POSM Strategy or is it?

Ok what is exactly POSM? And how did all these things comes about? Why is suddenly putting posters in front of shops hip and cool?

Well to accurately answers all these questions, you my readers have to touch your hearts and look at yourselves. How MANY times can you actually remember the promotions in the brochures or catalogues sent to your house? Do you actually bring these brochures or catalogues out and refer to them religiously? To check where all the promotions are? The answer is NO. (Ok if you are not 1 of them, congratulations! You belong to the rare 0.1%.)

POSM is point of sales material.

According to my Media Planning teacher Alifiyah (I will check the spelling again) from Mindshare, the "moment of truth" is at the point of purchase. Yup, you can come out with fantastic advertising and award winning catalogues (if there is one) but when consumers reach the retail shop wanting to buy your product and suddenly..... "80% OFF STORWIDE" on your competitors product. They change their mind and bought your competitors product instead of yours. It happen quite a lot of times in supermarket and for low involvement products.

So this is where I come in. To make sure our POSM are PUT UP. A simple job? Nah... Of course I don't only do this. This is just part of the job. The questions are how do we make sure retailers put up our POSM? How do we ensure that they will not only put it today but also tomorrow? How do we overcome their objections of space contraints and such? These require some thoughts.

As I was at a meeting with the marketing team, the head of marketing suddenly suggest that we should just cement the posters in front of the retailers store. I took down that suggestion in my notebook as one of the great ideas to use.

Now the question is "Where do I get the cement?"

Where is my team Dude?

Me: "When is my team coming in?"
Boss: "Not so soon."

WHAT?! I thought I am suppose to have like 2 to 3 person in my team. How about at least give me 1 first?? You know I can't be tying up all the merchants and going around Singapore to make sure they put up our POSM (point of sales material - something you put in or outside your store to show a promotion is going on). Singapore is so BIG, yes its a tiny red dot but I am even tinier.

Its already towards the end of September, I can't imagine that if people still don't come into my team soon, I will be:

1. Eating into my own pay because my transport allowance is not enough to cover my trips around Singapore

2. Walking alone during the Christmas Season just to check out whether merchants put up our POSM

3. So familiar with Singapore that I know whether the taxi uncle is going the longer route cheating my money

What is a manager without his team? What is a king without his castle?


( For my next article, I will be writing my POSM Strategy. For my competitors who are reading this, stay tuned! You know who you are... Wahahahahaha...)