Picture yourself walking down the aisle of a grocery store looking for the coffee section. You see it, it’s halfway down the aisle to your right. “Ok I see it now, there’s my favorite product…and there’s my brand, oh what’s that? Hmm…looks interesting”. Such a scenario, in a nutshell, is why you need to monitor your brand presence on retail shelves or how well your brand stands out among the sea of similar products.
The store shelf is the shoppers’ first point of interaction with your product. As a result, your brand presence or how your product looks at the retail shelf becomes almost imperative. When shoppers approach the shelf, their eyes are constantly scanning the shelf to see what else there is — this is the moment when another brand can catch the attention of the shopper and become part of the purchase consideration. It’s a game of seconds.
Every day the shopper is getting bombarded with different brand packaging laid across the store. The fight for shelf space is getting more competitive with each passing day. Companies are trying every possible technique to create a brand presence or product packaging that catches the eye of the shopper in a retail store. Every product has its own personality and brands have a really small window to showcase their products USP to the client or the buyer. The shelf is a key opportunity to display the product quality to the consumers.
Shelf Space and Brand Presence
The number of products in the marketplace is continually increasing while shelf space shrinks, due to the rise of private labels and smaller retail formats. Faced with increasingly complex decisions about which products to place where and how to create a profitable brand presence, sales teams are often ill-equipped to make the right decisions.
It is very important for companies now to make sure that the retailers stack their products properly to maintain visibility. At the same time, the retailers want to ensure that their highest selling products occupy maximum shelf space. It is a tough of war in which consumers are the referees.
If a product is bright and visible, shoppers will see it, but they also make inferences about a brand relative to where it’s placed on the shelf. Traditionally, eye level shelving is the most preferred, followed by waist level, knew the level and ankle level. It is nearly impossible to locate all items at the eye level and its product packaging and marketing plays a key role in getting the attention of the shopper. Even then, the pros of having a better shelf presence are undeniable.
People expect things on the top to be of higher quality. In fact, they expect things on top to be better in general. Ever heard the phrase “top of the shelf”. Enterprises can bump up the brand presence simply by tweaking its placement on the shelf.
There is no doubt that shelf monitoring and shelf placement can attract new customers to a brand. If the company is targeting millennials with an open mind who don’t just buy products based on brand or based on price, companies have to increase their shelf presence. The same principles of visibility hold true for online sales, where ensuring search engines are primed with keywords for your brand will increase visibility.
However, getting prime placement in retail stores do take more money off your marketing budget, but. it’s money well spent, and marketing managers nowadays re-allocate their budgets to pay more attention to point of sale and think more about brand presence instead of just brand preference. Spending a part of your marketing money at the point where people actually make the decision in the store helps increase brand awareness and visibility and perhaps even your brand image.
The Perfect Solution: ShelfWatch
History dictates that none of them has performed well in isolation. Traditional retail stores suffered from human errors while employing human workforce to perform compliance audits. Current solutions improve efficiency but the time lag between collection of shelf data and processing it to gain insights proves costly in this highly competitive environment. Companies need a comprehensive solution which reduces the reliability on field agents to record perfect data and the time lag between input (pictures, videos from shelves ) and output (useful insights from data).
Here Artificial Intelligence comes to the rescue. KARNA AI has leveraged the power of AI to create Shelf Watch and Smart Gaze. The extent of its advantages can be fully understood by analyzing each stakeholder in the retail audit process.
Brands and SmartGaze
Finally, it will be the Consumer Goods companies that will benefit the most from our AI-powered solution. They will be able to analyze all types of pictures from retail audits by using Smart Gaze for shelf object detection. Smart Gaze will help cut the time lag between input data and final insights. This abets the company to take on-time corrective action, if necessary.
Field Agents and Shelfwatch
The reps face major challenges while collecting data in the form of pictures and videos. There is a lack of uniformity in stacking patterns across retailers which leads to different kinds of pictures in terms of stack orientation, lighting, and positioning. Field agents struggle with maintaining consistency with the data they collect because such non-standard pictures take longer to analyze. In the pursuit of standard images, field agents fall prey to other types of human perception biases.
Shelf Watch helps the field agents by giving them the flexibility to take all possible pictures in any orientation, lighting or positioning. Such flexibility is allowed because shelf watch is not dependent on standard uniform images to give accurate output. Using state-of-the-art AI algorithms, Shelf Watch is able to analyze even the most distorted images because it uses AI packaging recognition technology.
Retailers and ShelfWatch
Compliance audits are tough tasks for retailers as well. To comply with the preset planogram is part of the service agreement between the retailer and the brands. If in the final assessment the retailers are found to be violating the agreement by displaying too few products, or by not positioning the products correctly, can attract penalties and even termination of contracts ( in extreme cases ).
Since Shelf Watch allows field reps to be flexible while collecting data, it will also help retailers comply with the service agreements because all the images collected by the agents are analyzed irrespective of the light, positioning, and orientation of the products on the shelf. This saves retailers from false audit reports because even if their shelf is not well stacked in terms of positioning and lighting, Shelf Watch will detect all the objects on the shelf, thus reducing incidences of non-compliance due to poor data collection.
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You can read the original blog here.