When it comes to Point-of-Purchase (POP), the size of the display absolutely matters for both the retailer and for the return on your investment. Size is ultimately a careful balance a manufacturer must make between getting the biggest bang for your buck (physically speaking) and getting the most receptive response from retailers willing to place the display in their store.
Let’s take a look at each of these areas separately, as the definition of size for a POP display varies slightly for each.
Size and the Retailer
The retailer is an often overlooked aspect of POP displays, but it is perhaps the most important one. A high percentage of a manufacturer’s new sales are often a result of using a POP display to open new accounts. Therefore, understanding all the nuances of each particular retailer’s preferences are essential in creating an effective display that will enable you to open new accounts and sell more product.
Space is always at a premium in a retail store, and this is especially true for smaller stores such as specialty retail shops and gift shops. The smaller the footprint your POP display has, the greater likelihood it will have of being placed in the store.
Retailers desire POP displays that stand out, but they also need to ensure they don’t take up too much space or create an awkward travel pattern for shoppers, as the retailer is focused on maximizing every square foot of the building.
Some retailers, especially large chains, may have height restrictions for POP displays as well, as they seek to create a uniform look throughout the store with all products.
The one area of a store where size will be determined almost exclusively by the retailer is the endcap, the place at the end of the aisles. In today’s retail market, this is actually the most desirable part of a store to have a product featured in. In fact, according to a Path to Purchase Institute study, 37 percent of respondents said the end of aisles was the store zone most effective for driving sales with vendor-supplied POP displays.
Size and the Return on Investment
The ultimate goal of any marketing effort is to maximize the return on investment. What you get out of a POP display needs to be much more than what you put in.
The commonly-accepted statistic in the POP industry is that every dollar you spend yields about $4.99 in incremental sales. That would result in a Promotion Program Value (or PPV) of 499 percent.
That statistic doesn’t speak to size specifically, though. In fact, it takes size out of the equation, since it is an average number of all POP displays, no matter the size.
The question you might have, then, is: If I create a bigger display, will it equate to more sales? In other words, if I spend twice as much to create twice as large a POP display, will I yield more than twice as much in sales?
The simple answer is: No.
A 2014 study conducted by Michael Williamson of Casio Electronics and the Kingston Business School found there were “accelerating gains from increased display space.” The study looked at display cases of watches in a store, and found that “increase in showcase size generated an increase in product sales.”
The 2014 study examined the size-and-sales relationship that had been investigated most recently in the 1980s and 1990s, when a few studies found that a doubling of POP display space leads to roughly a 20 percent increase in sales.
Simple math tells you that twice the cost needs to yield more than twice the return for it to be worth the investment. A 20 percent increase in sales is not nearly enough to justify a 100 percent increase in cost.
What is the Balance, Then?
What this teaches us is bigger is better … but only if you’re counting total number of sales. If you take into account return on investment, though, bigger is not better.
The above studies show the sales benefit you get from a display that’s twice in size isn’t going to outweigh the cost. In addition, the bigger you create your POP display, the more issues you will have with retailers.
The key instead is not designing the largest POP display you can, but creating a POP display that holds as many units of your product as possible, with as small a footprint as possible.
One great strategy is to design your POP display to hold enough product so it pays for itself. In other words, when a retailer purchases your display, the money returned to you equals at least what it cost you to create it, based on the number of products it holds.
Size is one of the most important factors of the success of your POP display. It will help determine whether a retailer accepts your product, in what part of the store it will be located and also the return on your investment.
That’s why it’s so important to keep size in mind throughout the entire design process, as making a small mistake in this stage could have a monumental impact on your return.