Increase Interaction With Category

You can dress up the aisles in the most beautiful way, but real-life cases show that the increase in traffic is only 3-4%-points. The volume growth seldom goes above 15%, making the ‘dress up’ an expensive exercise. In isolation, and from a narcissistic brand perspective, it looks pretty good, but cost-benefit is in most cases negative. Unless you are working for charity, that is not an ideal situation..

So, what should you do?

An unconventional idea is to remove some gondolas, to shorten the category aisle. Sounds odd – right? We have already too few days of cover. Well, the idea was to implement pallet racks on floor for the best selling products, and in that way, solve the OOS issue, rearrange traffic, and thereby get more shoppers into the category aisle. The impression of a shorter aisle, is that is less of a ‘burden’ as it requires less effort to enter that zone.

Before situation:

A: Only 20% of shoppers visited the category aisle

B: Total number of SKUs in category were 1,221

C: Productive space allocation was 46% (combination of in-line vision in meters, seconds and shopper density)

After situation (What we did):

A: Cutting the aisle and removed four gondolas

B: Implemented 12 pallet racks for the best selling products

B: Removed all SKUs that had a parasite effect

C: Improving space utilization

Results:
The beverage category grew 139% in volume, and 178% in value. 60% of the shoppers in the main aisle were now interacting with the category (through the squares on floor). Also, the original category aisle is visited more; up 50% (from 20% to 30%). The end-gondolas on both sides were also utilized in more optimal ways. One with a cooler, and one with an ‘inviting magnet’. This magnet was alternating with focus on #1 Brand – New product launches – Promotions – Cross category combos etc.

The effect of the cooler alone gave a 7.5% category uplift. This ‘market-feeling’ approach (read: pallet racks) normally doubles the category - but only as long as the tools on floor have a proper planogram, and the following tricolor of a rule is applied: One rack = One product = One price.

The effectiveness of the space was lifted to 61%, and the interaction of the new permanent beverage section grew to 93%. The delisted SKUs freed up 46 shelf meters. We used our 16 Matrix tool to optimize the category through 16 lenses.

Two key takeaways:

1. The interplay with floor, shelf, cooler and magnet, boosted the traffic to the category and lifted the sales

2. Executed a simple rule to maximize store effectiveness and reduce OOS ->> 1 Rack = 1 product = 1 price

End note:
When Museylamah claimed to be prophet after Muhammad's death, the people asked him to show a miracle like Prophet Muhammad did. He then called the mountain, but the mountain did not come. Museylamah then said the following phrase: “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, Muhammad will go to the mountain”. The meaning is this: If one cannot get one's own way, one must bow to the inevitable.

Mountains are important places in any religion. They were safe places to seek to when attacked, and they were also a place to meet their God. Just look at Christianity. Did you know that there are 788,258 words in King James Bible and of these, 14,565 are unique? Mountain is the 163’rd most commonly used word, just next to Holy. It is mentioned 661 times. Anyway, now you know it - needful or not - but that is not the topic to be looked at here. Google on, and you can study it further.

We like to tweak it and say; “If people are not going to the mountain, how can we bring the mountain to the people?” Without any comparison to any religion whatsoever, we need to bring the “Category Mountain” to the people. Merely 20% of shoppers visited our ‘mountain’. That is simply too few and we need to ‘invite and tempt’ shoppers to see and interact with it in a more accessible way. The task is as always to convert shoppers to buyers. Categories need to be seen, and especially when we deal with impulse categories.

Our core objective was to get more shoppers into the aisle, and then convert them to buyers.
Regardless of the objective, we need to get upstream, to make more shoppers see the category in an elegant and relevant way, that would trigger them to buy.