Planning doesn’t matter if you can’t execute at retail

Ketchup merchandised on the shelf upside-down

From the viewpoint of an over-worked stock person working the night shift and pressed to get everything off the trucks and on the sales floor by 6:00am, it all made perfect sense. The base of the bottle went on the bottom and the cap went up top. Everyone knows this.

But, if you paid attention recently to the condiment aisle, changes were slowly taking place. Brand managers discovered that a lot of people were storing their products upside-down in their refrigerators so the stuff would flow more readily out of the bottle. For most consumers, the labels were almost always upside-down. So, they redesigned the bottles with a wider lid, turned the label around and now 99%+ of the time the consumer interacts with the product, they are looking at the label rightside-up.

But nobody told the last guy in the execution line. With his iPod earbuds firmly screwed into his head, he happily unpacked the bottles and stocked the shelves at breakneck speed and efficiency. All the research, planning, bottle design and associated costs were a waste because the product was not merchandised correctly on the shelf.

This is a small example and with the exception of a momentary chuckle by me, a good photo op and an interesting blog post topic, no real harm was done with the ketchup being upside-down. Shoppers will still buy the Meijer-brand ketchup, perhaps every bit as amused as I was. But the implications for mis-merchandising and ill-fated execution can be extrapoled into other merchandise categories that may not be so benignly maligned.

Like the metaphorical red wine falling off the cart and spilling onto the street in A Tale of Two Cites, the red ketchup could easily be a metaphor for lost profits… or worse at retail.