What I learnt during my internship at Decathlon Sports India -By Bhushan Sharma from IBS Hyderabad

Meet Bhushan, a sports enthusiast and a retail management aspirant. Dive in to learn what it is like to do an internship at Decathlon, which served him the best platform to learn more about the retail and sports industry.

Decathlon is a France based company and is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world. The store owns around 20 brands and has its own research and development facilities. They develop new innovative designs to attract more customers and offer the best quality product at the best price. Each brand represents a different sport or group of sports, with dedicated product development and design team. It was a great opportunity to do an internship with Decathlon.

So for the internship, the company sent an invitation and a group of 10 students visited the store for their interview. The interview was based on Retail Management before which a proper CV screening took place.

The ABC of category management and consumer behaviour

I worked on Category Management and Consumer Behaviour. The main focus was to understand how categories of the product help the company in getting more revenue. It also dealt with consumer behavior - how often do they visit the store and what products do they buy and in what quantity when they visit the store.

So, Category Management is a process of managing categories as strategic business units by focusing on customer value. It is not only an art to manage their cluster of items, but it also a method by which companies efficiently buy products and save money.

I have visited many stores as a customer, but never understood how does a retail outlet provides its customers happy shopping experience. Here are some interesting facts about it:

1. Basic/famous products are placed at the end of the store

Have you ever thought why the basic or famous products of the store are kept at the end? It’s a retail strategy, as they want the shoppers to walk through more of the store and buy more. For example, you visit a store to buy a yoga mat and because it was at the back of the store, you end up buying other sports accessories or equipment and hand full of other unplanned items that you walked past.

2. Where to find your product?

Category Managers plan the placement of the product using the database to decide how many facings each product should get and where they should be positioned with each other. That’s why we find similar or related items that the customer would ideally like to find placed together in a store.

3. Impulsive buying

Have you ever noticed why products are placed while waiting at the billing section? Why easy carrying products are placed near queues? This is all because of impulsive buying - you may end up buying even more than originally planned.

A whole new spectrum of learnings

I worked in Gawchiboli (Hyderabad) during my internship with Decathalon. It was a great experience, though a challenging one being a fresher, but was motivated and inspired to work with all my dedication. It was an opportunity to learn and interact with customers, understand their motive of visiting the store and having an empathic approach towards them. I learnt about retailing, leadership and managerial skills, customer service, convincing shoppers with the right approach and communication skills because Decathlon has always favored entrepreneurial aspects like innovation and creativity.