Have you ever been told by your friendly retail partner, “We have millions of shoppers, invest in our in-store displays and you’ll have access to this huge audience”? Chances are that if you’ve worked with any of the world’s major retailers you have.
For many this has become a powerful rationalisation for expenditure in-store, especially as media fragmentation and retail consolidation fuelled a boom in point-of-purchase advertising. Indeed POPAI – the industry’s leading association, continues to heavily promote the benefits of in-store displays by publishing studies claiming that in excess of 70% of purchase decisions are made in stores.
Regular readers will know I’m not an advocate of this point of view, but I recently came across a post by Herb Sorenson, one of the world’s leading thinkers in shopper behaviour, which puts a very different spin on the value of in-store displays. In Herb’s post “The Incredibly Shrinking (In-Store) “Audience”” he presents an extremely well researched case that your in-store displays might only engage a tiny proportion of shoppers.
Herb suggests that as little as one in 140,000 shoppers are likely to engage with a specific in-store display. If this is true why invest in-store displays?
The evidence: shoppers will never see every in-store display
There’s a commonly held view in retail that a small proportion of products that account for the bulk of a store’s sales. Herb reckons this to be around 5%. With many shoppers buying less than five items in-store, it stands to reason few of us visit every part of the store. Herbs research tells us that shopper visit about 33% of a small supermarket just over 12% of a superstore. So potentially 80% of the ads in an average-sized grocery store never get seen.
The evidence: shoppers can never see every in-store display
Stores might be stuffed full of displays but having eyes located on the front of our heads means that we have a limited field of vision – a cone of 130°. So this means that even when we are surrounded by messages we could only ever see a third of these. As a result we miss nearly 93% of all in-store displays. Weirdly, we did some research a few years ago into the way mums shopped for milk powder in Asia and one of our key findings was that only 6.9% of people noticed a milk powder display.
The evidence: shoppers can never engage in every in-store display
Shopping is not like watching TV, we aren’t static and focussed on one thing. When we shop, we move our gaze every tenth of a second, Herb shows. It’s suggested that people are often working on autopilot in stores. This has been proven to be the case by the behavioural economist Ken Hughes (click here to see him talking). Ken shows us that few of us are engaged in the shopping process until we need to be.
When we do engage, we focus. This means we miss even more of what’s going on in-store. When we focus, our attention is drawn into a cone of just 2° – just 1/4000 of our total field of vision.
The inference – very few shoppers engage in an in-store display
Putting all Herb’s evidence together, the picture is fairly scary. For instance think about Tesco UK. Their website boasts that they service 75 million shopping trips a week. Let’s pretend, for fun, that this means they have 75 million shoppers a week. Using some of Herb’s numbers 15 million pass any given display, of which a third might notice it in their field of vision. That’s potentially 5 million shoppers who might see your display BUT only 1200 will actively engage in it.
If you think about what a display might cost in Tesco, the cost per impression is looking pretty high – but is it a waste of money?
Making in-store displays work
A few fundamental lessons can be drawn from all this:
- Target your shopper carefully – know who you want to communicate to and focus on getting your message across to them. Randomly targeting a message in store is unlikely to work so specificity is likely to deliver better results.
- Put your messages in places where they will see them – if you want to change someone’s behaviour, you first have to understand their current behaviour. If you’re targeting a shopper who habitually visits a part of the store – site messages in that part of the store and prioritise work in the home shelf if that’s where most sales are made.
- Use the whole field of vision – hoping that someone will focus on a tiny part of the shelf is unlikely to work. So avoid small pieces of point-of-sale material. Instead, use large blocks of colour and big, simple, pictorial messages to draw them to your brand.
- Use multiple media – hoping that one message will get through is unlikely to reap rewards so combine multiple media to get the message home. Combining old and new technologies like mobile-in-store with point-of-sale materials, colourful category themes and effective promoters reduces the chances you’ll be missed.
We’ve helped hundreds of managers develop inventive in-store solutions that drive better returns. If you suspect you could get more from the store, contact me to arrange a conversation about how you might do that.
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