As online growth slowed and more brands returned attention to physical retail, point-of-sale materials regained strategic importance.
New Can Factory and New Distribution spent three months studying more than 2,000 offline outlets, visiting over thirty stores in person, and analyzing ten common forms of POSM in China's snack category.
The resulting framework helps brands and distributors move beyond producing materials by habit.
Start With the Commercial Job
Before selecting a display, a brand should define the job the material must perform.
POSM can serve three broad objectives:
- Product: communicate a reason to believe, feature, or usage.
- Brand: build recognition and memory.
- Marketing: support a price, promotion, launch, or seasonal action.
A material designed for brand recognition should not be judged only by immediate conversion. A price communication should not be so decorative that consumers cannot see the offer.
The AIEA Consumer Path
The report proposed an AIEA model with four stages.
Attract
Color, image, words, size, and display position should earn attention in a visually crowded store.
Inform
The material should make the relevant product value easier to understand, using taste, ingredients, nutrition, usage, or an emotional connection where appropriate.
Improve Efficiency
After attention and interest, the display should reduce the work required to choose. It can emphasize a unique benefit, promotion, trust signal, social value, or meaningful comparison.
Act
The final stage supports purchase and reinforces memory after conversion so that the product has a better chance of repeat purchase.
The sequence provides a simple self-check: does the material attract the right shopper, communicate one clear idea, shorten the choice, and make the product easy to buy?
Ten Common POSM Formats
The research reviewed ten frequently used formats across supermarkets, convenience stores, traditional outlets, and new-retail channels.
- Price label: essential product and price information.
- Shelf card: promotion or local activity communication.
- Shelf talker or wobbler: a close-to-product device that highlights one benefit.
- Hanging strip or mesh: incremental display for small products.
- Endcap or side rack: high-visibility product and brand display.
- Header card: larger communication above a shelf or stack.
- Floor stack: high-volume display for one or several products.
- PDQ display: transport-ready packaging that converts quickly into retail display.
- Shelf insert: additional information near the price rail.
- Floor graphic: atmosphere or directional support near a display.
Each has different cost, capacity, visibility, flexibility, and retailer requirements. The right choice depends on the commercial job and store environment.
Seasonal Systems Need Vertical Coordination
Hsu Fu Chi's Chinese New Year execution used red seasonal visual territory and combined stacks, racks, PDQ displays, headers, hanging flags, floor graphics, shelf cards, and custom fixtures.
The materials created a coordinated path from overhead visibility to product-level detail. Standardization helped distributors reproduce the system across stores while custom structures highlighted priority products.
The lesson is not to use every material. It is to make different layers perform complementary jobs.
Product Upgrades Need Visible Evidence
Jinzai used POSM to support a premium anchovy snack positioned around marine origin and nutrition.
The execution translated the product benefit into visual form, used large blocks of color, matched biological imagery to the claim, and expanded through selected channels before broader rollout.
For a product upgrade, the material must show why the new item deserves attention and price—not simply announce that it is new.
Measure the Display as Part of the Transaction
POSM effectiveness should be assessed through more than installation count. Useful measures include attention, interaction, conversion, sales per facing, incremental margin, compliance over time, and the cost of production and maintenance.
The AIEA framework turns a physical display into a consumer decision tool. Its value comes from reducing friction between seeing a product and choosing it.