Why It Matters
Shoppers decide at the fixture. The 2012 Shopper Engagement Study by Point of Purchase Advertising International (POPAI) found that 76% of purchase decisions were made in store.1 Space and position are how your brand competes in that moment. Space should match what you sell. A common test is “fair share”: your share of shelf space and display should roughly match your share of category sales. A brand well below fair share may be under-spaced for what it sells; a brand far above it may be holding space the retailer won’t defend for long. Planograms often don’t survive contact with the store. When POPAI UK and Ireland, its United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland arm, looked at why in-store campaigns fail, its top reasons included vague or ambiguous instructions, overly complex planograms, and no compliance check after installation.2 The same report found that most retailers assume displays are in place rather than checking.2 What you don’t measure is usually worse than you think.Best Practice
Set Share of Shelf Targets Against Fair Share
Set a target per store segment, and anchor it to your share of category sales. A common way to express it is a fair share index:- Share of shelf is your facings (or linear space) divided by the category’s facings (or linear space), as a percentage.
- Fair share index is your share of shelf divided by your share of category sales, times 100. 100 is fair share; above 100 is over-indexed.
Count the Same Way Every Time
There’s no single industry standard for measuring share of shelf, so define yours and train it:- Pick one unit. Facings or linear meters, never a mix. They give different answers.
- Count front-row facings only. Units behind the front row aren’t facings.
- Measure the whole category. Define where the category starts and ends in each store type, and count all of it, not one bay.
Check the Planogram Item by Item
For each product on the planogram, check that it’s present, in the right position, with the right number of facings, and blocked correctly. Score compliance as compliant checks divided by total checks. Keep planograms simple, and give reps a picture of what good looks like for each one.Capture Evidence
Take a photo of the whole bay, square-on, with every shelf in the frame. Take it before you change anything, and again after you fix it. Photos let managers audit scores and coach reps on what they saw. See Capture Photo Evidence That Holds Up.Fix It While You’re There
Where the retailer allows it, correct facings, positions, and blocking during the visit, and fix price tags. Where you can’t, raise it with the store manager and log a follow-up. A gap you record but don’t fix is still a gap when the next shopper arrives.How FieldKo Helps
FieldKo doesn’t have dedicated facings or planogram fields. You capture both with survey questions, so the way you build the questions decides what you can report on.Common Pitfalls
- Mixing facings and linear measures across visits or reps, so trends mean nothing.
- Measuring one bay instead of the whole category.
- Free-text shelf questions such as “How does the shelf look?”, which you can’t chart.
- Editing a live question, which makes old and new answers score differently and breaks trends.
- Chasing space beyond fair share that the retailer won’t hold.
See Also
- Run a Great Store Visit
- Capture Photo Evidence That Holds Up
- Define Your Perfect Store
- Design Surveys and Tasks for Reporting
- Retail Execution Metrics
Sources
- Supermarket News, “POPAI: 76% of Decisions Made In-Store,” 2012. Read the article
- POPAI UK and Ireland, “In-Store Insights, Issue 24: Compliance Report,” 2015. Read the report