Why is it important to Monitor Retail Shelf presence?
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 the my favorite product…and there’s my brand, oh what’s that? Hmm…looks interesting”
The store shelf is the shoppers’ first point of interaction with your products, so how they’re stacked on the shelf can make or break the sale. As 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 more product option on the shelf. The fight for shelf space is getting more competitive with each passing day. Companies are trying every possible pack testing technique to get the attention of the shopper in the retail store. Every product has its own personality and companies have a really small window to showcase their products USP to the client. The shelf is a key opportunity to display the product quality to the consumers.
The number of products is continually expanding 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 properly activate them, 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 level and ankle level. It is nearly impossible to locate all items at the eye level and it’s 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 is undeniable.
If people don’t see you, there’s no way they will change their brand preference. Study shows that about two-thirds of products are never seen, never looked at by potential customers. Consumers have no way of finding all the products that are available, so companies have to put in that extra effort to be visible.
People expect things on the top to be of higher quality. In fact, they expect things on top to be better in general. Companies can actually begin to change the image of a brand just by 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 key words for your brand will increase visibility.
However, getting prime placement in retail stores does 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 purchase 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 point of purchase is not just a distribution tool; it’s a communication tool.
Our Solution
History dictates that none of them have 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, a service that empowers field agents with flexibility and companies with scalability. Shelf Watch will eliminate all bottlenecks in the traditional retail audit process that is currently eating into the revenue of the consumer goods organisations. The extent of its advantages can be fully understood by analysing each stakeholder in the retail audit process.
Field Agents
The reps face major challenges while collecting data in the form of pictures and videos. There is lack of uniformity in stacking patterns across retailers which leads to different kinds of pictures in terms of stock orientation, lighting and positioning. Field agents struggle with maintaining consistency with the data they collect because such non-standard pictures take longer to analyse. 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 analyse even the most distorted images because it uses AI pack recognition technology.
Retailers
Compliance audits are tough tasks for retailers as well. To comply with the pre set 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 analysed 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.
Brands
Finally it will be the Consumer Goods companies that will benefit the most from our AI powered solution. They will be able to analyse 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.
If you want to know more about Karna AI and our industry solutions, please connect with us on our website.
