A few events with potential industry-shifting implications have taken place in recent weeks.

Procter & Gamble's Dina Howell, director of the company's First Moment of Truth Business Team, unveiled a corporate initiative "to measure the store as a fully integrated marketing medium" while speaking at the Promotion Marketing Association's Annual Conference last month. P&G is working with a number of product manufacturers, retailers, marketing shops and industry organizations on the endeavor.

Using the term "medium" in reference to the store environment still gives me the willies, because it conjures up visions of upfront endcaps being sold via rate cards to anyone willing to pay the CPM, without proper regard to what's best for the store, its customers, or the product involved.

But it's reassuring that the charge will be led by P&G, whose work at retail has often gone "beyond the brand" to include uncredited activity (in the eyes of shoppers) that considers the long-term needs of all parties instead of just product volume growth.

Earlier this month, Unilever released a few results from "Trip Management: The Next Big Thing," the first in what the company says will be a series of shopping-behavior studies it has commissioned and will release to the marketplace. According to Unilever, the study "goes beyond other research ... and in some instances, challenges long held beliefs in retailing. For example, it points out that 70% of all category level purchase decisions are made before entering the store."

The study, which will be made available at next month's FMI Show in Chicago, also finds that only 13% of food-shopping trips now represent the "classic stock-up" on which much of CPG marketing traditionally has been focused. If most store trips are now "quick hits" for just a few items, that makes in-store marketing even more important, right? (Right.)

Finally, digital signage turned out to be a hot topic at GlobalShop in March, thanks in large part to recent efforts among supplier companies to better unify as an organized industry segment. Costs are still a major factor here, but some pundits believe that widespread adoption will be sooner rather than later.

Here, too, marketers intent on working with dynamic displays will have to confront the status quo: With the average length of shopping trips consistently declining, how do you best use a tactic designed to deliberately slow down shoppers? With consumers increasingly conducting their pre-buying research online, how do you provide information in a store that will significantly affect purchase decisions? In regard to both issues, how "dynamic" does a store become before the digital messages blur and sales effectiveness suffers?

Stay tuned for more on these topics. In the meantime, we welcome your thoughts about these issues.

Peter Breen
Managing Director, Content
In-Store Marketing Institute

Packaged goods retailers looking to improve the shopping experience often view vendor-supplied displays as contrary to their efforts. Yet H-E-B and Wegmans, two regional independents widely considered to be among the best at creating organized, shopper-friendly store environments, have more products on display than almost all other supermarket chains. That suggests that the merchandising "clutter" often discussed as a detriment to the channel is more the result of presentation strategy (or lack thereof) than it is of display volume.

That's just one of the observations gleaned from "Display Trends 2004," a report from Mosaic InfoForce's Display Express Insights auditing service prepared exclusively for the Institute.

While most of the retail world discusses the supply chain efficiencies that can be realized through RFID tags, a few really forward-thinkers already are examining the technology's potential on effective display marketing. Robert Michelson, ceo of RFID systems operator Goliath Solutions, offers a peek at what these forward-thinkers are learning in a keynote presentation from last December's P-O-P Show/New York.

Elsewhere, our technology focus continues with another desktop presentation, "Technology-Enabled In-Store Marketing," in which Checkpoint Systems' Jeff Sandgren discusses the need to transform gee-whiz advertising systems into can-do sales tools. And, in a special report, P-O-P Times examines the greatest obstacle to the implementation of display technologies: the costs.