Piecing Together Account-Specific P-O-P

There's nothing puzzling about account-specific P-O-P. Retailers want it. Some demand it. Over the past 10 years, account-specific P-O-P has become common practice when dealing with large retailers.As a result, product marketers have been faced with the challenge of customizing displays and promotions specifically for one retail chain and devising a completely different display program for another. The challenge can be daunting, but marketers have responded by getting to know large retailers intimately. Some companies have even hired retail marketing specialists. P-O-P producers whose clients work with large retail chains have also been handed a challenge. They have had to learn to work within tighter time frames, design to more detailed specifications, and adjust to shorter production runs.In general, account-specific work is limited to large, high-volume national chains. Big-box powerhouses like Wal-Mart, Kmart, Best Buy and Home Depot have changed the rules of in-store merchandising and have placed very specific limitations, requirements and provisions on displays. When a retailer has sales volume figures like Wal-Mart's, it's hard for a product marketer to say no. In fact, most marketers have accepted the necessity for account-specific work as a cost of doing business."When I began in this business, there were no custom displays done at all," says John Pender, director of retail promotion at Schering-Plough Healthcare, Liberty Corner, N.J. "Now, we do more than 320 display projects in a year's time and over half of them are custom. To meet the trade's needs, you have to come up with innovative display programs to drive business. Every year they're looking for new and fun ways to do that at retail. It's a matter of doing business -- you have to do it."According to the 1999 P-O-P Times/P-O-P & Sign Design Trends Survey, retailers cite customization options as the single most important consideration when accepting P-O-P. More than 85 percent of retailers polled said that customized programs are a determining factor for accepting vendor-supplied P-O-P. Product marketers indicated their eagerness to meet requests for account-specific displays as well. More than 77 percent of product marketers surveyed said they intend to offer retailers more account-specific P-O-P in the coming year (90 percent of product marketers who sell through the mass merchant channel said they will increase their use of customized P-O-P).The Need For Custom"Ten years ago, there wasn't account-specific merchandising," says one industry expert. "Now, the volume retailers demand their own look."Account-specific P-O-P has evolved over the past decade as retail chains have consolidated and become more powerful forces in the marketplace. At the same time, competition has increased among the chains for market share and customer loyalty. Differentiation has never been more important between competitors, as well as from other classes of trade. Retailers are striving to become brands within their own right and they're using marketer-supplied P-O-P to help convey their style and image."Each retailer is dramatically concerned with standing out from their competition," says another industry veteran. "They don't want a display in Kmart that's also going into Wal-Mart. They want it to be specific to them so the consumer perceives that this is a Wal-Mart or a Kmart promotion and not a promotion by the product manufacturer."Having an account-specific display isn't enough. Retailers who want customized P-O-P also want a say in how the final project will look. Retailer marketing departments, buyers and store planners are often involved in the design process to ensure that the P-O-P fits into the store's image and marketing strategy."The retailers have absolute dictatorial control over the display," says one product marketer. "They're very specific about what they will and won't take, and what the design will look like."Category ManagementMore and more, retailers are going beyond just specifying requirements for a display and are requesting the support of product marketers to organize and merchandise an entire product category. This frequently means that competitive brands must collaborate on a display program that prominently features all the players in a given category."For one of our OTC products, we actually made a display with one of our competitors because the trade wanted it done," says Pender. "We created the display for us, but the retailer liked the display and asked us to include the competition on it, too. Of course, the competition helped pay for it. But that's how dedicated we have to be to what the retailer needs."Wilson Sporting Goods has used retailer requests for category management as an opportunity to gain real estate in stores. The company has taken a straight-forward approach to its merchandising by supplying specific information about sporting equipment and the differences in design, construction and materials. "We're trying to sell knowledge to people so they can make an educated purchase on the products that are going to make them play a game better," says Mark DesJardins, art director of graphic design for the Chicago-based sporting goods company. "We try to do something functional as opposed to something that's just for show."The company recently featured information cards in Kmart stores on how to buy a basketball. The cards included information on size and material differences with the Wilson logo stamped across the top. The company did a similar program for soccer balls. "The Nikes of the world can go in and create their own store-with-in-a-store," says DesJardins. "For us, form follows function. If a display isn't going to help us sell product and it's just there to look pretty, it probably isn't worth investing in."Image is EverythingRetail chains have distinguished themselves from one another by creating identifiable and unique looks. Product marketers have had to adjust to the styles of the retailers to ensure that their displays don't clash with the decor of the