--- title: "Marketing Executives: How to Excel at Product Merchandising Display?" description: "A regional sales manager requested expert training for field staff serving distributors, prioritizing product display and merchandising. Effective merchandising can boost sales by over 30% and is crucial for influencing consumer choice at the point of sale." author: "谭长春" publisher: "New Distribution" email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com" telephone: "+8615854817671" published: "2015-01-28" language: "en" canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/marketing-executives-how-to-excel-at-product-merchandising-display-9655ea17/" markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/marketing-executives-how-to-excel-at-product-merchandising-display-9655ea17.md" original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/kMPdNhSsMbp86nIVkA-vYg" translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E8%90%A5%E9%94%80%E4%B8%BB%E7%AE%A1-%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E5%81%9A%E5%A5%BD%E4%BA%A7%E5%93%81%E7%94%9F%E5%8A%A8%E5%8C%96%E9%99%88%E5%88%97-9655ea17.md" attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/marketing-executives-how-to-excel-at-product-merchandising-display-9655ea17/" usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt" --- # Marketing Executives: How to Excel at Product Merchandising Display? > A regional sales manager requested expert training for field staff serving distributors, prioritizing product display and merchandising. Effective merchandising can boost sales by over 30% and is crucial for influencing consumer choice at the point of sale. Warm tip: Click the blue text above to follow "FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting" for more insights on marketing and distributor internal management. Introduction: A regional sales general manager wanted to invite an expert to train field sales representatives who serve distributors. Their work mainly involves distributor liaison, regional management, and sales policy execution, making it difficult to handle detailed tasks like terminal service and merchandising. However, the first session he specified was on "product display, merchandising, and service." Why? Product display is the last opportunity to drive sales to consumers after the product passes through various intermediate levels. The product's display and excellent terminal performance will determine its future—whether it is purchased by consumers or overshadowed by competitors' products. This is what is commonly referred to as: the final shot must be taken well; otherwise, even if you play well in midfield and organize successfully, it is ultimately in vain, with no actual sales results and no benefits for the enterprise. We are now in an era of highly developed market economy, one of whose main characteristics is the "attention economy." How to make your product more eye-catching, how to display your product and corporate image more in front of consumers, how to make consumers see and understand your product more among all similar products, and how to make your product stand out among numerous goods—these are concerns for all manufacturers, merchants, and retailers. This is also the issue of the product's "sales power." What is display? What is product merchandising? Display is the orderly presentation of products at the terminal. Merchandising is the vivid presentation of our brand and products to consumers through optimal display locations and all available point-of-sale advertisements, transforming them into products with added value and charm, thereby better conveying brand information, making consumers feel close and favorable towards the product, and achieving the sales purpose of on-site purchase. Obviously, product display is "static." Placing products at the terminal without any pattern may not necessarily attract consumers' attention or generate purchase impulse. Only merchandising display, which makes consumers feel that the product and company are more attractive and that the company is trying to meet their needs and desires, can lead to more purchase behavior. Merchandising makes the product display "alive," making our products convenient, visible, accessible, high-quality, and fresh, all of which make consumers more satisfied and convenient in consuming our products. Why do we need to excel at product display and merchandising? Essentially, distributors in the channel cannot resolve consumer choices, and company sales personnel often cannot face all consumers, nor do they have a fundamental way to solve this problem. Therefore, for sales representatives, from a sales (not marketing) perspective, merchandising is the only work that can influence consumer choice. If the product is not effectively displayed or has insufficient inventory at the moment of consumer choice, it loses the opportunity to be selected. Extensive research shows that under the same conditions, effective merchandising can increase sales by more than 30%. It can be said that good merchandising display is equivalent to a company's all-weather, silent sales representative. In other words, when sales representatives do a good job of display and merchandising, it is like hiring a group of sales assistants to help increase sales and improve market performance. "Merchandising" actually means the product itself can shout, promote itself, flirt with consumers, and sell itself, which is equivalent to the company hiring more promotional girls and more sales representatives! What are the principles of product display and merchandising? There are many principles for product display, but the most important ones include: maximization principle, visibility principle, vertical display principle, full product range principle, and heavy-bottom-light-top principle. Through the implementation of these principles, product merchandising becomes more conducive to establishment. Therefore, the product display standards determine the final merchandising performance, and also determine whether the company's products are more attractive and competitive at the terminal and in front of consumers. All these principles are especially important during new product launches. Because at the time of launch, other aspects of the product's competitiveness are hard to demonstrate. If through terminal merchandising, advertising media promotion, and innovative product promotion activities, this constitutes a "sea, land, and air" multi-level consumer notification and publicity, thereby achieving rapid product launch and successful sales. This has led many companies to establish product merchandising standards when launching new products. This is also the important