What Point-of-Purchase Research Reveals About Trade Marketing

Point-of-purchase research from Wharton, INSEAD, and Tilburg has spent years studying something most trade marketing teams only guess at: what actually happens in the seconds before a shopper decides. The findings are consistent, and they change how brands should think about the shelf.

What does point-of-purchase research say about how shoppers decide?

Roughly 74% of purchase decisions are made inside the store rather than planned in advance, according to POPAI industry data cited in the Wharton/INSEAD point-of-purchase study. Shoppers walk in undecided far more often than most brands assume, which means the pre-store plan hands the shopper off to the shelf while they’re still making up their mind. For most categories, the shelf isn’t the end of the marketing funnel. It’s the middle of it, and trade marketing execution at that moment carries more weight than a media plan alone ever could.

Why does in-store visual attention matter more than most brands think?

Eye-tracking research on real supermarket shelves found that when a shopper looks at a product twice rather than once, their odds of considering it climb by more than 10 percentage points. Researchers call this effect “visual lift,” and across the categories studied it accounted for roughly half of a brand’s total shelf consideration, not half of awareness, but half of whether a shopper considers buying at all.

The same body of research asked a pointed question that has stuck with trade marketers ever since: is unseen really unsold? The data suggests the answer is largely yes, and it extends further than most brands expect. In-store signage alone was found to multiply the sales effect of a price promotion by as much as six times, and it can lift sales even without any price change at all. A promotion built around a strong point-of-purchase display isn’t just more visible. It’s measurably more effective.

What happens to point-of-purchase displays after they leave production?

This is the question the academic research can’t answer, and it’s the one that determines whether any of these findings apply to your brand. A meaningful share of point-of-purchase materials never reach the shelf they were built for. Industry estimates put the loss around 30% of POS assets lost, discarded, or never installed between production and the retail floor.

That gap matters because it sits directly on top of everything the research proves. If half of shelf consideration comes from visual lift, and visual lift depends on a display actually being live and visible, then a third of a brand’s POS investment can go missing before it ever has the chance to work. The display wasn’t ineffective. It was never there.

How does brandhub give trade marketing teams visibility into point-of-sale performance?

POS is a brand’s silent salesperson, yet most teams can’t say what materials made it to the shelf. brandhub was built to fix that. By integrating tracking into POS materials at the point of production, brandhub connects that intelligence straight to the work. Teams can follow assets day by day, from the production line all the way to the field, inside brandhub.

Point-of-purchase research has already made the case for why trade marketing execution matters as much as the strategy behind it. The shelf is where most purchase decisions get made, and most of what wins them, package design, display quality, execution consistency, is well within a brand’s control. brandhub closes the last piece: seeing it happen, day by day, from the production line to the field.

Sources: Chandon, Hutchinson, Bradlow & Young (INSEAD/Wharton); van der Lans, Pieters & Wedel, Marketing Science (2008); Keller & Lehmann, Marketing Science (2006)