Any POS Marketing Road Will Do — If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Remember when Alice is walking through the woods of Wonderland and meets the Chesire Cat?

Alice is faced with two paths to take and so she asks the Cat, " Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

I don't much care where...." said Alice.

Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

Just How Does That Apply to POS Marketing?

Well, if you don't know where you want to go with your Point-of Sale Marketing initiatives, then it doesn't matter whether you manage or control them.

Where are we going?

We're getting ready for the 2012 NBWA Convention and Product Demonstration Showcase. The event is being held this year in San Diego, California on October 15^th.

The Showcase is a great opportunity for us to present our Point-of-Sale (POS) Marketing Management Software to the beer (as well as wine and spirits) distributors, and share with them the success that other distributors have had with our solutions. The NBWA Convention and the Showcase have always been very valuable to our success and we hope to meet many of you there this year.

Our POS Marketing Management Software helps beer distributors and suppliers track, measure and manage their custom printed POS signs, permanent POS displays, and beverage samples and menus.

In preparation for the convention, we’ve been meeting with several of our customers to discuss what POS marketing means to them, and the most important aspect of POS marketing. I’m sure you have a perspective on POS Marketing, but you might be surprised to learn that your peers, who mostly think POS marketing is very important, approach it in very dissimilar ways.

The Paths Our Customers Have Taken

One beer distributor told us, “PermaTrak is your most valuable product, because it enables us to manage our permanent POS just like we manage the beverage products we sell. We’d certainly never let even a case leave without knowing where it was going and how much we’re selling it for.”

Another distributor remarked, “Our customers won’t buy anything from us that they haven’t sampled first. SampleTrak helps us make certain that the sampling process is tracked from product request to customer tasting comments and supplier charge-back invoicing.”

A billion-dollar plus distributor of wine, spirits and craft beers thought MenuTrak was our highest value product because, “We produce thousands of menus annually and at great expense. We would need to have our accounting department dedicated to generating recovery reports about one week out of every month without MenuTrak.” Also they said, “Without MenuTrak, we would most certainly have way too many recovery dollars simply slip through the cracks, hurting our bottom line.”

So, before we began these discussions we believed that most of our beer distribution customers felt that SignTrak was our home-run product. But while SignTrak does an outstanding jobu of managing and controling the entire custom printed POS process, the reality for some distributors seems to be that PermaTrak, SampleTrak or MenuTrak may actually be their “killer application.”

The distributor who favored PermaTrak is also a SignTrak user and during our conversation, the CEO commented, “Your products, SignTrak and PermaTrak, allow me to measure what I treasure and help me know which road to take with respect to my retail promotional programs.”

Where Do You Want To Get To?

Some of these quotes may seem fundamental and obvious, but the truth is, POS marketing is anything but. POS marketing is often complicated because it involves signs, displays, co-promotions, product placement, timing, co-ordination with reminder marketing campaigns, ordering, tracking, measurement, management, analytics and, of course, the message and the product itself.

Recently POS marketing has been recognized as on-par with “traditional” marketing. It has quietly become the leading marketing tool for converting shoppers into buyers and increasing sales. And this is done at the only place this is possible — at the retail location where the products can be purchased.

We invite you to seriously consider deploying software that will help you track, measure and manage the impact of your most powerful retail selling tool — POS.