Retail experts stress the importance of a micro market “reset”

In retail, they call it a “market reset” and it's not a mistake. That jumbo can of mixed nuts and big bag of chips you wanted to buy for the big football game had been moved. Just an hour before kick-off, you could not find them on their usual snack shelf location and were forced to hunt the aisles of the store until you finally found them. Along the way, you spotted a new flavor of jerky and dropped it into your cart.

Resets work

According to leading retail consultant Jeff Campbell, aka “The grocery store guy,” a market reset is a critically important retail strategy that can a have very positive impact on sales in any retail environment. That would include micro markets.

Operators are already doing it

Steve Orlando, co-founder of Fixturelite, the industry’s leading supplier of micro market retail displays, equipment and design tools, said he knows of an operator that changes the location of a majority of the items in his micro market every month. “It shows that savvy retailers are buying into the concept of resetting their markets, because it works,” he said.

Product discovery

Campbell believes that rearranging the store is important, and he commonly practiced the technique as an executive at Whole Foods. “By changing where the items are placed, the customers will have to walk around the store as they try to locate what they want. For instance, if you visit the store today then go back a few months later, you’ll find that some items are not where you found them,” he wrote on his website.

“As you walk around trying to locate them, you’ll see other items that catch your eye, and you’ll end up buying them in impulse. If the products were left in the same place year after year, you’d probably pick up exactly what you came for. Then, most likely you would leave without ever buying anything else,” Campbell added.

A living environment

“A static environment is going to create static sales. A fluid or living environment is going to create continued excitement and a continued interest and increased revenues,” Orlando noted.

Reset beyond products

Troy Geis, Orlando’s business partner and co-founder at Fixturelite, believes that the reset should go beyond products on the shelf. “We have worked with operators to help them implement the same proven reset strategy that you see at major retailers, including the world’s best known coffee houses,” he said. “Operators can change out the furniture, move furniture around, rearrange the collaborative areas – so when you walk in, the experience is refreshed. If you have the same four tables with four chairs sitting in there every day, it's kind of boring, but when things move around and change, it creates a more dynamic environment.”

Change the look easily

“One of the cool things that our fixtures do is allow you to change the look very inexpensively and very quickly. The trim packages that come with our solutions can be swapped out for a different color, pattern or design. Let's say you have gray at building X and you have green at building Y, you can flip-flop them. Let's say the month of December, you decide to flip-flop them, or add a seasonal touch. It’s a subtle move that produces a positive result,” Geis said.

“We can help do a reset with furniture and more,” said Orlando. “Tables, chairs, soft seating, different lighting and signage. We have a line of LED lighting that we're doing and perhaps one month, the sign is white. The next month, for breast cancer awareness, it turns pink. Maybe for Christmas, it turns red. The market suddenly comes alive with a social message.”

Multiple benefits to a reset

A market that is being reset on a regular basis can help an operator succeed on multiple levels,” said Orlando. “A reset can assist with selling products that might soon go out of date; it can help position more profitable items into the face of the consumer ,and it is a great way to introduce new products that are suddenly positioned on the shelf, in a spot that was occupied by a top seller.”

Let Fixturelite show you how to easily and inexpensively reset your micro market for increased sales and customer satisfaction. Visit www.fixturelite.com for more information.