Bringing Planogram Pre-Testing Within Reach of All Budgets

The Retail Jungle

Retail is navigating one of its most demanding landscapes in recent history.

Stubborn inflation, shifting consumer confidence and fierce competition are making profitability trickier to sustain. But with every challenge comes opportunity – an opportunity to innovate, adapt and stay ahead.

Success in today’s market isn’t just about reacting to change; it’s about anticipating it.

Retailers and their suppliers leverage data driven insights to make informed decisions that prevent costly mistakes, optimise strategies and enhance customer experience.

One of the most effective tools in a market researcher’s arsenal is planogram pre-testing.

By evaluating store layouts, product placements and pricing strategies before committing resources, retailers can maximise impact while minimising risk. Think of it as a crystal ball for smarter retailing – turning potential pitfalls into profitable opportunities.

Let’s dive into why this is a game-changer 👇

It prevents costly mistakes

A single mistake in retail doesn’t just affect one product — it can have a domino effect across your entire strategy. Poor product appeal leads to poor sales, which leads to markdowns, which leads to lost profits.

Why not stop the first domino from falling?

Planogram pre-testing helps to do just that – allowing retailers to gauge product appeal and take the risk out of sales.

This not only ensures that just the most promising products hit the shelves, it also enables marketing campaigns to be tweaked so that they truly resonate with shoppers before big ad spend is invested, ending in a virtuous circle for your bottom line.

And let’s talk about pricing. Research from the EPP - Pricing Platform highlights that even a 1% price adjustment can influence profitability by up to 11%: A huge impact for such a small tweak.

By using insights from planogram pre-testing, retailers can fine-tune pricing to strike the perfect balance between being competitive and profitable — ensuring that customers are happy while maximising revenue.

It puts the customer first

We all know that the customer is king.

By gathering better consumer insights through planogram pre-testing, retailers can uncover exactly what shoppers want, need, and expect.

Unfortunately, whilst this is easy to say, it’s hard to put together and make it work, especially at scale.

Broadly, there are two options: Retailers can either leverage large mocked-up “shopper labs” designed to provide controlled conditions for real people to shop from whilst being closely monitored – this is very expensive with questionable data validity due to respondent encumbrance.

The alternative is virtual shelf simulations. These avoid the need for a physical mockup space, but they bring their own problems in managing data flow and assembly times for new shelf concepts.

Either way, pre-testing, as great as it is, is often considered out of reach for smaller research vendors and an exclusive, expensive option for the larger ones.

This is where Buzz 3D comes in.

Our virtual shelf simulations are designed for ease of use, speed and low scaling cost. We create a controlled environment where different store layouts, product placements, and promotional strategies are tested without any real-world risk.

How? By leveraging our automated workflow and light-touch interactive planogram web page which plugs seamlessly into your surveys, requires no special installs and is compatible across all devices.

The resulting simulations provide invaluable data on how customers interact with brands, which positions attract attention, and where bottlenecks occur in the shopper journey.

Retailers or their Category Captains (the Brands who “own” the store section) can then use these insights to refine product positioning, improve brand clarity, and ensure that high-demand items are placed where they’re most likely to be noticed and purchased.

We all want to see an enhanced, smoother, more intuitive and enjoyable shopping experience — leading to increased sales and stronger brand loyalty but with none of the pain currently associated with getting there.

Thankfully, for the first time, advanced shelf simulation technology is within everyone’s reach no matter the size of the organisation.

🤝 Get in touch today to see how we can help: https://buzz3d.com