Wednesday Wisdom: Sally Davis- Winning at Point of Purchase #6

Logobrand’s Sally Davis continues her Winning at Point of Purchase insight series

Promotional Compliance: The Holy Grail

The reason you invest in promotional campaigns is to increase visibility, drive sales and penetration.

Your buyer can promise you the world with best intentions, but the problem is you can’t and they can’t control how a store will implement your promotion. Sometimes the mechanics aren’t realised to your specifications. Other times the secondary locations aren’t the prime spots you were hoping for, sometimes stock allocation is a nightmare

You simply can’t afford to have 20-30% of stores being non-compliant, not if you are going to meet your targets right?

If you go to the expense of producing cardboard such as FSDUs, you want to ensure you get maximum compliance too

 

What should I expect?

• From our experience of the hundreds of thousands of store visits we conduct across the different categories, entry compliance really does vary dramatically. The retailer, category, geography, demographic and individual store management, plus a whole wealth of other factors all have an impact.
  • Poor compliance can be as low as 60%, but we find the Average is around 80% on Entry.
  • This gap is more than any business can afford

Who’s Naughty?

• Ask your agency to share their insights in which retailers to support and when. They should have a vast knowledge of the entire retailer store universe that you can leverage and use to your advantage.
• Some Retailers are better than others at implementing promotions -your budget should take this into account.
• Make a ‘Naughty list’ based on your agency’s intelligence and your historical data.
• Get to know the Naughty Stores & get a strategy in place to target them to make sure they know you!
• Ask Retailers for store lists. Gondola Ends may be fairly consistent and compliant, but Ladder Racks & Hotspot tend to be erratic. If you can’ get them, get your agency to build up a secondary space matrix for you. You can maximise your spend/investment & earn brownie points with your buyer for providing up to date equipment inventory. Be sure in the future they don’t try to sell you space you know and they know doesn’t exist.
• Ensure that you separate the performance uplift of Secondary Space stores and Shelf only stores when monitoring overall promotional performance otherwise your targets will be wildly inaccurate and you could make the wrong naughty assumptions

Choose your battles, win the war:

• Analyse your promotional history to understand which stores are consistently non- compliant. Systems like Availability Manager are available to do that for you which encompass the physical data collected in store, layered with actual sales data
• Monitor sales throughout the whole promotion to identify which stores need help and when, as opposed to blanket calling on all stores at the front end of the promo
• Target only the Naughty stores for a Day 1 visit to activate and ensure compliance of secondary site agreements
• Monitor sales for the rest of the estate, & evaluate how they perform on Day 1&2.
• Your agency should be able to quickly mobilise your field resource to be in store on Day 3 to target those that haven’t delivered– targeting the 20% not the 80%…..but quickly.
• Provide the field team with sales figures for each store to assist in their negotiations. knowing that the store down the road is performing better usually gets the nod of agreement to take action and gives good credibility
• You should have a 3 week promo strategy in place, not just a day 1 blitz. Compliance falls off and space becomes available, so each week of the promotion have a different brief for your field team
• When walking in FSDUs and other Point of Sale materials, target your agency at 100% – it is possible.

Anything less than 90% is a poor job. Suggest you pay them less for the stores that they don’t get compliance in if stock is in store and you have an official siting – see your results improve overnight!

The first three Winning at Point of Purchase tips can be found on pages 10-11 of FMBE’s Summer Issue and will continue to be shared as our Wednesday Wisdom for the duration of the Summer.