In-store Activities Research Articles

How U.S. consumers view in-store promotions

Most sales promotion analysis, either at the external-to-the-store or in-store level, has been conducted based on what marketers have done and how consumers have responded in specific retail situations and for specific promotional techniques. Most studies, therefore are reported as, point-in-time and point-of-place specific, historical, after-the-fact results and imply a consumer preference for the measured activity. This paper provides a holistic view of how U.S. consumers regard all forms of promotion, both external-to-the-store in the form of 31 media alternatives and 23 in-store techniques across thirteen broad product categories. Data comes from twice a year online studies of representative groups of U.S. consumers, conducted since 2002. Consumers report on which in-store activities most influence their purchase decisions. From that, predictive models of consumer response to alternative promotional combinations are developed using CHAID analysis. This predictive approach is superior to traditional after-the-fact measures.

Research Note—Competitive Brand Salience

Brand salience—the extent to which a brand visually stands out from its competitors—is vital in competing on the shelf, yet is not easy to achieve in practice. This study proposes a methodology to determine the competitive salience of brands, based on a model of visual search and eye-movement recordings collected during a brand search experiment. We estimate brand salience at the point of purchase, based on perceptual features (color, luminance, edges) and how these are influenced by consumers' search goals. We show that the salience of brands has a pervasive effect on search performance, and is determined by two key components: The bottom-up component is due to in-store activity and package design. The top-down component is due to out-of-store marketing activities such as advertising. We show that about one-third of salience on the shelf is due to out-of-store and two-thirds due to in-store marketing. The proposed methodology for competitive salience analysis exposes the optimal visual differentiation level of a brand versus its competitors, and of each SKU versus the other SKUs of the same brand. The model of the visual search process and methodology for competitive salience analysis enable diagnostic analyses of the current levels of visual differentiation of brands and SKUs at the point of purchase, and provide directions for increasing these.

What Do Excellent Service Promoters Do Differently?

The key finding is that excellent promoters have higher perceptions of the importance of promotion than non-excellent retailers and that they follow up by spending more on the total promotion budget. More specifically, excellent promoters give relatively more emphasis to wide reach promotion tools such as direct mail, print advertising, broadcast advertising and public relations and relatively less emphasis to in-store activities such as personal selling, in-store promotion and price mark-downs. The non-excellent promoters seem to be more preoccupied with price related promotion tools such as in-store promotion and price mark-downs and relatively less occupied with wide reaching promotion tools such as direct mail and broadcast advertising. There is no evidence that non-excellent promoting retailers are failing to contain costs and indeed are just as likely to be minimising costs as the excellent promoters. Rather, the non-excellent promoting retailers seem to be less successful in maximising audience reach for a given promotion budget, that is a productivity measure of promotion effectiveness rather than a cost minimising measure.