MXRx offers practical, prescriptive advice to marketers facing specific challenges.
Q. I lead retail marketing for a CPG challenger “better for you” snack brand. We started out primarily DTC, but we’ve been ramping up our brick-and-mortar presence as the buzz around our hero products has prompted some major national retailers to come knocking. One of our retail suitors has presented us with an endcap opportunity to help us make a splash as we launch into their stores. This is exciting, but it’s also going to be incredibly expensive to do right. If we move forward, how do we make the most of the opportunity and maximize ROI? We really need this to pay off.
A. Retail endcaps — displays at the end of store aisles — can definitely drive sales if done smartly and strategically. For instance, one emerging hydration brand that Quad has worked with saw a 40% sales lift after launching a dynamic endcap at a major national big-box retailer.
To maximize your endcap’s potential impact, start with an inventory of all the variables you’ll need to manage. Here’s a strategic checklist to evaluate your endcap opportunity holistically:
Get a clear picture of the planned placements for your brand’s retail endcap
Start with the basics: Where are you actually sitting in-store? Evaluating the potential line-of-sight advantages of your endcap placement early can pay major dividends later. Key considerations:
- Map traffic flow: Will your endcap always be a central-aisle placement (most desirable) or a far-aisle placement (which might also be desirable, if that aisle fronts a popular store destination)? Is the aisle a major in-store thoroughfare (e.g., on the way to the check-outs)? Ask your retail partner to share foot traffic data so you understand the potential audience for your endcaps.
- Real estate variations: An endcap that’s perfect for a particular brick-and-mortar footprint might be suboptimal for a certain percentage of your retail partner’s locations (e.g., stores in certain regions that have not been recently renovated or may have materially different configurations).
- Promotional culture: In many stores — particularly grocery stores — endcaps signal “Expect to see a deal here.” Is the messaging on your display meeting shoppers’ expectations for potential savings? Novelty may not be enough.
Focus on telling your brand’s story at a glance with a strategically designed retail endcap
“Consumers are looking for brands to deliver seamless, enjoyable engagements at retail. They want to be able to process information and select items quickly so that they can move on to their next potential purchase.”
With endcaps, this means you may be designing for awareness, consideration and/or conversion all at once. Consider the partnership between Quad and Pura, a smart home fragrance brand expanding across national retailers, including The Home Depot, Target and Anthropologie. Working closely with Pura’s leadership and marketing teams, Quad engineered an endcap that’s both elevated and homey, mirroring how consumers experience Pura products in real life. Every design decision reinforces the brand’s positioning while showcasing several common traits among the most effective endcaps.
- Bold, simple messaging with a layered design: Your endcap should instantly answer the question “What is this product about?” It should also pull product forward, creating a sense of depth and offering visibility across multiple vectors of approach, ensuring that messaging comes through regardless of where it meets a shopper’s eye.
- Premium materials and interactive elements: Foil, acrylic and vac-formed elements can catch light and attention while subconsciously conveying brand quality/excellence. Pura’s endcap, for example, uses a unique printing technique that mimics luxury wrapping paper. The display also invites sensory play: Quad built a special, interactive scent-testing element into the endcap to encourage discovery and engagement.
- Prelaunch testing: Eye-tracking research — one of the state-of-the-art tools that are part of Accelerated Marketing Insights by Quad — can take some of the guesswork out of designing an endcap that will get noticed in-store.
Design your retail endcap for longevity and enduring relevance
Keep in mind that your endcap opportunity doesn’t have to be a one-and-done activation. By combining temporary and semi-permanent components pieces, endcaps can be refitted to evolve across sales cycles in the opportunity arises (think: new products, refreshed seasonal messaging, etc.) for better sustainability and ROI.
In the end, actually pulling off a national retail display opportunity involves deep collaboration across creative, engineering and production — the exact type of collaboration that Quad’s integrated, multidisciplinary model is built to enable.
From early concepting and store visualization to prototyping, printing (using state-of-the-art large- and small-format offset, plus the fastest digital presses in the industry), finishing services (including mounting, die-cutting, i-cutting and hand assembly), kitting and drop-in fulfillment, Quad partners with brands as an extension of their team, guiding them through what can otherwise be a complex, intimidating process. And our deep relationships with retailers — we serve more than 20,000 retail locations, delivering more than 150,000 kits every month — help us help clients understand the larger brick-and-mortar ecosystem in which their endcap must compete.
Struggling with a marketing challenge? Talk to one of Quad’s experts.
