Many FMCG brands have sales teams that are doing merchandizing inside the stores and it's a crucial part of their go to market strategy. Sometime there are staying whole day in a single store if it's a hypermarket and key account for the brand. Their job is to put the products to the shelf to make sure that shelves are not empty in all stores served or in the Universe as brands call it.
Some retail chains have compliance discounts for meeting some KPIs of SKU visibility and order or planograms compliance. Again FMCG brands are interested in make the compliance rate as high as possible, because they've invested into making it work.
Apart from it brands invest into above the line marketing - driving customers to the stores increasing brand awareness and announcing new products launches. Then brands invest into below the line activities or trade marketing like vivid ad materials or point of sales materials (POSm), some promo like sampling etc.
However in practice brands have only two major figures they can influence: sell in and sell out. Sell in or primary sales happen when brand sells its product to the retail chain or distributor. And that's it. But brands fear that retail chains won't be taking care of their products and stimulate sales by driving sell out or off take sales - sales from the shelf.
Top brands know that if they will be focusing only on sell in then they can lose the market share. Experienced trade marketing gurus push for the share of the shelf to be equal to the market size, otherwise it's a matter of time when more active competitor will take over and the sell in will also decrease.
The only way to have a predictable sell out results, planogram compliance rate and share of the shelf is to track the shelf KPIs in every visit of a sales rep via Image Recognition with 95-95% accuracy. Our customers report a 5% increase in on-shelf visibility and at least a 20% increase in planograms compliance across their Universe. And they're getting the sales increase and have a power to check how retail chains are working.
