A Holistic Assessment of a Brand’s Retail Conditions
The increasing importance of retail conditions to the overall health of a brand is widely acknowledged. Amid media fragmentation and abundance of product choices, brand managers have long recognized that traditional marketing tactics, e.g. TV and Print, are far less effective today than 10 years ago.
However, the complexities of retail conditions can be intimidating. First, there are a myriad of things a brand can do in store. Where should you, a brand owner, focus your money and efforts?
Retail Brand Health (RBH) is designed to address the above issues. It is an objective and holistic measure of a brand’s performance along shopper’s path to purchase in store. It not only provides insights for a brand’s in store conditions and how they impact its sales, but also identifies specific retail actions that are most effective in driving its sales.
RBH Framework
Four stages of path to purchase in store
Once a consumer walks into a store, they become a shopper. Your main objective now is to turn them into a buyer of your brand. To achieve this objective, your brand needs to carefully guide the shopper along the path to purchase, which includes these 4 stages: access, attract, engage, motivate
- Access: make brand available and easy to find, at locations where the shopper expects to find it. This is most important when your brand is already on the consumer’s shopping list.
- Attract: Get on the shopper’s radar screen. This is often achieved through some disruptive marketing and/or merchandising, e.g. demo and end cap display. But it could also be achieved through basic shelf presence, e.g. significant number of facings and brand blocking on shelf.
- Engage: once a brand is on shopper’s mind, either on the initial shopping list, or through the “Attract” stage, now it needs to keep them engaged. This is often achieved through in-‐store communications, including packaging, display header cards, trial opportunities, store staff, etc.
- Motivate: overcome the shopper’s purchase barriers and motivate them to make the purchase today. This requires deep shopper understanding in terms of purchase barriers, and then address them accordingly using education, promotion, recommendation, etc
Seven dimensions of RBH
RBH measures how well a brand interacts with the shopper on her path to purchase in store. Anything a brand does to facilitate its shopper along their path to purchase belongs to one or more of the following seven dimensions of RBH:
- Distribution: is the brand available in store? How many varieties?
- Share of Retail Space: what are the brand’s share of facings and linear spaces?
- Location (in store): where is the brand located? This includes brand adjacency, category adjacency, and secondary locations.
- Point of Sale: what point of sale communications are being used? This includes
o POS vehicles, e.g. standalone display, gondola, floor graphics, etc o POS messaging, e.g. value, feature, benefits, etc - Price/Promotion: what shopper promotions are being used? e.g. TPR, sweepstakes, BOGO, etc.
- Product Trial: what trial opportunities are provided in store? This includes both unassisted and
assisted trial. - Store Staff Interaction: how does the store staff interact with shopper on behalf of the brand? e.g.
available for help, make brand recommendations, etc.
The figure below depicts the relationships between the seven RBH dimensions and the 4 stages of shopper’s path to purchase. For example, Location, where the brand is located in store (including brand adjacency, category adjacency, and secondary locations), helps deliver both Access and Attract. On the other hand, to deliver Access, a brand could invest in Distribution, Share of Retail Space, and/or Location, depending on its specific situations.
Figure 1 Relationships between the seven RBH dimensions and the 4 stages of shopper’s path to purchase
