Is Point-of-Sale Marketing Worth Measuring?

POS/POP marketing experts often make big promises about the effect of POS/POP on sales results.

While many of these promises could and should be discussed, this is a blog posting, not an MBA marketing class or a white paper on the subject.

So I’ll try to keep this posting plain and simple, by focusing on what I, and many other POS/POP advocates, consider to be the most important of those ‘promises’: That being:

• You can measure and manage the impact of POS/POP on sales

The reason I say it’s the most important promise is because of a basic management principle:

• It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to manage something unless you measure it first.

Let’s agree - The basic question to determine the success of POS/POP marketing is this:

• How many additional sales-dollars were generated coincidental with our POS campaign

A Competitive Advantage

If that ‘additional sales’ metric seems a bit too difficult, or time consuming, to track and measure today don’t despair. We’re all on a learning curve when it comes to POS/POP Marketing measurement.

POS/POP impact measurement is a relatively new area of study - a very young science. But the time to learn more and get started with measurements is right now!

It is very likely that some of your competitors and peers are already collecting the data that allows them to determine the impact of their POS/POP Marketing programs. They are using this data to help forecast and create demand for brands or products. Any work that you put into tracking, measuring and managing the impact of POS Marketing for your products will give you a competitive advantage - even at this early stage of the game.

Just know for now that there are tools available to help you begin to collect the data you need to track, measure and manage POS/POS Marketing performance.

Key Questions

Throughout the $2 trillion consumer goods industry, especially beverage suppliers and distributors, marketing types have been wrestling with these types of questions:

• What benefits (sales) are we getting from our POS/POP Marketing investments?
• How much are we actually spending on POS/POP Marketing?
• Are we getting a good return on our investment?
• Do we recover all the available manufacturer’s co-op dollars to offset our POS/POP marketing expenses

This is not meant to be a complete list of questions but by knowing the answers to these questions, you will have the data you need to help measure and manage your POS/POP marketing efforts more effectively and profitably.

Measurement Data Equals Better Management Decisions

Measuring POS/POP Marketing campaigns will provide you with the following data:

• A known and quantifiable cost of a campaign
• A correlation of those cost to sales dollar or units
• The sales results before the campaign started, as well as, during the campaign
• The sales results required to pay off the campaign investment, or even better, increase campaign ROI

This may seem like a simple-minded approach, and you could come up with many reasons to disagree.

But here’s what we have learned from our customers who use our technology:

When they collect POS/POP campaign and product sales data, over time, they begin to see trends where their campaigns repeatedly result in increased sales. They see which campaigns are the ones to continue, or perhaps expand. But they also learn which campaigns to cancel when sales results don't increase.

Through the use of our POS/POP marketing management tools, our customers now have historical data on what was placed, what it costs, and what sales results a campaign produced. They also have accurate accounting of the supplier bill-back that they are due, which helps them offset the costs of the campaigns. The bottom line is more profitable POS/POP marketing campaigns.

So is POS/POP marketing measurement is a good thing?

You tell me! We and our customers sure think so.

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