Marketing Planning: The Mazur Plan

The Mazur plan divides into four functional areas of retail activities. These five areas are merchandising, publicity, store management, human resources and control. These areas make up the typical merchandising structure chart underneath the company’s chief executive officer. These different divisions contain a number of different departments and personnel who have specified tasks and jobs to carry out. In order for the store to be successful, there is a great deal of communication and interaction within the departments to remain as a cohesive unit.

THE MERCHANDISING DIVISION- “the general merchandise manager (GMM), the divisional merchandise managers (DMMs), and the buyers and their assistant buyers are responsible for making certain

Buyers are located underneath DMMs on the typical merchandising structure chart. A retail buyer is responsible for selecting a range of products to sell in retail stores. Within a buyer’s decision making process they must consider customer demand, price, quality and availability, market trends; store policy and financial budgets (Buyers (Retail Trade)). Buyers travel the world to keep up to date with market trends (known as market weeks), source new merchandise and products and review existing items to ensure products remain competitive. By fully understanding customer needs, they are able to maximize profits and provide a commercially viable range of merchandise at competitive prices. Some tasks included as a buyer are regularly reviewing performance indicators, such as sales and discount levels, managing plans for stock levels, reacting to changes in demand and logistics, meeting suppliers, plan advertisements and promotional sales and negotiating terms of contract and getting feedback from customers (Buyers (Retail

They are responsible for retail store tracking, bringing in new inventory based on consumer demand, creating sound financial plans that reduce company spending, and increase overall profit (Bordelon). Since the main goal of a Merchandise Planner is customer satisfaction their job can be best described as “being a liaison between the customer and the marketing and buying department, ensuring what the customer wants is available” (Bordelon). They review forecasts, use past performance to make projections, make recommendations for promotional markdowns, and manage inventory to maximize profitability. Additionally, merchandise planners research market trends to increase create more attractive