Brand Managers: Your In-Store Product Displays Suck.
Update: we placed 4th in Startup Weekend! Here’s our pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L09SkSGvYS8&feature=youtu.be
You’re a brand manager for an established and revered product. Let’s say Star Wars. People love Star Wars. Of course they do; millions of hours and dollars have been spent creating a series of amazing product and building an amazing brand that’s lasted almost 40 years. A brand that survived Jar Jar Binks and earned a $4 billion payday from Disney.
Peak shopping period is upon us. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Green Fortnight (that’s a thing, right?) are here this weekend. The other big holidays are on the way too. Interest in Star Wars is high because the first movie released under Disney launches on December 17th (and surely it can’t be as bad as the prequels…).
You’re confident. You have a solid marketing plan. You spent hours crafting the design, the messaging, the in-store displays. Everything is perfect and ready to go. You decide to visit your local store to bask in your own glory. You walk in. You see this:
Your heart stops. WHAT is my product doing on the floor? WHY is the shelf not restocked? WHO cut the top of the display off?
You’re pissed off. Rightly so. Your billion dollar brand looks like crap. Nobody is going to buy this. You’re losing money. Worse, they screwed up your perfect campaign. What if your boss sees this?
It’s 9:pm on a Saturday but that won’t stop you. You call your sales manager, who’s in a bar, but who gets the word out to the store manager, who doesn’t call you until the next morning. You’re still angry.
“It’s just that one store, I assure you…” says the sales manager. You know he’s lying but you have no way to prove it. Headquarters follows up with pristine shots from their model store. Obviously staged.
You briefly consider getting in your car and driving to 10–15 of the nearest stores. You quickly realize that won’t make a dent; your product is in 4,500 stores nationwide. Gulp.
Rather than think about how many of those stores are are screwed up as the one you slump back in your chair and resign to relying on your boss not to do his own christmas shopping. This isn’t just a Star Wars problem; $17 billion is spent every year on in-store display and $400 million is spent on mystery shoppers to catch these issues in the wild.
Heeve is a platform for brand managers to crowdsource pictures of their product displays in store, across the country, on demand. These days everyone has a smartphone with a powerful camera and a connection to the internet. Uber, AirBnB, TaskRabbit, Instacart and other on-demand startups have trained people to work for themselves, when it’s convenient to them. The time for this product is now.
We’re a team of 5 brand marketers and product designers who have experienced this pain ourselves and are passionate about solving it. We came together this Friday at a Startup Weekend in New York.
We need your help.
If you’re a brand manager who feels this problem, fill in this survey to help us understand if we’re on the right track:
IMPORTANT: Startup Weekend ends Sunday 22nd of November. Our pitch to the judges is at 5pm EST. If you can fill in this survey (or share it with the right people) before then, you’ll be doing us a huge favor!
Thanks :-)
