Some believe promotional displays aren’t delivering the boost they did a few years ago. Anecdotal evidence and hard research suggest a more nuanced possibility.
Here’s a fairly uncontroversial statement: In-store displays have been one of grocery retail’s most dependable merchandising tools.
Whether they’re endcaps, pallet displays or secondary placements, they’ve helped retailers and manufacturers introduce new products, promote seasonal items and – importantly – generate incremental sales beyond what a product might achieve all alone on the shelf.
I wonder if it isn’t time to change the conversation, though.
I’ve come across some anecdotal evidence – online conversations among marketers, suppliers and retail observers – suggesting that displays simply don’t perform as well today as they once did.
Maybe it’s changing shopping habits or tighter household budgets. Maybe it’s the decline in impulse purchases. There seems to be a growing perception that consumers have become less responsive to promotional merchandising.
Those factors may indeed be influencing display performance. But before making the broad claim that “in-store displays have lost their mojo,” I think it’s worth asking a more fundamental question:
Are we measuring the performance of the display itself… or the consistency with which it is executed?
The Fuzzy Gray Area Around the Display
Recent industry research continues to show that properly executed displays can generate meaningful sales lift. Circana, for example, reported that products supported by both a feature and a display generated a 129% unit sales lift compared with normal merchandising. Earlier research from POPAI found that compliant displays produced a 19% sales lift in grocery stores, while endcap displays generated an even larger 77% incremental lift across the study.
Those figures suggest that displays still work when shoppers actually encounter them.
The more difficult question is how often that actually happens.
Retail execution has long been one of the industry’s most persistent operational challenges. Trade organizations and merchandising experts have documented a variety of reasons why promotional displays never reach the sales floor or are installed late, incompletely or in locations different from those originally planned.
Shop! reports some common obstacles include labor shortages, competing store priorities, display complexity, missing product, unclear ownership and limited time available for assembly. Industry best-practice guides have been discussing many of these same problems for well over a decade, suggesting this isn’t a new issue – even if it has become more visible.
None of those challenges exist in isolation. Grocery stores themselves have become dramatically more operationally complex.
Today’s stores are managing responsibilities that barely existed a decade ago. Traditional merchandising is only part of the job. There are online grocery orders to fulfill, curbside pickup and delivery operations to support, increasingly sophisticated inventory systems to manage and labor schedules that require constant juggling throughout the day.
In fact, FMI reported that average employee turnover in food retail remained 58% in 2023, despite improving from pandemic highs. More than 90% of food retailers surveyed said they had increased wages or salaries in an effort to recruit and retain employees. Labor may have improved since the height of the pandemic, but it remains one of the industry’s defining operational challenges.
Against that backdrop, a promotional display that requires assembly, stocking and ongoing maintenance is competing with who-knows-how-many other tasks – and many of those tasks carry more immediate operational consequences.
Let’s Be Sure of What We’re Measuring
I don’t mean to suggest that today’s reality reflects poor execution or a lack of commitment. Not at all. It may simply reflect the practical choices managers make when labor is limited and customer-facing priorities dominate the day.
So if execution can vary significantly from store to store, another question stares us in the face: When a promotional program underperforms, what exactly is being measured?
If a display arrives late, isn’t assembled, ends up in a lower-traffic location or isn’t fully stocked, weaker sales may say as much about execution as they do about the merchandising concept itself.
Retailers and manufacturers invest significant resources in developing displays, negotiating promotional programs and analyzing results. Evaluating those programs without measuring execution compliance may produce an incomplete picture of what actually happened.
To be fair, uneven execution probably can’t explain every disappointing display program.
Circana has also reported that the average grocery store featured 10 fewer promotional displays in 2023 than it did in 2018, reflecting changes that began during the pandemic and have yet to fully reverse. At the same time, consumers remain highly value-conscious following several years of food inflation. Some promotional offers may no longer resonate with shoppers, while others ask households to purchase larger quantities than they want on a particular trip. Shopping behavior continues to evolve, and not every display concept is equally effective.
All of those factors deserve consideration – I simply think execution belongs on that list as well.
This Could Get the Conversation Going
Perhaps the conversation around display effectiveness should begin with questions like these:
- How consistently are displays being installed?
- How quickly do they reach the sales floor?
- Are they being placed as intended?
- Do some display formats perform better because they require less assembly?
- Which retailers consistently achieve the highest execution rates?
- Should display compliance become a standard performance metric alongside sales lift?
The answers to those questions may prove just as important as measuring the promotional results themselves.
The grocery industry has invested heavily in understanding what happens after a display reaches shoppers. I think some of that same analytical firepower should be focused on understanding what happens before shoppers ever have the opportunity to see it.
Until those two questions are measured together, the industry risks drawing conclusions about merchandising performance using incomplete information—and that could prove very expensive indeed in the long run.