• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, April 10, 2009

With marketers cranking up their in-store ad spending and retailers expanding their private-label offerings, stores -- the place where consumers make about 70% of all their buying decisions --are emerging as a more complex territory than the O.K. Corral.

But it's also a frustrating territory, because companies typically have very little control over how their programs are executed, and little insight into how effective they are. For that reason, Point of Purchase Advertising International (POPAI) says it's commissioning a new study, to figure out exactly which kinds of in-store efforts are most likely to turn shoppers into buyers.

"For the first time, we're going to be able to tell clients, quantitatively, what works," says Dick Blatt, POPAI's president and CEO. "And we can establish metrics that will allow in-store advertising to be compared to front-end media." Blatt says that while spending in the field has been growing at about 5% a year for the last decade, "that growth is based on this gut feel that marketing at retail works. But no one knows for sure."

Ahold, parent of such chains as Giant and Stop & Shop, and 7-Eleven, Frito-Lay and Walgreens are among the participants, he says, and the study will measure the effectiveness of displays, shelf layouts and other marketing efforts. (POPAI has identified about 40 different types of marketing at retail, with digital signage among the fastest-growing.) He says the Marketing at Retail Initiative, called MARI, will be the largest qualitative study on shopper engagement to date, with first results expected late this year.

Using extensive audits, the study will also get at the issues of execution, which have typically frustrated marketers. "Our clients have always told us they believe that only about 40% of their in-store events come off as planned," says Caroline Cotten-Nakken, president and CEO of Mass Connection, a marketing company that specializes in in-store sampling and other events.

Her company just received a patent for an "Accountable Tracking Process," a debit-card reading device that documents the duration of sampling and merchandising events. "We wanted to provide accountability, improve execution and eliminate wasteful spending for brand marketers and retailers," she says. "Our employees use their cards to log in, so marketers know exactly what happened, store by store. Marketers can also track what affect their event had on product sales, in a very precise time frame. They want to know, "Did this sampling program hurt my brand, or did it help it?'"

Clients of the Cerritos, Calif.-based company include General Mills, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft, as well as such chains as Winn-Dixie, SuperValu and Harris Teeter.

Increasingly, Blatt says, marketers are aware that despite their efforts to integrate and streamline all aspects of marketing, their store efforts are quite fragmented. "We just don't see many companies that have effectively integrated things like marketing at retail, store fixtures, store communications, whether that's circulars or information from associates, and packaging."