Luxury or Necessity?
For a long time using product images in planograms was seen as a luxury. However, with the increased usage of digital image in general life, displaying planograms with nothing but schematic, colored blocks or simple shapes is increasingly seen as less professional, and less efficient.

Most retailers and virtually all manufacturers these days use digital product images, so called Live Images, to increase the level of professionalism of their Category Management and Trade Marketing activities.



And that is not just because it looks nicer! Studies showed that planograms with Live Images lead to better results, as they are easier to understand and implement.

Full-Service
We know how much time creeps into all sorts of small, seemingly less important things, and can help you by taking care of these for you. E.g. you can deliver all your own products to us, but leave it up to us to collect all competitive products in the category. Contact us to discuss all possibilities.

All planogram software
In addition to Live Images and a product database for use with our own Retail Shelf Planner software, we can also help you in case you have another application to create planograms. We have a long experience with applications such as Nielsen’s Spaceman and JDA’s pro/space or Space Planning. It’s no problem to deliver product information and images in a format that is directly usable with those applications.

Advantages of Live Images
Even though a schematic planogram has its use, think among others about communicating the commercial vision regarding segmentation and product grouping, using Live Images comes with a number of advantages:

• Higher quality planograms
• “Reality-check” of new product packaging in a realistic context before actual implementation
• In-store productivity improvements

In a number of cases it’s even impossible to develop a good planogram without product images. See the planogram below with irregularly shaped products on a pegboards as an example.



Product Database
To create professional, high quality planograms in an efficient way, it’s key to have a well-set up product database.

The database contains a series of generic product characteristics/attributes such as EAN/UPC, name, supplier, category, subcategory, brand, etc. In addition, you’ll need physical dimensions of the consumer unit of each product. In case the product is (also) merchandised/displayed in a tray, multi-pack, etc. you’ll also need those dimensions and packaging contents.

Setting up such a database, in Excel, is something we can do in parallel with the creation of Live Images. That way you can focus on translating your knowledge of the category and consumers into high quality, professional planograms.