The following article is brought to you by Diageo.
See your business grow with clear visibility
Influencing choice
Over 65 per cent of your customers do not know what they are going to buy when they enter your bar. Forty-three per cent choose their drink based on habit, 23 per cent will make a selection based on their mood and 12 per cent make a choice from your selection. Therefore improving visibility through merchandising and POS can significantly influence both their choice of drink and your bank balance.
Key areas of opportunity
Diageo/ID Magazine research identified four areas where you can influence your customers in the "Decision Corridor".
These are the entrance to your outlet, the route to the bar, the bar itself and the back bar. As most customers head straight to the bar, staff obviously attract most attention and the area immediately around the till has a major influence on your customers and where they stand at the bar.
- The entrance
The point of entry into your outlet is best used to create a welcoming feel. Point-of-sale material is more effective when sited elsewhere in the outlet rather than at the entrance. Customers use the entrance to get their bearings and for navigation purposes.
- Only a fifth of customers could recall any point-of-sale
- Although a quarter of customers will look at an "A" board, few recall the message. The mental focus is on finding and reaching the bar
- Door posters and stickers also perform poorly with few people actually seeing or recalling their message. Have you ever pushed a door when it "clearly" reads pull?
Route to the bar
Keep this area clutter free and tidy, customers first look at the floor and the general dècor on the approach to the bar. As customers approach the bar most attention is turned to:
- barstaff
- general dècor
- bottles on the upper shelves
- beer founts
- spirits display/bottles in chiller
The bar
Once at the bar, most of your customers' attentions will be on the barstaff, but with greater focus now than when they were en-route to the bar. When asked where else they looked, they made reference to the individual beer founts with little reference to POS.
The back-bar
The back-bar attracts three quarters of all fixations, mostly centred around the staff. This creates a "hot spot" approximately one metre wide either side of the till.
Customers rarely look much above or below eye level. On the back-bar illuminated or animated displays attract most attention.
Building the perfect back-bar
Good merchandising of your bar will allow you to focus on maximising profit from the available space, thereby influencing your customers' behaviour to increase sales. Spirits and RTDs will be made an obvious and easy choice (65 per cent of customers are influenced by what they see).
What's the size of the prize?
Continuous testing by Diageo has proven that effective "Range and Merchandising" can:
- increase turnover by 12 per cent, on average
- raise profitability - through the sale of higher margin product
- raise efficiency - a well organised bar will increase speed of service
- raise customer satisfaction - making it easier for customers to make their decisions.
Merchandise your back-bar for profit
Simplify the back-bar and chillers
- Remove clutter, creating space for displays
- Allocate promotional space inside your chillers
- Break the back bar into "Fields of Vision"
- Short, broken up Optic or back-bar displays are easier for customers to understand
- Faster decision making means faster sales
- Put optics into banks of no more than eight
- Separate out your light and dark spirits and specialities
- Identify and maximise most visible areas of the bar ("Hot Spots")
- Allocate space to impulse and high profit lines
Layout optimisation
- Group similar products together
- Allocate space to top selling lines
- Remove slow selling lines from chillers or Optic
- Increase facings to meet rate of sale and double bank key "signpost" spirits such as Smirnoff®, Bell's® and Gordon's®, which can deliver an 11 per cent increase in sales
Cross-category merchandising
- Locate mixers near their "partner" spirits, eg Gordon's® & tonic
- Display quality components
- Plenty of quality ice and whole and wedged fruit.