The Evangelist of the Brand

It is not very often that you receive a compliment from your customers. It is usually a “quiet is good” scenario. This is why we were very excited to hear from one of our customers that they are now an “Evangelist of the Brand of IPMS”. This means a lot to us because this is exactly where we want to be. To us, this meant so much more than just saying we were doing a good job. To us, this compliment meant that as a service provider, we were not only able to provide the service they asked for, but we were able to venture into new territory and find solutions for even bigger problems they were dealing with. Helping the retailer do better at retail through innovation and removing barriers that prevent them from success.

In this case, because of the relationship we have developed, we were able to talk about issues that are impacting other areas of the store and share ideas that they didn’t think would ever work or were previously too complicated to pull together. Not quite brainstorming since these are not new ideas, they are existing ideas that we are able to find a way to make possible together. An example is an enhancement to our patented shelf strips to integrate product promotions, suggestive cross selling, logos, brand messaging and color coding by category. The result will be an even more powerful store shelf management tool that will still help this retailer realize the same labor savings and shelf integrity benefits of our patented shelf strip system, but will also further increase the value of the shelf strip solution through even higher revenues. Not to mention how much cleaner the shelf presentation will look and how much easier it will be for customers to see everything without all the POP that it would take to accomplish the same results.

In other words, as a service provider, we are able to overcome the internal limitations and bottlenecks a retailer has and are able to pull all the different components together and deliver it back to the retailer in one piece. Internally for a retailer it is a big deal to get all the information needed to combine Pricing, Vendor Promotions, Customer Loyalty campaigns, price promotions and suggestive cross-selling together and deliver to the store, however, our proprietary software can integrate each of these “ingredients” into our patented shelf strips and “reset in a box” program for a truly comprehensive solution.

The result is one piece that gets to the store, is easy to understand for the store personnel and is easily executed consistently across all the stores. And by the way, it is going to cost less because we can build in the efficiencies in one solution.

It’s fun to be involved in initiatives like this, because as we grow the relationship together, the retailer sees more and more ideas that didn’t exist until you removed the barriers. Now this particular customer is excited about yet another idea that, in their words, will take their entire business to the next level and will have a tremendous impact on sales.

We believe this should serve as a model for all other retailers. We are happy to be working with our retailer partners who embrace what the definition of Retail 2.0 should be…that is improving HOW retail is done tomorrow through innovation in merchandising strategies at the shelf.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 3:37 pm by Bill Francis and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.