Joe vs. the Retail Gnomes

Traveling around the industry the past dozen or so years, one of the most frequent comments I hear is something along the lines of, "I like your magazine, but please keep that Joe Ricci guy the hell away from my stuff."For several years, "that Joe Ricci guy" has been visiting stores across the U.S., reviewing in-store marketing displays for his column, "Ricci At Retail." A P-O-P lifer, Joe has developed displays in just about every style, although he's most closely associated with battery units from his years with Duracell. A consultant (Beacon Concepts), he was inducted into the P-O-P Hall of Fame a decade ago and is the proud inventor of the "Ricci Drop Test," which sends a fully loaded, 70-pound, ready-to-ship prepack display down three flights of stairs. "Do you think a UPS driver is going to be any more gentle?" he explains.He's in constant contact with industry folk, but there's no doubt that things heat up when one of his criticisms appears in the magazine. "You know, for a while there, I hadn't written any negative reviews," he says, "and I must have had a half-dozen people ask me, 'Hey! Are you going soft?'"If there's any comfort in criticism, it lies in the fact that since Joe tends to go only after bigger fish, even a critique is something of a badge of honor. "Overall, displays have gotten far better in the past few years," he says. "It's due to the consolidation of display manufacturers from years ago when there were three or four times as many in business. Natural selection has weeded out all the bad ones, and you've got a pretty select group of producers now that know what they're doing."In fact, if Joe has a bone to pick with anyone, it's with CPG senior executives who place inexperienced people in charge of display project management. "Most brand assistants know they don't want to be in that job for more than two years. If you put them on a project, they know the easiest way to make a mark is by hacking out cost, especially since they most likely won't have to be around to live with the results."Joe has seen companies that spent $40 million on media advertising force 40 cents out of a display, and as a result, that last three feet of the shopping experience looked "crappy" to consumers. "And don't ask if the producer was at fault. Find out who told the producer and his designers to save money on that display and wouldn't let them do what they were supposed to do."Contrary to what many assume, Ricci does not leap into criticism eagerly. "Before I rip any display for damage or something like that, I'll go out and find it in at least two or three other stores," he explains. "If I see the same thing, in the same spot, then I figure it really was a design issue. I know that things can get screwed up in one store, so if all the others look good, I just won't say anything."He adds, "The guys who'd probably complain the most about me are retailers, because I blame them most often for screwing up perfectly good displays. When their dreaded 'retail gnomes' -- those unthinking, uncaring teenagers who put things together any old way -- are given free reign, you have to wonder where the managers are. There's no doubt that the retail environment has gotten dramatically rougher on displays lately. Retailers are over-stretching things with their people. And I think it is accelerating."Not-for-profit organizations, by virtue of their tax-exempt status, need to be transparent. One of the ways that manifests itself is via a rule requiring them to make certain documents available to the public. A new service has emerged called www.guidestar.org that enables anyone to log on and view several years of Form 990s from an alphabet-soup-bowl's worth of associations serving the in-store realm, from AMA to ANA, RILA to RAMA, NAFSM to NARMS, or POPAI to PMA. They cover a variety of topics including revenues, expenses, salaries and other financial information.According to my reading of the documents, POPAI had a membership uptick during its most recently reported year (the 2005 report, which ended Feb. 28, 2006) over the previous 12 months, going from $1.27 million to $1.45 million in membership dues. Programming revenue was off, however, dropping from $1.27 million in the 2004 report to $809,000 in 2005.The In-Store Marketing Institute is exempt from such reporting rules, being a business unit of HoytPublishing Co.

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