Point-of-Sale Marketing - Blow Up Your TV and Go to the Store 2014

If you have been involved in the alcohol beverage industry for the last five years, either as a supplier or a wholesale distributor, you know there have been many changes in the industry that significantly impact your business.

The Importance of Point-of-Sale (POS) Marketing

One of the significant changes has been the growing importance of point-of-sale marketing (aka, in-store or shopper marketing). POS marketing includes any planning for, or the measuring and managing of the promotional materials and messages which target the ‘consumer’ at the point-of-purchase (POP).  Such POS or POP marketing materials might include printed signs, displays, menus, or product samples.

The Changing Role of Mass Media Marketing

Mass media marketing, while hardly dead, has become less valuable in driving local sales. Like society for most of the last decade, mass media has become ever more fragmented, making it increasingly difficult for brands to be effectively marketed to large population segments. This one trend alone has led suppliers to restructure their marketing budgets to identify alternatives to traditional mass media. Other trends, including the explosion of brand choices and retail places, have also served to weaken mass media’s impact.

The Changing Role of Point-of-Sale Marketing

Starting in the early 2000’s, in response to the weakened impact of mass media, suppliers, distributors, as well as retailers, started to shift their budgets away from mass media toward point-of-sale marketing. Now in 2014, as we continue to emerge from the Great Recession, this shift has again picked up momentum.  We have seen 'at-retail' marketing activities increasing in-sync with these shifting budgets. 

The market has spoken and it certainly seems to be saying ‘at-retail’ is where the critical difference can be made with respect to influencing the consumer to buy.

The only challenge with POS and POP is that these promotional materials are provided and placed by the supplier or distributor with little or no knowledge of the impact of the marketing investment, or without a known correlation between the cost of these marketing campaigns and the resulting sales performance. Said a different way, there was no easy way to determine the profitability or the return-on-investment of point-of-sale marketing initiatives.

To confirm this all you have to do is consider the following:

Do you have the information to answer the following questions?

• How much of a sales increase did you experience from your point-of-sale marketing initiatives?
• What attributes of POS marketing have the most influence on sales?
• How can the effectiveness of your promotions be improved to generate more sales within your current budgets?
• How do multiple POS marketing programs (signs, display, menus and samples) work together for a greater impact on sales?

Until recently, tools were not available to collect this type of marketing campaign data and present it to the suppliers or distributors.  Now with products provided by OnTrak, it is possible to answer these questions quickly and accurately, to improve your point-of-sale marketing efforts.

An added benefit is that you will now be able to provide detailed information to your suppliers about what point-of-sale marketing campaigns you sponsored, how much they cost, and what their impact was on sales. You will also have the data to file timely and complete marketing co-op recovery reports immediately after a campaign has concluded.

Exciting stuff!

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