Price, assortment and promotion management

This research area deals with issues such as assortment, price and promotion as central decision-making problems for any retail company.

The topics price, assortment and promotion are part of the central decision problems of every retail organisation. The increased intensity of the competition, shrinking differentiation potential of products and forms of retail, risen costs, an increased price awareness of consumers and a higher influence of the price image of the single retail organisation on the decisions of the customers make those topics more and more important. The specific characteristics of the retail, especially the food retail sector, require a special observing. The enormous size of the assortment and the therefore existing correlations as well as the structure of the geographical distinguished stores, which require a location-based assortment and price formation, are high impact challenges. In the past those decisions were made based on experiences and gut feeling. Because of the increased competition and new competitors, for example through the online retail, the systematic decision process becomes a necessity for the competitiveness of retail organisations.

The simultaneous availability of relevant information, through die development of new system architecture and the availability of required processing resources (In-memory-databases), makes the optimization of the decision process possible.

Tasks of this research area are:

• Analysis of the decision and design parameters
• Context of effects
• Development of models and the implementation of those
• Analysis of existing and emerging system architectures in the retail industry
• Big data technologies
• Predictive and advanced analytics
• Artificial intelligence 

• Tatjana Gorodnyanskiy
• Felix Weber