store. Sometimes, retailers even specify the color, materials, size and style of the display."If their image is glass and brass, then they want glass and brass," says Rich Gausselin, vice president of sales for Chicago-based Visual Marketing Inc. "They want the P-O-P to look and to be part of the retail atmosphere of the store. They don't want it to really pop out and take away from anything else. They want it to blend in and to merchandise your product secondly."Gausselin says he was presented with the task of creating a pager display for Fred Meyer stores, a 400-unit "one-stop shopping" chain headquartered in Portland, Ore. During his first meeting on the project, he was instructed that he had to use a Pionite #181 hard rock maple laminate base for the display. "They wanted our display to match a cellular display that was going to be placed right above it," he says. "They wanted the two to look alike and blend into the electronics section of the store."Retailers don't care about merchandising or SKUs," Gausselin says. "They want image. Then they'll say, 'Now that we know what the look is going to be, it has to merchandise X number of products, etc.' They don't give you the specifics until they talk image."While working on another pager display for Best Buy, Gausselin got very specific instructions. "They said, 'Here's the size of the board and the color scheme. It's 16 inches by 16 inches and it's black and white. You can do whatever you want on it,'" he says with a laugh. "As a result, it's not a very exciting display, but it had to fit into their department."Schering-Plough's Pender has had similar experiences building displays for specific retailers. While constructing a power wing for an account, he had to have every element of the display approved by the retailer, including the type and size of clip used on the display.What's considered account-specific P-O-P varies from marketer to marketer. At Schering-Plough, account-specific displays are defined as "any deviation in the national display that's offered to our customers," says Pender. "If you change the product mix or change the art, it's considered custom."Other marketers have found that mere deviations aren't enough -- an account-specific display needs to have a totally unique structure. "Because our relationships with our big accounts are so good and they're so important to us, I can't just turn around and take a display from Wal-Mart and give it to Kmart with a new header on it," says Wilson's DesJardins.Regardless of the lengths to which marketers go to customize their P-O-P programs, one thing is certain -- the customer is always right. Product marketers are basing their account-specific work on retailer specifications, and making the retailer happy is a priority."When we think of account-specific, we think of whatever the store standards are for that particular retailer," says Wendy Glancy, manager of merchandising and trade shows for Rubbermaid Inc., Wooster, Ohio.The Customs of Custom P-O-PSince account-specific P-O-P is still a relatively new concept, there is still much to learn. P-O-P producers and product marketers are gaining knowledge by adding staff to get inside the heads of Wal-Mart, Kmart, Best Buy, Home Depot and other big-box stores."You have to become a specialist because you have to know what the retailer's requirements are and what they're going to respond to," says Michael Williams, vice president of Phoenix Display, based out of the company's Chicago office. "You need to know the retailer and know what they'll accept and what they won't. You need to work closely with the [retail category] buyer of the product. There are certain parameters for Kmart in general, but each buyer has his or her own concept of how a display should look and function. The buyers at the mass merchants are typically the ultimate decision makers.""We have written requirements from many of our key accounts," says Pender. "That's the foundation for our work. For example, if they require a certain clip, you can't go and create a display with a different clip on it."Nabisco Biscuit Co., Parsippany, N.J., has organized customer marketing managers who develop P-O-P and promotions for the company's major retail clients. Each manager is responsible for a national chain account, such as Wal-Mart, Target or Kmart. With smaller regional chains, drugstores and supermarkets, regional customer marketing managers determine the P-O-P and promotional needs on a regional basis."I get the overall company strategies from Nabisco and I get Wal-Mart's merchandising strategies," says Doug Haase, a manager of customer marketing for Nabisco, who oversees the company's promotional work with Wal-Mart. "My job is to support and tailor national programs to make them more Wal-Mart-specific, and also to formulate programs that fit into their plan."Haase is stationed near Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., and works closely with its marketing department and buyers to develop promotional programs specifically for Wal-Mart. For example, Nabisco recognized that 40 percent of all country music sold in the world is sold through Wal-Mart. Haase organized a Nabisco/Wal-Mart country music promotion that offered a free country music cassette with the purchase of a Nabisco product. Themed "Country's Summer Snacking Favorites," the program will run again this July and will be supported by P-O-P displays and signage.For a recent "Generations of Winners" promotion, Nabisco featured well-known race car drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Dale Earnhardt Sr. on displays -- again, exclusively in Wal-Mart stores. "I look at my job as category management for consumer promotion because I'm taking a non-biased look at the situation," says Haase. "I'm focusing on the Wal-Mart consumer. If you focus on the consumer and use that as your basis, then you're going to win."In addition to creating promotional programs and P-O-P for Wal-Mart, Haase also makes certain that those programs will work and will benefit the retailer's customers. Promotional ideas and in-store