Imagine as a CPG brand if you could zoom into any grocery store and view where your product is and what it’s sat next to.

The problem:

You’ve got a product for sale in a grocery store. You’ve spent loads on marketing. Your product looks great according to your latest concept tests, pack tests, taste tests, and focus groups. But where is your product featured in stores? What do your shoppers actually see?

Sure, you can get a feel for it in your local store. Go in and take a look. Take a photo.

What about the store a mile away? Or the store 100 miles away? Or the store 1,000 miles away?

Viewing your product as your shoppers see it — being in all places at once is impossible. Or it was impossible.

Today we’re launching Planogram Publisher.

VST’s Planogram Publisher shows a retailer’s planograms to CPG brands. These planograms are made into:

• High-Resolution Images — see your products as your shoppers see them on-shelf
• Share of Space Data — usable share of space data with >3 years history. Key data is share of SKUs, facings, linear space and quadratic space. This is the data directly from a retailer and from the store, so both parties are singing from the same hymn sheet. Drill down to individual SKUs, individual stores, or across a variety of store clusters available.
• Maps — denoting which plans are in which stores.

Why can’t brands access this data already?

Traditional planogram software makes it hard to share data. We’ve seen countless horror stories of big brands being sent things like margin information in error. This has led to retailers becoming wary of sharing this information with suppliers.

Furthermore, the data has become more complex. There’s no such thing as a common planogram and there are many individual store-specific plans for a variety of categories. Managing this data, viewing this and making it usable is not easy. For reference, our planogram data with Tesco combines over 3.7bn rows of data.

But where my products are in a store is publicly available information?

True — you can send field sales teams out to every store under the sun to take photos and try and dissect what’s on-shelf and your key metrics, but the data’s not clean, storable, usable, or good. I.e. you can’t really do anything with it.

And many brands do send teams out to many stores, and spend north of £200k a year for the privilege of doing so. But it’s 2022, and we should be doing better, with transparent relationships between retailers and brands combining to do a great job for shoppers.

In order to do some proper category management, you need all the information. Not just your sales data. Not just your customer data. But your positional data. Your planogram data.

Planogram data is valuable but hard to get hold of.

Well, we’ve solved that. Now, with Planogram Publisher, you can access this data today.

Planogram Publisher

Planogram Publisher includes 3 key components:

• High-resolution planogram visuals of any store or group of stores

• Share of space KPIs — share of facings, SKUs, linear space and quadratic space

• Map views — which plans are in which stores? Where do you need to go and visit? What are the commonalities between stores you’re interested in?

Our CPG brand partners use this information for:

1. Better Category Management — identify opportunities for new products, better flows / adjacencies, space, learnings from other markets. For Category Management teams.
2. Better Shopper Visuals — understand the context that shoppers actually see and present this context back to buying teams. Great for pitching new innovation. For Trade Marketing / Account teams.
3. Better Tracking Changes Over Time — easily accessible, one point of truth agreed between retailer and brand, to create a repository of planogram history. For Insights teams.
4. Better Performance Auditing — understand share of shelf, value of space, new product launch positioning, and tracking of competitors. For Management teams.
5. Better Field Sales Support — understand best practices to support and launch in market. For field sales teams.

Planogram Publisher provides a new frontier of category management.

Please get in contact with me (nick@storetrials.com) or any of the team to get access today.

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