Seeing them and falling in love with them

Trade Marketing Club’s annual ‘Trade marketing, my love’ conference is traditionally held around Valentine’s Day.

This year it took place on 13 February and the theme was visual merchandising in stores. Nearly 100 people gathered in the BKIK building where one of the club’s founders, Zsuzsanna Hermann welcomed participants. First presenter Judit Tóthy, international marketing manager of Heineken Netherlands told: her view is that 100 percent of shopping decisions are made in-store. Obviously, the point of sale is key, shopper decisions have to be analysed, understood and products have to be offered and communicated accordingly. Spar marketing director Péter Dömötör came next, who declared: new, back-to-basics approaches are needed, which he indicated using examples such as the Spar store Salzburg, in the house where Mozart was born. Architects Linda Erdélyi and András Dobos presented how LAB5 redesigned and rebuilt the Spar in MOM Shopping Centre. Matthieu Violet, owner and managing director of Signature Olfactive came all the way from Paris to introduce their dry molecular diffusion technology that can be used to support selling. Marin’s is the distributor of their products for the FMCG sector – which are also available built into their automatic displays. Bálint Török, head of store furnishings at Wanzl examined where and how shopping turns into an experience. Wanzl offers a full concept to partners, from design to manufacturing to installation. After the lunch work continued with a presentation by Attila Seres, project manager with ET Research. They used eye tracking to analyse the efficiency of POS tools. They found that in the case of planned shopping trips POS tools can mainly remind customers and induce extra purchase, but with non-planned goods calling shoppers’ attention to the products is much more difficult. Krisztián Steigervald, the head of Emotionalsmarketing talked about how the simple process of one buying what they need can be turned into a process involving emotions, making customers want to have, to own certain things. Psychologist Péter Kiss agreed with the fact that the final decision is always made on an emotional basis. His view is that buying something always has to do with rewarding ourselves and childhood memories are decisive in making decisions. Juli Pécsi, an ‘evangelist’ from prezi.com talked about the secrets behind the presentation tool’s worldwide success. They already have 40 million users and calculate with 2 million new ones per month. The conference ended with announcing the results of the Trade Marketing Manager/Team of the Year Competition. Ms Trade Marketing 2013 became Szilvia Brodár, customer marketing leader of Unilever Magyarország Kft.; the Trade Marketing Team 2013 award went to Bunge Zrt.’s team of 3: Judit Bibók, Orsolya György and Manna Krompecher. Nestlé Confectionery’s trade marketing team, Roland Rendessy and Réka Szabó won a special prize. The LAMá Display of the Year award, presented by Viktor Galgóczy, the head of Marin’s Central Europe in Hungary, was taken home by the Pickwick LAMá Cascade automatic products storage display, the prize was accepted by Andrea Gábor, customer shopper marketing executive with Douwe Egberts Hungary Zrt