Shelf placement, the key to attracting customers and growing sales

Shelf placement, the key to attracting customers and growing sales

A brand's shelf presence is one of the most important marketing tools to ensure your success. Follow these important tips to get the best shelf placement.

You’ve worked hard to create an innovative product that consumers want. The next step is to get it onto retailer's shelves. Gaining distribution at key retailers is the blueprint to every brand’s success. Knowing how to identify the best stores to target is key to your survival.  Building your brand by gaining distribution in the wrong stores can actually be a bad thing as it can dilute your brand as well as your ability to support it.

Know your core customers

You first need to identify who your core consumers are, not just your target customer, but who is most likely to buy and use your product. Do they come from small or large families? Do they have a low or high income? Are they college-educated, blue or white collar? What is their ethnicity?

These important questions will help you develop a solid marketing and brand strategy that communicates the value, as well as the key benefits, of your brand.

Know which retailers your core customers shop

Next, you need to identify the markets and the retailers with a similar demographic profile. There are a lot of tools to help you pinpoint the best retailers that match your target demographic footprint. This will help ensure your brand's success with your core shoppers.

Once you have successfully identified the ideal retailers, pursue gaining distribution in their stores. Having your product represented at each of the stores that you identified will help you promote more efficiently and effectively while you reach the largest audience possible of your core shoppers. Gaining the right distribution in the right stores is the most critical component of every successful brand strategy.

Recommend an effective merchandising strategy for your brand

Once your product is in distribution at every target store, determining how and where it should be merchandised on their shelves is the next step. Retailers appreciate brands willing and able to provide insights and fact-based merchandising recommendations. Request your products be merchandised together on their shelves to form a billboard, preferably at eye level. This will create the greatest impact for your brand and attract new customers.  The goal is to make shopping easy for their shoppers and to attract new customers to their stores.

Request to have your product shelved to the right of the retailers' private-label. This spot is usually reserved for the number one brand in the category.

It is important to make sure that your items have enough holding power on the retailer’s shelves. This will help to avoid out-of-stocks.  Ideally, your products should not need to be restocked more often than once a week. This sometimes requires additional facings of the more popular items. Most retailers require a minimum case and a half of products on their shelves.