Demographics: Understanding Your Target Market

Learn about:

• What the Store of the Community app is
• What Store Traits are
• What to do with this information

Walmart suppliers often run many reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. These reports include one on demographics so that suppliers can stay on top of their target market and ensure that the right stores are receiving the right products.

Suppliers can use point-of-sales analyses to see how different stores are performing. From there, they can proceed to the Store of the Community report.

What is “Store of the Community”?

Store of the Community reflects Walmart’s belief that its stores should reflect the communities in which they operate. Buyers often adjust each store’s product assortment, groupings, and promotional activity to reflect the community’s values and shopping habits. Suppliers must stay on top of these metrics to ensure sales.

The Store of the Community app in Retail Link utilizes segmentation analysis to display community demographics and traits by store. An example would be going to a store in Northwest Arkansas and seeing University of Arkansas merchandise. However, this same store will show fewer beach items, like snorkeling equipment, as Arkansas is a land-locked state.

What are Store Traits?

Each Walmart store has a list of traits and profiles attached to that store, such as demographics, competition, community characteristics, and more. Some stores can have as many as 30 traits.

Some examples of Store Traits include:

• Demographic makeup (e.g., age, ethnicity, gender, etc.)
• Urbanicity levels (i.e., city versus suburb versus small town or village)
• Income levels (household sizes and income)
• Proximity to retail competitors (e.g., Kroger or Hobby Lobby)

What Can Suppliers Do with This Information?

Monitoring and analyzing the selling patterns of a supplier’s items in Walmart stores will help understand how well they resonate with each store’s particular store traits or customer base.

Once suppliers have an understanding of which customer traits their products tend to perform well in, they can recommend:

• New products to buyers that fit within those traits to expand shelf placement
• Additional stores for currently traited products to expand store distribution
• Store-level minimum inventory requirements for stores with high-performing traits to bolster instocks and increase sales

Armed with this data, suppliers can improve their relationships with their buyers and bring forth actionable insights into replenishment and store distribution. Suppliers can tell their buyers which stores are doing well and be more strategic when it comes time for line reviews.

How Can Suppliers Use Store Demographics?

Suppliers can maximize the utilization of store demographic information by following these steps:

1. Start by performing an item-store level point-of-sales analysis to understand which stores are overperforming (or underperforming if considering minimizing store count to maximize inventory efficiency and strengthen sales velocity).
2. Once you have a list of stores you want to review traits for, you can access information about each store utilizing the Store of the Community app in Retail Link.
3. Select “SOTC Profile By Store.”

_Retail Link – Select SOTC Profile By Store_

4. Input one store number at a time. (Unfortunately, there’s no way to get around this without utilizing additional technology.)

_Retail Link – SOTC Profile By Store – Enter one store number at a time _

Once a supplier understands similar traits across top-selling stores, they can start to make the recommendations above to their buyer.

Retail Link – SOTC Profile By Store – Store results

Note: Walmart has begun phasing out access to the Store of the Community app.

One of the drawbacks to utilizing Retail Link is that this process is extremely tedious and time-consuming. In the app, suppliers have to do one store at a time and notate traits in a spreadsheet to find commonalities across groups of stores.

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