Putting some POP! In P-O-P Displays

Effective Point-of-Purchase displays can improve sales and give marketers and their retail partners plenty of reasons to celebrate while still achieving their ultimate goal: the sale.

By Leah Genuario, Contributing Editor

It’s got wide exposure. It’s fashionable and influential. And unlike a celebrity jetsetter, it will not get itself into trouble. A well-designed point-of-purchase (POP) display, when it’s appropriately placed, consistently branded and developed with today’s tastes in mind, can bring significant value to marketing campaigns, offering another way to connect with a target audience and drive the sale home.

A POP display offers many advantages to its brand owners, the first of which is its sphere of influence. Within three weeks, marketing at-retail displays have the potential to reach 5,850 people per drugstore and 8,500 people per supermarket, according to marketing at-retail association POPAI, Alexandria, VA.
POP displays also come into play at a critical time in the buying decision. With 70% of purchase decisions made inside supermarkets and 51.5% of drugstore purchases influenced by in-store advertising, according to POPAI, POP displays are an excellent way to connect with many consumers when it really counts. Data backs up the effectiveness of in-store displays. POPAI has recorded notable lifts in brand sales when products utilize a display, ranging from 6.5% to 18%, dependent upon various circumstances.

The importance of in-store displays is not a new concept. POP displays have long been an additional way of reaching consumers in-store. They come in many shapes, sizes and materials, ranging from temporary corrugated displays designed for a few weeks’ use to permanent metal or wood displays.

Unlike primary packaging, a POP display affords companies the opportunity to communicate their brand message and product benefits in a larger-than-life font and with life-sized graphics in an effort to recruit new customers. But with today’s crowded space, both in prestige and mass-market channels, POP displays must serve other purposes as well.

Meeting Retailer Needs

Given the current competitive beauty climate, POP displays must meet two critical goals in order to be successful. “Everyone is competing for placement and everyone is trying to look unique,” comments Michael Williams, vice president/national sales manager for Shorewood Display, New York, NY. “The marketer has two objectives: They need the retailer’s acceptance, and they need to sell the product.”

Retailers can be tough; their needs may seem in direct conflict to those of brand marketers. For one, there’s the issue of size.

“Marketers will often want to create a building-sized display while retailers put a large emphasis on making displays compact to ensure that all available retail space is put to its highest and best use,” says Dennis Bacchetta, marketing manager, Diamond Packaging, Rochester, NY.

Ease-of-use is another important consideration. Complex assembly is labor-intensive (and therefore cost-prohibitive). A lot of retailers, especially large retailer chains, do not want to invest that type of effort for a temporary campaign.

In Europe and increasingly elsewhere, the POP display market is seeing the emergence of a new trend urged on by retailer requests for ease-of-use. “Shelf-ready packaging is all the rage at the moment. Retailers are pushing for it as it improves restocking efficiency,” says Phillip Adcock, managing director of Shopping Behaviour Xplained in Tamworth, United Kingdom.

Shelf-ready packaging is just what the name suggests: decorated trays that already hold a specific number of products and can be transferred from pallet to shelf with relatively minimal fuss.

While these are great for retailers and increasingly popular, they may miss the mark when it comes to a jump in sales. Shelf-ready packaging “rarely benefits brands as the outers are designed from an operational viewpoint as opposed to a POP perspective,” says Adcock.

Sustainability

Another trend to emerge, spurred on by retailers, is the increased need for a more environmentally-friendly display.

“The biggest topic right now is sustainability,” asserts Shorewood Display’s Williams. “Every customer is under a mandate from the public and key retailers. Every HBA marketer is scrambling to address this. They want to go to every retailer and say, ‘This is how we’re doing it.’”

The Bentonville behemoth is playing a large part in the scramble for sustainability, recently announcing a packaging scorecard to hold suppliers accountable for the impact of their environmental footprint. Wal-Mart’s supplier scorecard encompasses all aspects of the packaging industry, and its reach has been felt in the POP display market as well.

According to Shorewood Packaging, a business of International Paper, the key challenge is to balance the correct look and a reasonable cost with sustainability.Shorewood Packaging’s green choice initiative was designed to help brand marketers strike the right balance. Both its corrugated board for POP displays and paperboard for packaging are highly recyclable. Shorewood Packaging also uses inks and coatings that generate little waste during manufacturing and are made with ingredients found under the Food and Drug Administration’s Generally Regarded as Safe list. The company also works with customers to deliver products that reduce the amount of materials used and reduce space, thereby taking up less space in transit.

So that it’s not all one-sided, brand marketers also have a new tool to keep retailers accountable. As originally reported in the September issue of Beauty Packaging, smart packaging technology has arguably entered the POP display arena. Among the findings, some brand marketers have used RFID tags to ensure better display management.

Wal-Mart’s mandate of RFID tagging on cases and pallets led some suppliers to also tag and track displays. This ability to track POP displays led to a startling discovery regarding coordinating promotions.
“What happened in the past, more than 40 percent of the displays were not even making it to the floor for the first day of the promotion,” said Louis Bianchin, senior analyst and program manager of RFID for VDC Corporation, Natick, MA, in a July interview.