reason why the company must conduct "product display and merchandising training" before all other training! Because they have many opportunities to launch new products, but not all of them have been successful! The purpose of product display and merchandising is to promote sales growth! Product display and merchandising, through orderly and effective product display, create a purchasing atmosphere, improve terminal product display image, enhance promotional effects, and ultimately promote sales growth. This is the main purpose of implementing product display and merchandising. In addition, squeezing out competitors and even different types of products, establishing terminal customer relationships, and even effective regional management are all good effects brought by product merchandising display. Although product merchandising display has not been applied and implemented in China for a long time, it has become popular and rapidly prevalent with the emergence of terminal management. So, how to excel at product merchandising display? 1. Establish your own merchandising display standards: Product merchandising standards can ensure consistent display style across the entire market, making the entire terminal appear to consumers as a very eye-catching and complete product sales and display system of a certain company. Under the guidance of product merchandising standards, our product will be the first similar product consumers see after entering the store. At the same time, implementing product merchandising standards will help us be quickly understood by consumers and increase sales. Product merchandising standards also make it easier for us to assess the market and sales representatives, helping them improve their business level and service quality. Establishing merchandising display standards can help us gain more market opportunities. Because competition requires us to enter all possible stores, consumer purchase decisions require that each store's product range be complete, and the time consumers spend in the store requires that our product be noticed by consumers at the first moment; all these enable us to gain more sales opportunities than competitors after implementing merchandising display. No matter which large international company, its product display standards may be unified across all regions globally. At Coca-Cola, I have come into contact with terminal merchandising standards for Coca-Cola products across the country and even in several Southeast Asian countries. Not only are the standards the same, but the actual situations are also completely identical. In various places, Coca-Cola's product merchandising is exactly the same. This makes it very easy to form a very obvious impression in consumers' minds—a standardized, neat, and vivid terminal display image. In fact, this also represents the company's image, making it easy for consumers to accept the entire company and all its products from the heart! 2. Not only should merchandising display be vivid, but also systematic: Product stack display position, product display surface, display competitiveness, promotional posters, and other items are the basic requirements for merchandising. Some companies define merchandising assessment and tracking as these words: "look up, look down, look forward, look around." In fact, this means looking up at banners, hanging flags, or light boxes, looking down at stacks and box packaging, looking forward at the actual product display, and looking around at competitors' and other products' display situations, as well as posters and POP. In fact, from the content of assessment and tracking, it can be seen that product merchandising display is systematic, not independent product placement. 3. The importance of interactive display and activities: Merchandising display not only emphasizes the systematic nature of terminal product display, but also can make a big fuss about interaction and activities. This deepens merchandising display further. Merchandising is not exactly the same as display; everyone must be very clear about this. Many companies have thoroughly understood this and have done an excellent job in terminal merchandising. Merchandising is very flexible, while display is very rigid. Therefore, many companies have combined merchandising with interactive promotional activities, product advertising, and promotion behaviors, and even made full use of merchandising in transportation vehicles, staff uniforms, business cards, and so on! For example, a beer company recently planned to fully promote merchandising display in the urban area. They could hold activities at some of the most important terminal stores, make a large product stack in front of each hotel, cooperate with roll-up banners, advertise in newspapers, display prizes, use TV recordings for promotion, and conduct interactive games and lottery content. In this way, the entire urban area's product display would be completely "activated"! 4. Seize opportunities for merchandising competition: Merchandising display is actually an important competitive process because terminal display space and scale are very limited, and the number of companies wanting to conduct merchandising display at the terminal is increasing. Therefore, in addition to striving to do terminal display well according to company standards, sometimes it is necessary to compete for merchandising display in limited space. Competing for terminal display space and scale is very difficult, but there are still some rules to follow. For example, if shelf display space is insufficient, you can do stack display; if POP posting is restricted, you can hang banners or hanging flags; or make your own shelves to expand display space; or fix your own display position and area; or negotiate with competitors to expand different companies' merchandising areas at different times... In short, maximize the protection or expansion of your important position at the terminal! How to excel at product merchandising display? This is an increasingly perfect topic. In fact, many terminals already understand the importance of terminal product merchandising and are using company products or merchandising supplies to maximize their sales volume. In this way, every company's products have achieved considerable development. Daonong recently opened a public account specifically about how traditional enterprises can do WeChat marketing well. If you are interested, you can follow it. Search for the WeChat ID above or scan the QR code below to follow. \-------------------------------------------- --- ## Copyright and AI use This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL. Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671