We have an important announcement to make: one-size-fits-all for in-store marketing is dead. Yep, it’s time to lay that concept to rest once and for all. Now, national brands have transitioned to a much smarter approach. They consider each store’s footprint a micro-venue.
What’s driven this shift? Cost savings and campaign performance optimization.
When brands can provide stores with bespoke in-store materials that match their configuration, traffic patterns, shelving, cooler doors, counters, and other physical store elements, fewer materials are wasted, and more messages are delivered more effectively.
How is this accomplished? Through the power of detailed store profiles.
How Store Profiles Define Each Location for In-Store Marketing
A store profile is a detailed list of each location’s attributes. It’s not an architectural blueprint, but it still paints a very clear picture of what each store can accommodate for in-store marketing materials.
Examples of Store Profile Details
- Ceiling height
- End cap counts and sizes
- Entrance door configuration and sizes
- Exterior elements (menu boards, islands, displays)
- Fixture count and sizes
- Menu board type and dimensions
- Number of POS terminals
- Number and variety of hot and cold foodservice stations
- Square footage
- Traffic flow patterns
- Window count and sizes
When a brand captures all the pertinent details of a store’s footprint, usually numbering in the hundreds of distinct attributes, it optimizes each selling opportunity. But what creates, stores, and links the store profiles to the marketing outputs? For that, you need a specialized technology such as The Engine from Momentara. It’s a robust, proprietary platform with four modules tailored to your workflow, campaign-building, management, and reporting needs.
Are store profiles really needed?
Yes. Especially as brands deploy more location versions. For example, many QSRs operate both full-scale locations and smaller, more limited versions that fit better in airports and malls. Even retailers have adopted this concept with large, mega-store footprints in suburbs, and tighter, more efficient footprints in urban and downtown areas. So not only do you have variations between actual locations, but you also have variations in the types of locations national brands are opening.
Be Fearful of Phantom Inventory
What causes phantom inventory? It can be several things, but the number one cause is inaccurate POP kits. Locations can’t post what doesn’t fit their store. So store managers do their best, post what they can, and dispose of the rest.
The store manager thinks they have done a good job. The brand thinks everything was used. The consumer misses out on important messages that improve on-property conversions.
Automated POP Fulfillment With Less Materials, Less Waste, and Less Investment
When each location is treated as unique, each one gets only what it needs and nothing more. That’s the primary benefit of automated POP fulfillment. All details are in the system, and all production, kitting, and shipping are done exactly as specified.
Using automated POP fulfillment for signage kitting means no wasted printing, no wasted shipping costs, and nothing tossed into the garbage. Everything comes exactly as needed with no excess. That alone can save brands huge sums of money over the course of a single national campaign. Now extrapolate those savings over a full year, and the amount becomes staggering. While the exact figure varies by study, it’s safe to say that marketing waste is at least 15% and can exceed 30% when brands don’t use custom kitting powered by store profiles.
Examples of Marketing Material Waste
- Phantom inventory
- Incorrect sizes for a store’s fixture layouts
- Duplicate materials for nonexistent areas of a store
- Unnecessary shipping and freight costs
Not using a detailed store profile to support location-specific kitting is a death-by-a-thousand-cuts for your marketing budget. That’s why each store deserves its own marketing kit. That’s true whether you have 50 stores, 500 stores, or 5,000+ stores. In fact, the more locations you market in, the greater the need to treat them as distinct entities.
How Material Waste Adds Up
For large retail chains, the cost of working with a marketing partner such as Momentara can be significantly offset by cutting waste. Plus, that offset doesn’t even account for the additional ROI increases that would be achieved through optimized planning, creativity, and production.
Have your doubts? Here is a very conservative example showing how much money brands lose by not tailoring marketing kits to each location.
- 1,000 locations
- $500 average kit cost (all in)
- 20% material waste
In that scenario, the brand loses $100,000 per campaign. If new campaigns launch quarterly, the total avoidable losses add up to $400,000 annually. That is a massive, wholly avoidable six-figure loss to the marketing budget’s bottom line. That’s unacceptable. The amount is comparable to the cost of a sizable 4th quarter campaign budget — and it’s just been tossed in the garbage.
Oh, but that’s not even the total amount at stake. The real loss far exceeds $400,000. On top of the $400,000 loss, retailers have to account for the additional freight costs they pay to ship away the marketing trash. Plus, paying store managers to sort through the materials when they arrive on site. It all creates a fast-growing, never-ceasing avalanche of lost money.
Want to get honest about your budget numbers? Momentara invites brands to bring us their production data from a recent national rollout. We will use them to conduct a lean marketing assessment that shows exactly where and how much money could be saved.
Ready to Deploy Micro-Venues Driven by Store-Profiles?
POP materials powered by store profiles are just one aspect of in-the-moment marketing — a strategy created by Momentara. We turn in-store, out-of-home, and event promotions into useful touchpoints that sync with your customers’ routines to encourage behaviors. The Momentara approach makes your marketing messages a welcome, impactful, and natural part of the customer’s day.
Whether your media buying needs are focused on improving fulfillment for a national chain or you’re intrigued by the in-the-moment opportunities offered by Momentara, we invite you to reach out. We bring you the technology, experience, production, scale, resources, and national presence to build certainty and programmatic success.
