Taking Care of Business: Statistics Show…Retailers Rely on Research

Here are a few quick numbers most everyone is familiar with…

• Four out of five doctors recommend chewing Trident gum.
• You only use 10 percent of your brain.
• Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with water.
• My wife and kids listen to me only about 6 percent of the time.

These are statistics most of us can quote (well, maybe not the last one) but that are relatively meaningless to us in our daily business lives. But just because our brains are flooded with data like this doesn’t mean there aren’t certain statistics that are HIGHLY important to running a successful business.

How about things like…

• How much the average new homeowner spends on home improvement projects?
• What kind of return on investment you can expect from circular advertising?
• Or, perhaps most importantly, what percentage of your sales drop to the bottom line?

See? Statistics and numbers like these can be integral to running and growing your business.

That’s exactly why the North American Retail Hardware Association is launching its Retail Research Group (RRG).

The RRG will launch later this year with the express purpose of gathering data, statistics and information about the home improvement industry and all the outside forces that affect its health and direction.

You might not realize it, but NRHA already conducts a good deal of research for retailers. From our annual Cost of Doing Business study and Market Measure: The Industry’s Annual Report to the quarterly Independent Retail Business Index and the trend-focused studies we do in the pages of this magazine, NRHA commits significant resources to gathering data for you.

The mission of NRHA’s RRG will be to raise the level of these existing research projects to make them more insightful and useful for you as well as engage in new and dynamic projects to provide even greater insights into the industry.

While there will be different opportunities for retailers and other channel members to participate in the RRG, the entire industry will benefit from access to greater information.

Most importantly, however, is that the RRG will play a critical role in fulfilling NRHA’s mission to help hardware stores, home centers and lumber dealers become better and more profitable by arming you with the information and insights you need to make prudent business decisions.

If you want more information about RRG, please contact me directly, and watch for more details in the coming months.

After all, when it comes to running a successful business, access to information is half the battle (actually, it’s 50.35 percent of the battle).