PLMA's Executive Education

The pandemic and its aftermath had a significant impact on everyday retail, creating opportunities for brick and mortar and online retailers as well as exposing real vulnerabilities in supply chains. Retailers and manufacturers alike grew their toplines alongside and perhaps ahead of inflation. As we move into a recovery era, it appears that some of these impacts will be short-lived, and others will be long-lasting. Understanding what to do in the medium and long-term in the changing retail landscape will separate growth leaders and laggards.

How can store brands maximize their retail supply chain efficiency, grow on-shelf presence, increase margins, and eliminate fines? In this session, the specifics of retailer compliance, how retail consolidation works, and strategies for tightening the supply chain and driving down costs will be discussed.

Developing any brand is a strategic endeavor. Working with store brands has additional considerations. In this session, you’ll learn the nine strategies to contemplate as you work to grow store brands -- quality, pricing, merchandising, sourcing, omnichannel, marketing, design, packaging, and loyalty. Small groups will discuss and evaluate how these components interact towards a common goal and they will be asked to grade a specific retail company on how it is faring in this essential business process.

In a noisy marketplace with more variety than ever before, how do you motivate retail customers to spurn others and select your products from the shelf? This session will apply scientifically proven, fundamental principles of consumer psychology to understand how product perceptions, preferences, choice, and satisfaction are influenced by branding, package design and retail merchandising. Participants will learn easy and affordable strategies to attract a target audience and positively influence consumer decision-making.

Never have stakes been set higher for retailers to leverage innovation and product development and differentiate their brands as a means of generating shopper excitement and loyalty. But where does innovation start within retailing organizations; how is innovation translated into products and the retailer’s brands; what roles do private label suppliers play, and how do retailers manage product development processes for everyday products as well as new and innovative items? What are the blocks to successfully innovating within private label and how can success be measured? We will examine what it means to innovate private label by examining approaches from retailers here and abroad. Case studies provide insights for teams creating strategies and execution plans to launch new products and product lines.

The landscape of competition is evolving due to resource constraints and innovation that is changing exponentially. Explore the practical applications of AI in Retail and Manufacturing to understand how this innovation can optimize supply chain management, improve customer experiences, and enhance operational efficiency. Discover real-world success stories and expert insights to implement AI effectively in your organization. This session will equip you with actionable strategies and valuable knowledge to stay competitive in the evolving landscape of AI technology.

In the private label space, the retailer and manufacturer have a special relationship where they have to work together in order to build and sustain long term product development and category growth.  In this session, we will dive into the nuances of this unique and essential relationship and identify new and better ways that retailers and manufacturers can work together to maximize consumer value.

As private brand share grows and competition intensifies, suppliers need to rethink their organizational strategy to achieve their overall goals and retailers’.  The solution is moving from being responsive to irreplaceable.  To become an irreplaceable supplier partner, you need to build an organization that truly orients itself around solving retailers’ business problems.  To accomplish this, you’ll need to reevaluate your sales strategy, redefine roles and adapt your talent.  It won’t be easy; however, the results you’ll achieve make it worth the investment.

The greatest challenge of executive education is to carry home learnings that are most relevant to your work activities and interactions, and to assume an expanded role as the agent for changes within your own company. This wrap-up gives you the opportunity to apply your knowledge and insights from preceding sessions to a real-life business challenge or opportunity you are facing. It is modeled after the “grand rounds” approach of medical education where teams of doctors and healthcare professionals meet to diagnose and discuss challenging cases.