Although placing RFID tags on displays offers an obvious benefit, not everyone agrees that RFID currently has a real presence in the POP display industry. “The problem has been that the technology to do reading at the store level has not been developed or implemented. It could be a benefit, but the implementation has not taken place,” says Williams.

Another area of electronic displays that has grown is digital signage. “Digital signage is probably the biggest boom in the industry right now,” says Kaijsa Kurstin, manager, corporate communications for POPAI.

Digital signage has less to do with the packaging industry than most other segments of the POP display industry. According to the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast 2005, digital signage grew 8% in 2004, spurred by in-store television network advertising. Will in-store television ads eventually take over where corrugated and plastics are currently reigning? It’s too soon to say. In the meantime, it is a growing retailer trend worth watching.

Meeting Needs

Keeping in mind retailer requirements to ensure the POP display even makes it into the store, brand marketers’ next challenge is to design displays that persuade would-be customers to take the product and put it in their basket.

The obvious way to meet this challenge is to make the display visually pleasing—so visually pleasing that it stands out from other POP displays touting similar products. With this pursuit in mind, beauty brand marketers have worked with display companies to stretch design limits.

“The industry is trying to get away from some of the standard designs,” says Michael Glicksman, president of Dynamic Display Solutions in Hackensack, NJ. “They want a design utilizing many levels, unique colors and cutouts that exactly match the product shape. Half circles, rounded corners and four-color printing are usually required,” he adds.

“We are constantly looking for new shapes, new colors, new materials, new ways of printing —printing on plastics, holographic papers, printing on foils,” says Williams. “Fashion trends also spill over into packaging and displays.”

To meet the need for eye-catching displays, Diamond Packaging has developed several 3D displays for the hair care market. “Diamond’s unique counter display designs incorporate a secondary rear panel that is actually glued to the fifth panel, creating a striking 3D appearance. The panel is then further enhanced by die cutting around a photograph of a model or product, adding to the illusory effect,” says Diamond Packaging’s Bacchetta.

Of course, clever design and construction must be balanced with cost. Some say that brand marketers are spending less on displays than before. “The main trend observed recently is the budget restrictions developed by beauty brand marketers. This has a strong impact on the quality and the sophistication of the material,” says Nathalie Jarry, communications director for Ileos in Nanterre, France.

Sensory Branding

Within the packaging arena, there has been a recent buzz concerning sensory branding. Sensory branding involves intentionally engaging consumers’ senses to reinforce the brand message. Since most packaging today only speaks to consumers’ visual senses, marketers sometimes use tactile, audio or olfactory cues to further connect with the customer.

What technologies may be incorporated into a POP display in order to engage additional senses? Sampling manufacturer Arcade Marketing, New York, NY, for example, has recently launched MagniScent, a sampling system that emits a continuous scent over a 30-day period. The product can be used for a variety of purposes, but the company sees a market for in-store displays.

Although new developments such as Magni-Scent may expand the use of olfactory devices on POP displays, sensory branding within the POP display arena has had limited success to date. Adcock, of research agency Shopping Behaviour Xplained, provides two case studies to demonstrate the experimental status of sensory branding initiatives and POP displays.

For example, in an effort to appeal to consumers’ sense of smell, “there was an automated perfume tester in Germany. It failed to inspire because the experience shoppers got from using it lacked the important tactile sensation of holding the curvaceous and heavy bottle,” says Adcock.

A brand marketer using a tactile cue proved more successful. “In another example, the floor covering was changed in front of a POP display (in this case, softer carpeting). As a result, shoppers rated the products on the fixture better quality and that, with other changes, led to a 350 percent increase in sales over a measured six-week period,” says Adcock.

Despite some success with specific sensory branding campaigns, there is a barrier to widespread implementation that needs to be crossed. “It’s very, very limited. Part of the problem is retailer push-back on anything that might offend the consumer,” says Williams. In the case of tactile substrates, he adds, “It’s expensive and only looked at for special collection items.”

Consistency

Most importantly, POP displays do best when they are viewed as one component of a much larger branding campaign that includes primary packaging and other marketing and advertising initiatives.

POP displays should continue “the advertising and packaging campaign, to touch the maximum number of consumers at the point of sale. The display must follow the marketing strategy to convey the brand’s image at the point of sale,” says Jarry.

Its connection to the primary packaging is important. “Displays generally must match the colors and design of the product package. This includes the shape and height. It’s important that we allow for the maximum quantity of products in the display,” says Glicksman of Dynamic Display Solutions.

Shorewood Packaging’s staff regularly works with marketing and branding teams to maintain brand consistency. For brand marketers working on product launches or rebranding initiatives, Williams offers this advice: “Don’t develop the package and later develop the display. Start the whole process in tandem. If you begin the display design process at the same time you are starting the packaging development process, then they are addressed holistically.”