Why Shelf Audits are Essential for FMCG Success
By Dawie du Toit
In the fast-paced world of FMCG, ensuring your products stand out on crowded shelves is crucial to success. With so many brands competing for attention, it’s easy for even the best products to get overlooked. That’s where shelf-audits come in.
These regular evaluations help brands optimise their retail presence by ensuring products are strategically placed, well-stocked, and priced to attract consumer attention.
In this article, I look at why shelf audits are so important, how they impact visibility, and the tangible benefits they bring to your business.
What is a Shelf-Audit?
A shelf audit is an in-depth look at how your products are displayed, priced, and stocked on retail shelves. It involves reviewing the in-store placement of products to ensure they are optimised for visibility, availability, and sales performance.
Shelf-audits typically include key aspects like:
- Product placement: Ensuring that products are positioned correctly to attract consumer attention and encourage purchase.
- Stock levels: Checking for product availability to avoid stockouts and ensure that shelves are adequately stocked to meet demand.
- Pricing: Verifying that the pricing is aligned with the store’s pricing strategy and promotional activities.
- Promotional materials: Assessing the visibility and effectiveness of promotional materials, such as banners or discount labels, and whether they align with current marketing campaigns.
- Competitor analysis: Observing how competitor products are positioned and performing in comparison to your own.
By doing regular shelf audits, FMCG can quickly spot gaps in their retail strategy, improve product availability, and maximise customer experience to drive sales.
How Do Shelf-Audits Ensure Brand Visibility?
Once you conduct a shelf audit and identify any issues, you can quickly work to fix them and ensure better brand visibility. Here’s how:
Maximising stock availability and minimising stockouts
One of the key benefits of shelf audits is that they help ensure products are consistently available for customers. Regularly auditing your shelves enables brands to identify stockouts.
By keeping a close eye on stock levels, brands can ensure their products are always available when consumers want to purchase. In turn, this improves product visibility and prevents missed sales opportunities.
Optimising product placement to drive sales
Proper product placement is essential for brand visibility. Shelf audits evaluate where products are positioned on the shelf to ensure they are placed in high-traffic areas.
For example, products placed at eye level are more likely to be noticed and purchased. A well-executed shelf audit shows you the most effective product placement strategies, ensuring they are displayed prominently.
Monitoring competitor performance and market trends
Shelf audits not only assess a brand’s own product placement, but they also provide valuable insights into your competitors. By reviewing competitors’ product placement, promotion, and pricing, brands can stay ahead of trends and adjust their strategies as needed.
These insights also help brands position their products more effectively, ensuring they are visible and appealing in comparison to similar items.
Improving customer experience
A seamless shopping experience is a key factor in ensuring a product catches a shopper’s eye and drives purchase decisions. Shelf audits focus on improving the way products are displayed, ensuring they are easy to find and well-organised.
Clear signage, neat shelves, and eye-catching displays all contribute to the customer experience. When shoppers can quickly and easily find products, they are more likely to make a purchase. Over time, this improves brand visibility and consumer loyalty.
The Business Impact of Regular Shelf Audits
Regular shelf audits drive business growth by improving product availability, visibility, and sales. By ensuring products are well-stocked and strategically placed, audits can help improve customer engagement and increase revenue.
These audits also provide valuable market insights, enabling brands to stay ahead of their competitors and adjust their strategies accordingly. This is also helpful for informing product development and marketing decisions to ensure they remain relevant.
Furthermore, shelf audits also improve operational efficiency by streamlining inventory management, reducing stockouts, and optimising product turnover.
Let Meridian Help You Stay Ahead
Staying in the FMCG landscape requires more than just having a great product. You also need to ensure visibility, availability, and proper positioning.
At Meridian, we can help you optimise your shelf presence, improve stock management, and provide valuable market insights that can turn you into a contending challenger. Let us support your brand’s growth and success with tailored shelf audit and merchandising solutions.
Visit our website to learn how we help brands power forward with heart.