In the Battle For Advertising Space, Displays Increase Attention

Chocolate bars, champagne bottles, savory cookies: they are often advertised in supermarkets with eye-catching and well-executed secondary placements. Some in baskets, others in displays or tasting trays.

How do you measure the success of displays in the grocery retail? Manufacturers often lack the time and resources to assess the impact of their placements. There is also a lack of comparison with other outlets, explain experts from POSpulse and Bormann & Gordon. They have developed the new "Secondary Placement Online Trackers" tool, which systematically records secondary placements on a weekly basis and aims to provide answers to many questions about efficiency. The survey is conducted via the app community of the Berlin-based industry service provider POSpulse. At the moment it is comprisedc of around 600,000 people – called Spotrs – in Germany. They are out and about in food retail stores to carry out store checks and take photos for numerous questions.  These are uploaded to the app with a little added information.

In this case, the brief was to photograph secondary placements in the area. The photos are linked to the exact location of the display (location, name of the outlet, which retailer it belongs to) and the time the photo was taken. Analysts then code and quantify the flood of data in terms of store, category and manufacturer. The display KPIs determined can be called up in real time both at store level and in aggregated form in the dashboard.

The experts at Bormann & Gordon (B&G) derive specific market potential and benchmarks from this, reports the Lebensmittelzeitung. Every month, the Spotr community collects a random sample of around 330 supermarkets and hypermarkets with similar structures. The same number of cases is continuously surveyed per region, sales channel and area size. The focus of the survey is on the decentralized food retailers Edeka and Rewe, but Kaufland, Globus and other hypermarkets are also surveyed. "Comparisons by area size and region are also possible and provide benchmarks for key account management", explains B&G Managing Director Reiner Graul. Shopper profiles, on the other hand, play no role in this analysis, as it is purely about objective implementation at the POS. The tool uses learned key figures such as size evaluation according to Chep quarter pallets as well as industry definitions in relation to decorations, seasonal goods and price labeling.

Confectionery on Trial

Secondary placements for impulse articles in the confectionery segment are particularly popular. Therefore it made sense to launch the tool in the confectionery category. During the conception phase, the perspective of a market leader in the confectionery segment was incorporated. Displays with chocolate dominated the confectionery category with a share of over 50 percent. Nevertheless, a downward trend can be observed. Sweet and savory baked goods, on the other hand, are gaining presence, according to a finding of the surveys, which are also possible to make for non-alcoholic beverages and drugstore product groups. Further categories are being developed.

The analysis of the data also shows that Rewe and Globus focus more frequently on salty snacks compared to Edeka and Kaufland. This illustrates how differentiated the retailers' strategies are and how differently they use the available POS space. Incidentally, the "display paradise" is at Globus. There, the additional space is used for an average of 152 Chep quarter pallets. Kaufland creates space for an average of 97 such pallets per store and thus offers more than twice as much display space as an average Edeka (40) or Rewe store (36 Chep quarter pallets).