Supplement information that can be captured via field-based VM program

Over the years POSM deployment activity has changed a lot. An activity that was merely known as a poster deployment activity earlier has completely changed its scope and now helping brands with the execution of supplement activities which helps brands in collecting insights, market intelligence, and executing other activities with the help of information collected from the field.

POSM deployment programs on large scale need a lot of feet on the street to ensure the execution of campaigns, POSM replenishments, and planogram adherence. But did you know that they can also be used to help other programs which might be getting executed in retail? Let’s find out areas where POSM deployment programs can help retail:

1. Stock availability: There are limited numbers of stores where a brand can designate dedicated manpower and a lot of stores don’t have dedicated brand representatives. It becomes difficult for brands to get stock-related insights from those stores. A visual merchandising team can help in collecting stock-related insights from those stores as they visit such stores on a frequent basis with an assigned frequency of monthly visits.
2. Fixture maintenance issues identification: Though it might seem odd to collect maintenance-related information via Visual Merchandising resources because they don’t have the skills to ascertain the issues properly, with the help of proper training, you can guide your VM teams to identify and categorize the exact maintenance related issues into different buckets of difficulty. Accordingly, such problems can be directed to maintenance vendor partners and technicians easily. This will help in saving a lot of costs.
3. In-store promoter hygiene: Though in-store promoter hygiene can also be checked via their own application, there are good chances that promoters are not adhering to hygiene parameters after reporting in the application. The visual merchandising team generally visits stores unannounced and at any time of the day. Thus, they can check the in-store promoter hygiene parameters adherence and management can take action as per the insights collected.
4. Competition SOV: Keeping track of competitor visibility. A field-based VM can collect information on total branding done at the store brand-wise, which helps in assessing the visibility share at the store.
5. POSM production planning: Based on the past statistics, we can analyze how much POSM was replenished (POSM type-wise) and deployed at the stores and accordingly how much POSM is required for such stores. This will help in the effective planning of the POSM replenishment and saving on cost.
6. Collection of store-level attributes: Market mapping can be a very tedious task for brands and brands pay a hefty amount just to collect store-level information. A few examples are the retailer’s name, alternate mobile number, GST number, bank account details for loyalty programs, date of birth, PAN number, store area, Geo coordinates, storefront image, etc. A visual merchandising can collect such information with ease while visiting the stores.
7. Asset Monitoring: There are a lot of examples in the market wherein we have seen that retailers have sold the assets which are being handed over by brands that were supposed to be placed in the stores for brand visibility. Product display fixtures and brand walls are some such examples. VM team can monitor those assets and highlight if any of the fixtures are missing from those outlets so that the brand team can take immediate action.
8. Retailer enrollment for incentive schemes/announcements: There are many incentive schemes announced by brands for retailers. Most of them are based on secondary and tertiary sales. The effectiveness of such schemes is based on awareness of the program in the market. VM team can help in creating awareness and enrolling the dealers for such schemes

Thus, a traditional Visual Merchandising activity which was earlier known to be a poster deployment activity has now changed a lot and is being used as a market intelligence cum VM activity. Kindly contact us to know more on this subject.