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As marketers and retailers both come to understand the growing power of P-O-P, more people on both ends are having a say in the final message and look of a display. That may produce more effective pieces -- but it also means gathering more feedback, balancing a wider spectrum of needs, and sometimes determining whose requirements are more important."A lot of people touch a display before it's finished and ready for our store," says Vaughn Haves, vice president of store planning for Lowe's Cos., North Wilkesboro, N.C. Lowe's focuses its vendors' efforts on customized, category-management type pieces. In the past, the buyer was the key contact, using displays and merchandising support as an additional element in the total product package. Today buyers are much more focused on the bottom line element, leaving promotional messages, sizes, shapes and colors up to other people in other departments. At Lowe's, the creation process includes the visual merchandising manager, design manager, buyer, store planner and the procurement department (if specific fixture elements need to be outsourced to make it fit the department)."There are more retail merchandising committees, with more people involved, than ever before," says Holly Roper, analyst with the Retail Research Center at Promo Edge Inc. "And it's going to continue to move in that direction as retailers see the need to do so. They can no longer take the risk that a supplier's merchandising program won't work for them."Involving more people up front can also reduce store labor costs, where retailers are focusing a lot of their efforts now, Roper points out. "More retailers are getting everyone involved to check out the display prototypes being offered as early as possible to ensure the pieces are easy to assemble and fit their space. Any problems they can address early to reduce in-store labor costs in assembly, stocking or maintenance will pay off greatly once the display reaches each store."Executives at CVS Inc. are big believers in that approach, says William Rudolph, director of fixtures and equipment purchases for the Woonsocket, R.I.-based drugstore chain. "Every single program we use is previewed in person," he says. The company offers a planogramming room where vendors can set up their display options for review, and sometimes CVS has the displays set up in a local store to see how they look within the context of the department. "We'll go kick the tires to see what we've got," he says.As a result, the role of internal merchandisers has grown considerably in recent years, taking over some of the responsibilities formerly handled by the buyer, the point man for the most manufacturers' sales-people. Today, buyers have less interest in the merchandising element being presented. "A buyer doesn't want to control the merchandising space," Roper stresses. "He wants his company and his category to do well, but his number-one goal (and any bonus he receives) is based on how well he buys products at the lowest possible price."At the same time, the merchandiser cares a great deal about P-O-P elements. "He doesn't care what deal the buyer works out," Roper explains. "He cares whether the products look good in the format he's created for the store. He cares if the merchandising materials are too wide, if they block popular products alongside, if they hang down and cover the product on the lower shelf. Shoppability is his key."CVS's Rudolph agrees with those divisions of responsibility. The drug chain now uses a "consortium" of personnel from three departments to review displays, an activity that is separate from the purchasing function. These include category managers/planners, who oversee the balance in the department and its productivity; visual designers, who are responsible for the planogram itself and how merchandising elements enhance that; and fixture buyers, who outsource better or cheaper permanent fixtures when needed to fit the chain's specific needs.These elements are then overseen by an interior design executive charged with ensuring that all departments fit together and that adjacencies don't clash. The position, added just three years ago, focuses on design in general to ensure that there is a common thread of imagery running through the store. "We decided we needed to keep two high-impact programs from being next to each other, negating the impact," Rudolph explains. "We also didn't want to have too many display programs in any one aisle. His responsibility is to carry the overall design of the store's look through every aisle and keep it from getting too crazy."For the most part, the disparate teams work together pretty well, he says. "Collectively, we ensure everything gets taken into consideration. The visual people are looking at the overall planogram as well as how the pieces will affect other products in the aisle, plus any cross-merchandising opportunities. Then I discuss with the vendor how it should be packaged, what labeling we want and what that should say; what instructions we want inside the packaging; what color it has to match; whether the edges are too sharp, etc."As markets consolidate into fewer retail chains, their ability to control the packaging and promotional material grows -- and each one has its own approach and idiosyncrasies. "Every one is different," says Eric Wynn, assistant circulation manager at The Dallas Morning News. "In each chain, there's a different person who has the authority and ability to cut through the B.S., and we have to find who that is and focus on them."At Kroger, a Midwestern grocery chain, for instance, one person coordinates every element of in-store merchandising, he notes. But with other retailers, it may be the nonfoods buyer, a marketing person or a distribution person. "We try to deal with marketing people, because they seem to be the most innovative and creative in working with us," he