The Shelf – Endless War Game

The Shelf, home of brands and products, the oxygen of sales, those few centimeters from which products get their extreme mojo, brands their loyalty from millions of daily consumers and find their way into their shopping carts and it is these shelves that allows companies and brand owners to grow their businesses and increase their margins and profitability.

Consequently, the shelf, leads to an endless hidden war game, not seen by the consumers, between the people behind brands and products to have better shelf positioning.

Everybody wants the best visibility and the largest displays, on flat shelf, all brands want to be on eye level, some multinationals pay tons of money to be on eye-level shelves and it is because of this brand positioning that retailers worldwide are taking advantage and imposing more and more tough conditions. Sometimes brand owners care more about the shelf than to book an order with the retailer.

That is why at one point in time, category management (now treated as a science in the retail industry) was founded and plannograms are created, to maintain order on the shelf.

This works perfectly if the category management (by brand or by product family) is applied strictly. Unfortunately not all retailers are taking advantage of this new science, which leads to big chaos on the shelves (in all categories of the store) and specially in basket freezers. Where merchandisers and salesmen of brands, visit the stores everyday and try to squeeze the competition and enlarge their visibility.

It is an on-going cat and mouse game I’ve been seeing almost all around the world, in local small supermarkets or in international chains.

Keeping in mind that retailers shuffle their assortments and plannograms every now and then, and make lots of changes, sometimes by kicking some products out of their stores or moving them to a different shelf level (eye-level, waist-level, knee-level and ankle-level), which can lead to a big sales drop as it can also lead to increasing the sales, depending on the reason of this change and the product in question.

No matter what you are selling on the shelf, the relationship between brand owners and retailers, is one of the most important influences on that placement.