Aiming High

A few people have expressed surprise over our selection of Dina R. Howell, director, first moment of truth (FMOT) team for the Procter & Gamble Co., to this year's P-O-P Hall of Fame. They weren't questioning her qualifications, mind you. Quite the contrary. "I just thought your Hall of Fame was only for big buyers of P-O-P," said one. "She seems to operate at the 30,000-foot level." Over the years, our Hall of Fame has been graced by a diverse assortment of executives who involved themselves in the P-O-P process from various angles. We've had marketer inductees who were classic P-O-P purchasing execs, and others who got involved only at the "ideation" stage. We've honored retailers who made their mark via total store concepts, and others who focused on specialties such as signage. We've inducted folks from brands that are global household names as well as companies that John Q. Public barely knows. But even in this august company (and this year's class is particularly platinum-plated), Ms. Howell's credentials are noteworthy because they epitomize P-O-P's past, its present and its future. The work she did in the 1990s on P&G's Wal-Mart account would've merited serious consideration on its own. When you're the P-O-P pivot point between the world's biggest retailer and the world's biggest advertiser, in an era when relationships are changing profoundly at all levels, you earn your stripes. Today, in her work with P&G's FMOT team, she is charged with building on her Wal-Mart experience and re-aligning P&G's approach to in-store worldwide. And the future? In the Q&A in this issue, she hints at some of tomorrow's priorities: "We just do not have acceptable measures in the industry today... without a lot of data in this space, we end up making a lot of decisions based on judgments. We're hopeful that in the future we'll have data that will lead us to the right decision." Contrary to assertions made recently in some quarters, P-O-P Times has never discounted the potential for, or importance of, measuring the retail space. We have a long record of "measuring the measurement dilemma," and in all its forms: pre-tests, sales tracking, lift data, Nielsen samples, customer/consumer/shopper insights, field feedback, IRI extrapolations, re-order rates, scanner data, Mosaic stats you name it. But I am also proud of the times that we stood alone in the business press, arguing against what we considered irrational exuberance for certain measurement techniques (the "70% in-store decision rate" comes to mind), or expressing doubts about early claims of progress in making the store "a measurable medium." What we said then still holds. For retail measurement to progress in a significant way, breakthroughs will be required both in terms of technology and corporate commitment. I think that in 2006, the potential for the former is well represented by RFID and related innovations, and the latter by P&G and its 2006 P-O-P Hall of Famer, Dina Howell.Someone recently asked me how 2006 shaped up for the P-O-P business. There's virtually no hard data to look to, so I offer up the following as a very indirect guesstimate. I collated key answers from the last few years of P-O-P Trends surveys (the 2006 report is available for download via www.menashapackaging.com or www.retailii.com) to see if there was any consistency to budget predictions (see chart at right). Since 2002, we've asked our panel of CPG marketers at the beginning of the year whether their company's budget for P-O-P would be increasing, decreasing or remaining the same. Twelve months later, we then asked them to relate what actually happened to their budgets during that same time period. The black bars represent the percentage of marketers predicting an increase for the coming year. The white bars represent the percentage of marketers who said that they did in fact boost their P-O-P budget. (A caveat: This is what statisticians call "indicator research." It's just a summary of opinions.) Nonetheless, if forced to make a prediction, I'd say that judging by trend lines, and barring unforeseen shocks to the economy, 2006 looks to be at least as good as 2005.

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