Insight into the Major Changes Reshaping Category Management: MVI Forum to Focus on Supplier and Retailer Implications

MVI, Management Ventures, Inc., has analyzed the comprehensive changes taking place within this fundamental cornerstone of the way retailers and suppliers work together. A dynamic one-day Category Management Forum will take place November 1st in Atlanta, GA.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Business Wire EON) October 18, 2007 -- MVI, Management Ventures, Inc., has analyzed the comprehensive changes taking place within this fundamental cornerstone of the way retailers and suppliers work together. A dynamic one-day Category Management Forum will take place November 1st in Atlanta, GA.

The retail landscape is changing quickly and core retailer/supplier processes are struggling to keep up.

MVI, in critically examining the current renaissance in Category Management, has identified how this evolution will transform the way suppliers work, retailers sell, and shoppers buy. According to MVI experts, it is a total management mindshift toward ideas and a portfolio view of the category. The exponentially growing field of shopper insights—combined with the invention and proliferation of radically innovative tools—is propelling Category Management to entirely new levels of effectiveness.

Bryan Gildenberg, MVI’s Chief Knowledge Officer, explains, “The retail landscape is changing quickly and core retailer/supplier processes are struggling to keep up.” He predicts, “Tomorrow’s retailers will run smaller formats with decisively limited assortments, maintain higher shelf shares for their own brands and unique products, and infuse their merchandising processes with proprietary shopper insights.”

MVI considers customer-centric assortment planning strategies and optimized, store-specific planograms as vital to the future of retail. The need to master shopper insights to support the new Category Management opportunities will be essential for business growth.

“To succeed, suppliers will have to align internally to allocate resources based on the future, rather than what’s worked in the past or their present best practices. And they have to start that process now,” Gildenberg added.

MVI responds with its newest event, The Future of Category Management Forum. This targeted, one-day program is designed to prepare vendors for this changing environment.

For more information on The Future of Category Management Forum, November 1st in Atlanta, Georgia, please visit www.MVI-Worldwide.com/FOCM or contact MVI at 617.588.4100 or customerservice@mventures.com.