Cashing in at the cashiers

General Mills found the best place to tempt shoppers' taste buds was at the till. It used TillTops, an in-store medium that displays advertising messages at the till, to promote its new range of granola bars.

Run over two months as a branding and awareness building exercise, the green advertisements were placed at around 300 of the 20 000 tills in the advertising company's network, specifically at 15 Checkers and Checkers Hyper stores nationwide.

Fungayi Kapungu, senior brand manager for Nature Valley, explains that the till medium was used to augment the brand's existing on-shelf advertising. “Our granola bars are generally an impulse buy,” says Kapungu. “Since we are not yet stocked at the point of purchase, which is the ideal place for impulse shopping, we used the till medium so that we could at least have a presence in this zone.”

Stores where on-shelf campaigns for Nature Valley granola bars were supplemented with tillpoint branding are claimed to have outperformed those with only on-shelf promotion, with a 57% increase in sales being attributed to the till campaign. “Sales figures for both the months before and after the campaign were also down, proving the efficacy of the medium,” says Kapungu.

He believes the campaign worked well because it gave the brand huge presence in stores.

The medium capitalises on several aspects of shopper psychology. One is that shoppers are more likely to remember the first and last message they see in-store. Another is that shoppers slow down at the tills, and begin to look around for stimulation. They are therefore very receptive to campaigns at the till. Finally, research shows that shoppers keep a close eye on the cashier area while products are being scanned, again making messages placed here very impactful.

The fact is, while just over half of the shoppers in a store go down any one aisle, 100% of them leave via the tills, making the medium ideal as a means to catch their eye with every transaction.