In-Store Merchandising Placement –Learning Launch

Challenge  I work in a Consumer Electronics company that manufactures and sells Audio equipment  (such as speakers, headphones, earphones, etc). The company sells its products via  different consumer electronics stores, all around the world (e.g. BestBuy in the US, Fnac  in France, MediaMarkt in Germany, etc).  We have been designing our latest Visual  Merchandising elements for the stores, i.e. the way we will be displaying our products in  those stores. That includes the furniture, the placement, the signage, the demonstrations,  etc. Our challenge was to identify the best solution from the many available, within a  given budget limit, to make the best business impact (i.e. maximum sales). The solution  would be deployed in more than 1000 stores globally and thus it needed to be well  thought and with minimal risk, as after deployment changes would not be easy at this  large scale.

Selection  We have been internally working with agile methodology in different parts of the  organization and in this case we decided to use the  learning launch tool. We wanted to  create a control learning launch as an experiment to quickly test the ideas and prototypes,  before rolling solutions out the market widely.

Application  We decided to use 6 stores as trial locations (2 in US, 2 in France, 2 in Germany). And  we created 2 different visual merchandising concepts that we then trialed in each of those  stores (i.e. each concept was tried in 3 stores, all in different countries). One of the  concepts was more visual (i.e. large imagery next to the products), with photos of how the  products are used (e.g. in a living room environment, or while traveling). The other  concept was more focused on the product specifics (e.g. materials used, technical  specifications, etc). The prototypes had sensors so we could collect data on how many  people reached the display, how many people tried/demo the products, and of course how  many people made a purchase. We run this trial for 2 months, to collect sufficient data.

Insight  Apart from the quantitative data, we also collected data by observation (i.e. looking what  people were doing in the store) but also talking to the sales personnel about their  observations. We learned that talking more about the lifestyle and context of the product,  i.e. how it is used and how it adds value to the customer at home or traveling, was  definitely much more inspiring and intriguing for the customers to approach and interact  with the product displays (vs. the technical specification alternative approach). We are  now in the phase of rolling out the concept globally.

Approach  While the learning launch tool gave us strong insight on the correct concept to use, next  time we should like to take it into more “steps”, in a more iterative approach. While we  answered the top level question, we also have some other smaller questions unanswered.  Next time we would like to make a similar setup with 6 stores, but before launching try a  more refined concept to e.g. 10-12 stores, for nailing down more details, before going  global.

