The major utility of soft drinks is to quench thirst. The soft drinks industry involves production, marketing, and distribution of non-alcoholic, and generally carbonated, flavored, and sweetened water-based beverages. Soft drinks have a history starting from sweetened base to carbonated natured base.
Soda based drinks were considered to have a medicinal effect and cure headache and many other problems. The interesting fact is that Coca-Cola was created by an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John S. Pemberton. It was developed as medicine that can be made available without a prescription.
Major misconceptions about soft drinks are:
• Soft drinks cause weight gain
• It contains more calories
• Soft drink causes fast decay of tooth
Sales of soft drinks
The soft drinks industry is responsive to customer psychology changes, or in other words, the consumption pattern of the soft drinks depends on the psychology of the consumer.
Soft drinks are meant for refreshment purpose. Like any other product, the brand personality factor of the soft drink brand has a major influence in attracting customers to the brand.
The major brand personality features are:
• Excitement
• Sincerity
• Ruggedness
• Competence
• Sophistication
We can associate various soft drink brand with each of the above personalities.
Major players of the soft drinks industry are:
• The Coca-Cola Company
• Pepsi Co.
• Red Bull
• Nestle
• Suntory
• Danone
• Dr. Pepper Snapple
• Unilever Group
• Arizona Beverage
• B Natural
As the size and number of players in industry increases resulting in the increase in marketing efforts to accrue the market share. According to the researches published by web site ‘Statista (The Statistics Portal)’ the major player is Coca-Cola with approximately 45% market share and then comes Pepsi Co. with on an average of 30% market share. Rest of the soft drinks cover the remaining global market volume.
As an FMCG product, the sales of soft drinks depend upon the effective tactics that are utilized to exploit customer psychology. FMCG products are low-cost consumer goods that is used for day to day usage. A customer chooses a soft drink based on the cost, brand image, availability, visibility, health factors.
Tactics to improve soft drinks sales
The products in the soft drinks industry are not costly and are easily consumable. For a soft drink brand to increase sales the major steps that should be taken are:
• Brand image building: Image building is the crucial factor that helps your brand to stand out in a set of non-identifiable brands. If a customer approaches a retailer and wants to pick a soft drink and is yet to decide on a brand, then a moderately rated brand will gain sales among not so well-known brands. If the brand is popular enough then the customer may demand the brand. So, brand image building is very important.
This can be done by:
? Sponsoring events.
? Advertising.
? Social cause-related advertising.
? Proper planning of brand personality
? Etc.
• Ensuring availability: Ensuring availability is a major factor in improving sales. If your product is well known but not easily available, the sales figures will go down. To avoid this the company should ensure that its supply chain is efficient and is well coordinated. Field teams should be assigned to ensure the effective carrying out of the supply chain.
• Product display and visibility: The major factor which is influencing the sales is the product display tactics used. The sales if the soft drinks increase when the soft drinks are placed near the entrance and near food items which goes well with the drinks. This tactic helps the customer to promote buying soft drinks. The sales can be increased by displaying the products itself as well as the display hanging and other attention-grabbing components.
Once a customer decides to buy any soft drink by impulse the question is what brand he should buy. There are several similar soft drinks like Pepsi and Cola, this makes the customer choose according to the impulse. This buying impulse can be influenced by various factors like the visibility of the product. If the product is visible, then the sales are likely to increase compared to a product is not visible in the display.
So, the visibility and arrangement of the product on the display helps to improve sales. Usually, any customer first looks at the products placed at the eye level. Also, an increase in the number of facings will improve sales. From the above two factors, it is evident that visual merchandising is very important in improving sales.
Visual Merchandising
It stands for visually appealing the customers to buy the products. Tools that can be used to improve visual merchandising are:
• Signs
• Banners
• Sounds
• Planograms
Sign/symbols can act as visual merchandising tools. Banners and sounds attract the attention of customers, whereas planogram helps in arranging the products on the shelf according to the previous sales figures. Planograms are visual charts or representations that denote the position where the product should be placed on the shelf in order to achieve maximum sales. For creating planograms various software are used. Many of them are high-end software were it requires specialists to operate it.
An easy planogram designing software is inevitable in properly coordinating and communicating the planogram and its compliance. With easy planogram software, it will be easy for multilevel employees to handle the creation, communication, execution, and compliances management.
Nexgen POG is an easy, powerful and affordable web-based planogram builder. This planogram software is easy to learn and use. It provides optimum, store-specific planograms that will increase product visibility and thereby boost your sales.
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