merchandising vehicles are often tested in the field before being presented to Wal-Mart. "A lot of the promotions that we're doing this year were tested in stores last year to get all of the bugs out," he says. "We weren't just saying to Wal-Mart that we think this is a great idea. We had actually tested it and we gave them consumer reaction to it. We told them what the initial idea was and the changes we made to make it better. Then, they added their ideas and we added that to the plan."DesJardins agrees that field-testing is an important element in account-specific work. Currently, Wilson is testing four new, multi-function endcap displays for golf and racket sports in The Sports Authority stores."P-O-P costs a lot of money and an endcap is expensive," says DesJardins. "When it comes to something like this, it's wise to test the waters to see if it's feasible to have them in stores. We're waiting to see how the market tests look and to see if we're actually able to sell product off these things."Account-specific work, with short production runs, can drastically increase the price per display, not to mention the design and engineering that go into the finished project. "To do 100 units, it takes just as much time, effort and skill as it would take if you were doing 10,000," says Visual Marketing's Gausselin.However, many product marketers and P-O-P producers are confronting the increased costs by streamlining their P-O-P operations. Schering-Plough has addressed the added costs of custom work by using universal components wherever possible and changing the artwork on stock displays. "We're trying to standardize more of the things that we're using," Pender says. "Where we can, we try to use one structure for all the custom displays that we do."At Wilson, the company is experimenting with multi-function displays that can be altered from season to season to market different products. The company is testing a prototype display for multiple uses. "This display is designed with shelving that swings out and locks in place," says DesJardins. "The display has arms that swing out to hold baseball gloves. We are trying to be forward-thinking so that when seasons change, we can change out the entire display."Managing the costs of account-specific work begins with planning. Using standard materials and limited tooling can keep costs down. "You can produce practical P-O-P for a 100-store chain if you go with a fabricated-type of display and don't get involved in heavy tooling, like injection-molding, vacuum-forming or the more expensive tools," says Gausselin. "I have found that cost is not a problem for small-run work. The client has the business. They know they need a piece of P-O-P and they know it's going to be more expensive than a generic piece."Custom Time FramesTime frames for account-specific work tend to vary by product category. Seasonal products generally have more planning time, while consumer packaged goods have less. Regardless, when retailers want a P-O-P program, marketers respond quickly."The mass merchants have such power because of their size and because they represent such big dollars to the product manufacturers that they can set some very tight time frames," says Phoenix Display's Williams. "That's partly due to the marketplace, too. They're seeing a trend with a product or with consumers and they want to act on it very quickly. We're talking six weeks from the time there is an idea to do a promotion until we have to have the displays in stores.""We used to have a year to a year-and-a-half leadtimes on displays," says Schering-Plough's Pender. "I was just called into a meeting this morning where they want a display in six weeks for a totally new structure."With customized displays becoming more predominant in the marketplace, marketers and brand managers are often faced with the challenge of maintaining a consistent brand image while meeting the merchandising specifications of retailers. Product marketers are attempting to maintain their own identities across various retailers and different classes of trade.For example, Rubbermaid is attempting to standardize its P-O-P by creating guidelines for its displays. Customized displays can be altered from account to account, but all are built with the same strategic principles."We want to have some things that the consumer can relate to time and time again, such as the positioning of the logo, the design, the visual of who Rubbermaid is," says Glancy. "This year, we're developing merchandising standards for Rubbermaid that we can start using as a basis. We can then transform the PMS colors to match store interiors and formats that will work for particular retailers. We've tried to set a baseline for what we want our merchandising to look like. Then we'll work off that basic standard and transform it to meet the customer's needs."Wilson's DesJardins, too, is attempting to preserve the company's brand look and image with consistent brand elements. "From store to store, from account to account, we want to keep our corporate identity elements the same so people will see that it's a Wilson display," he says. "It might have some different verbiage on it for that particular account, but the message is the same. It reinforces the Wilson brand."Account-specific work isn't going away and most industry experts say that the demand for customized P-O-P is going to continue to increase. Because retailers want more opportunities to differentiate themselves from the competition, product marketers will be challenged to find new and creative ways to merchandise their products and communicate their brand message within the context of the retailer."If we can help retailers and it helps us make money and sell our product, then it benefits us to help out when we can," says DesJardins."Nine times out of 10, the information you get from the retailer is very specific," says Visual Marketing's Gausselin. "They do a lot of the work for you. Basically, account-specific work is like assembling all the pieces of a puzzle."

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