says. "The distribution people tend to be more resistant to new ideas. They want to merchandise the newspaper in the more traditional approach."Meanwhile, the Washington Post's Manager of Retail Sales Tony Mineart focuses his attention in most cases, on the buyer. "He's the number-one guy for us. He wants to sell product and so do we." But he agrees that more often, getting P-O-P placed requires dealing with "a task force." His retail contacts include the design/display/fixture staff, the engineering staff (to work out specific sizes and shapes), and even directly with the fixture-construction company.The problem with dealing with the buyer and walking away with a good deal, Promo Edge's Roper warns, is that the buyer is price-driven: first, last and always. "Most buyers don't care what you put in your merchandising package, as long as it produces the lowest price. They'll take whatever you offer, whether they intend to execute it or not." In many cases, they aren't the person who will be responsible for executing it anyway. "Their job isn't to say, 'We don't want that.' It's to say, 'What's the deal and what's included,' and then pull out their calculator to see where that puts them."To be sure, she adds, savvy buyers will turn down merchandising pieces they know they can't use, asking for different pieces or for another few cents' markdown: "But most buyers have 20 minutes to hear your spiel and execute the program. They are pretty focused on what is offered and how low they can get the price." The merchandising team, on the other hand, is 100 percent focused on the store's look and impact." If the visual merchandiser says 'No' to a display, even if the buyer said 'Yes,' it won't go up in the store," she warns. "They control the back door, too, so even if it gets shipped to the store, it doesn't get to the floor."In some cases, the local store manager has control over his floor, making all those approvals at headquarters moot if he doesn't like what he sees. Says Lowe's Hayes, "Store managers receive guidance from corporate, but we stress to them that they are the CEOs of their stores. They have the flexibility to change the look based on their individual markets. We can't sit here and know 450 different markets, so they can diverge from our base plan."That can work for or against a marketer (assuming the display gets shipped to the store in the first place), but it can also create some frustrating experiences. "We've worked with store managers to ensure our pieces fit their store's look," says the The Dallas Morning News' Wynn. "And then a new store manager came in and had different ideas on how to merchandise our products. In some cases, we've spent $1,200 for fixtures that lasted only nine months."Even if the store manager puts it up to appease corporate, there's little to dictate how long it stays up. "Nothing stops the store manager from taking that display down again quickly," Roper says. "And if they don't like it, especially if it's annoying, it will come down."In some cases, the store manager may be overruled -- by store employees. "I hear that a lot," Roper says, especially with audio displays activated by any motion near the display. "If it's going off constantly or is annoying to listen to, employees will deactivate it [usually by taking out the batteries] even if they have to tear it apart." She suggests having audio messages that are no longer than two minutes, and they should have to be activated by consumer interaction. Another sad truth comes when everyone agrees on the program, the stores are apprised, the displays are shipped -- and they still don't reach the floor. Quite often, breathtakingly simple factors (such as an odd-size shipping carton) are at the heart of the problem, Roper says: "The display arrives at the dock and it is put on a lift. They try to stick it in a storage slot but it doesn't fit. So they stick it in the corner of the back room and it is never thought about again." Another common mistake is wrong labeling. It leads to programs being unidentified and unused until after the promotion has ended.Kodak marketers often deal with these types of frustrations, says Kristi Marchbanks, vice president and general manager of the Kodak Retail Services Division, Atlanta. "For retailers, putting staff on cash registers is the number-one goal, and stocking or putting out promotional materials is second or third," she says. "Sometimes the displays are labeled correctly, but the staff doesn't know the timing of the promotion and doesn't think about it until it's over." To counter this, Kodak distributes extra informational alerts to retailers to draw attention to promotional periods. Many retailers also incorporate upcoming approved vendor promotion information into their store communications.Many companies are taking advantage of third-party merchandisers to ensure displays are set up, remain stocked and look good during promotions. For example, Kodak uses its in-house staff to handle 25,000 key store accounts, relying on Powerforce Inc., Chicago, to look after 50,000 others. "Having a dedicated service to help with this makes a difference," Marchbanks says. "That's their job, so they're pretty careful about making sure it's done right." These services can also provide feedback on the status of displays, providing data on in-store presentation that correlates more precisely with register sales data.Before the in-store salesforce can go to work, a lot of hands have already touched that display and its shipper. It's been scrutinized for product density, cubic space, marketing message, colors and design, cost, assembly, restocking ease, shipping size, promotional window and a host of other factors. And as each successive program becomes more important to stores and more customized for their specific needs, the number of touches from both manufacturer and retail will grow.

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