EuroShop sets the pace for retail
A review of some of the highlights and retail marketing trends from EuroShop
By Carla Bridge, Shop! ANZ General Manager
EuroShop, held in late February, was the last major retail event to take place worldwide before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, and will probably be the last for some time to come. Luckily, the show is so huge as to provide enough ideas and inspiration to last through the period.
EuroShop attracted 95,000 attendees over five days. Visitors came from 142 countries to view the 16 halls of retail and eight conference stages including the Shop! retail marketing stage. Sectors covered include retail marketing, retail technology, expo and event marketing, lighting, refrigeration, visual merchandising and shopfitting and store design, as well as POP Display entries from the Shop! Germany Awards.
Let me take you on a virtual trip down the show floor to reflect on some of the tech and POP features on show.
POP Displays
Germans love their cardboard displays, and there were some impressive displays on show.
Pommels Chips Bulk Display
A temporary display used in German supermarkets for the Pommels air popped chips brand, this display is a hanging chair made from corrugated cardboard and shipped to stores packed as a compact set. It provides easy access to the product by shoppers, with the chair being a play on the light and airy-ness of the chip. It used a real rope and was designed to draw attention and bring awareness to an on-pack promotion to win a hanging chair. This display resulted in a 46% uplift in sales for Pommels chips.
Toy Story 4 Ferris Wheel
Netherland business, Holbox, designed and produced a 2m ferris wheel to promote the plush toy characters from the movie Toy Story 4.
This display used motion and LEDs for authenticity, with the toys for the film presented in the gondolas of the ferris wheel. Made from corrugated cardboard and digitally printed, this activation has won several Awards in its home market.
Red Bull Mini
Red Bull’s aim was to rebuild the well-known Red Bull mini car, created completely from corrugated cardboard. The novelty of this POS is that it can be refilled on a pallet by unhooking the bumper and inserting another filled pallet. The side doors can also be opened up to be easily replenished with a pallet truck.
Using a hollow construction, the display is light and 100% recyclable. The complete set up time is 15 minutes and can be carried out by just one person.
Avene Eiffel Tower Display
To celebrate the 30th birthday of the French beauty brand, Avene it created an Eiffel Tower display for pharmacies display to represent its French origins and present the brand’s top selling products. Testers are housed on the top balcony. A two in one solution, it may be used as a product-carrying display inside a store or as a window decoration.
Coca-Cola Premium Shelf
As a preferred Coca-Cola Hellenic Group supplier for 28 European countries, Serbian POP producer, Propulzija, created this conceptual POS. It is fully digitised with 16 LCD displays in the header and shelf liners, which are remotely controlled by a 3D app that is able to manage the content of each individual display worldwide. This means shelves can be rebranded as needed between the Coca-Cola brands, as well as changing product prices and promotional messages in seconds. The changes are first tested in the app before being applied to the shelf.
Motion sensors ensure that when a shopper picks up a product a greeting message and audio is activated.
More trends from the EuroShop show floor
Facial recognition
This is a hugely growing space for retail, and we’re only just at the beginning of this journey. The uses of both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality are quite small and unsophisticated right now, however, in 10 years with the machine learning of these systems it’s going to move in leaps and bounds.
Most of the AI tech on show at EuroShop were still in testing or experimental phases, however, facial recognition has perhaps the most potential and relevance to retail. Facial recognition has the ability to identify any shopper by age demographic, distance from the camera, gender, mood, or how long attention has been held. Shoppers are also given a unique ID so that when they return to a store, the data can be matched with previous visits for better behaviour predictions.
The information generated for retailers by these systems can be used for all sorts of things – identifying potential or previous thieves, targeting shoppers with discounts, customer counting, customer satisfaction scores, duration and frequency of visits and product suggestions. It can also be used to prompt shop staff to offer assistance or enable features such as large print on labels.
One reason why it’s still in its infancy is accuracy - there is still a margin for error with some people being incorrectly identified by age, gender or mood. For retailers offering products to certain target demographics based on these results, incorrectly identified customers could be put off or offended instead of engaged.
Living Floors
Interactive, or living floors and walls were also seen at EuroShop, and given the greater use of floors in marketing since Covid restrictions, these could present a whole new medium to engage customers.
Living surface technology can be used for several applications, including edutainment, branding, gamification, and POS promotions. A great example that went beyond the typical entertainment use was a floor with a projection that as a shopper moved over the image, it revealed more of the packaging of a product – coupling instore interactivity with advertising and branding opportunities.
These interactive surfaces can be applied anywhere, not just floors, such as walls, ceilings, tables, bars or any other flat, blank surface. Content is able to be managed and updated remotely and is fully customisable.
Micro Farms
Micro farms were almost their own mini trend at EuroShop, and its unsurprising seeing their inclusions in supermarkets around the world creeping up.
These modular vertical farms house edibles such as lettuce and herbs where they are grown on premise in front of customers until they are mature enough to be sold and consumed. Special LED lighting is provided for the plants in addition to an irrigation system.
Kroger supermarkets in the US has already rolled out this German innovation, with homegrown German grocery retailer Edeka also using the concept in its upmarket Zurheide supermarket chain.
Over 500 images from EuroShop and retail visits in Germany have been loaded into Shop! ANZ's POP Search Gallery which is hosted on the Flickr photo sharing platform.
All Shop! ANZ members have access to this gallery which has 3,000 photos available to view and download.
