New System Seeks To Change Prism Of In-store Marketing

(Sunday, October 15, 2006) - A consortium of retailers and manufacturers – including Wal-Mart, Walgreen, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola – has developed a new technology system designed to measure the effectiveness of in-store marketing efforts – and to do so in a way that mirrors the ratings used to gauge the effectiveness of television programs and Internet sites.


By using infrared sensors placed roughly four feet high in selected aisles, the system counts shoppers aisle-by-aisle, and then backs up those metrics with observation done by researchers. The technology application – called PRISM (for "Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric") has been tested for a limited time in ten stores, operated by Wal-Mart, Albertsons, Kroger and Walgreen, with the goal of creating common metrics that can illustrate and define successes and failures in the in-store environment.

The study was sponsored by the In-Store Marketing Institute, which certainly has a vested interest in rating and expanding the use of in-store media, as well as a consortium of companies that includes manufacturers such as P&G, Coke, Kellogg and Miller Brewing.

There are, of course, holes in the system. Some people walk down aisles and browse the shelves, and therefore are more susceptible to in-store marketing schemes. But others just walk down aisles to get to the back of the store and are harder to attract.

PRISM was originally announced with considerable hullabaloo at September's In-Store Marketing Expo in Chicago, though the participants were careful not to over-hype the effort. They concede that the test has been extremely limited, and that a broader scale effort is needed to really figure out what works and does not work. Part of the publicity campaign being generated by the In-Store Marketing Institute and companies like P&G and Wal-Mart is designed to bring on additional retail and manufacturer partners to do a broader study.

In addition, the consortium will be seeking out a data analysis partner that can serve to measure and interpret the data generated in-store. This is a significant part of the program in other ways, because it suggests that Wal-Mart will in some way be contributing to the pool of syndicated data about product movement; in 2001, the world's biggest retailer stopped supplying scanner data to research firms, and instead provided it directly to manufacturers.

The In-Store Marketing Institute says that it hopes PRISM will "prove to be a watershed marketing tool for retailers, manufacturers and agencies. It has potential to be adopted as an industry standard, allowing the retail venue to be compared alongside television, radio and other forms of mass media for its ability to deliver an audience of consumers, and please them in the process."

This would be a significant shift, because it would force companies to think of in-store media in a different way. Because it delineates the audience, it takes in-store media away from its current condition as often being just a cacophony of noise, and gives it shape and definition and boundaries. In other words, a real media. However, manufacturers will have to be careful about how these metrics impact spending by manufacturers in-store. If retailers are able to get manufacturers to divert ad spending from other media to in-store efforts, then they will be happy to participate. But if they get the sense that in-store metrics actually might impact promotional dollars – about which they are highly sensitive and protective – then their reactions may be very different.

It also could mean, by the way, that it the long run there will be fewer point-of-purchase promotions and less in-store media. But with any luck, they also will be more meaningful initiatives that will serve the consumer with a kind of clarity often missed by today's less focused attempts.

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