The Hindu Business Line : Dead man selling!

THERE are salespersons alive and there are salespersons dead! And I am not talking of all those hard-working souls gone by, pushing up the daisies in a Pali Hill or a Tambaram, who have done yeomen service to the world of selling in the past several hundreds of years.

There are really salespersons that are alive and kicking like you and I, and then there is the more potent salesperson of them all around in our lives as well. This is the one sales entity in our lives who is the most focused, and the one who gets the most consumers to sway with one quiet gesture. One quiet word at the point of buying. One quiet word by the point-of-sale material at the point of buy!

The point-of-purchase (POP) material is possibly one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of selling. The one quiet, relevant, original, innovative and specific sales aid that most marketers tend to ignore. Ignore this at your own peril, then. Point-of-purchase is big. It is possibly the best sales tool to use to tackle the tumultuous years ahead. The POP generation is ahead of us! And this generation of marketing folk is a generation behind!

Look at a glaring statistic from this realm. Seventy per cent of purchase decisions are made at the point of purchase. This, of course, varies across categories of low-involvement and high. Nevertheless, this is a stark point not to miss.

POP is silent selling at its best. Dead man selling!

The consumer tires in the selling process. And most of the selling process is an active one. Selling is a process that brings in the `buyer-seller dyad' that Henry Tosi told us about decades ago. Every selling process requires a buyer with a yen to purchase and a seller wanting to sell. This buyer-seller dyad is a relationship. A relationship that takes the seller on an active mode of persuasion. Most selling is persuasive today. In a demand-led market where the supply of goods, services and dreams is on overdrive and hyper-availability, persuasion is the name of the game.

The salesman is, therefore, on hyper-drive. He is forever at you as a consumer, telling you all the great things this humble little toaster will do for you. Every feature will be explored for you by the demonstrative salesman, who will make a non-feature a feature even.

Having gone through the features route then, the salesman will launch himself onto the domain of emotive selling. The functionalities done with, Mr. Salesguy will launch onto a glib routine of an emotive pitch that will get you wondering whether you are buying a toaster or a new husband who will be a friend, philosopher and guide for a whole fifty years to come!

Salesmen therefore have a routine. The active and alive salesperson will sell to you with passion and vengeance. A non-sale is a slap on the face and a sale is the ultimate commercial orgasm to achieve! The salesman will therefore use every weapon to make that one sale.

The active salesperson on the field has plenty of cover as well. He has the power of adverting as his aide-de-camp (ADC in governor parlance!) Advertising in many ways is selling in print. This morphs onto the medium of television and radio, and selling is a holistic process here. The toaster is on the idiot box where it looks ever so glamorous and ever so appetite invoking! The toaster is on the hoarding near your barber shop as well! And it looks so big and domineering! The toaster has a lovely jingle that seeps into your psyche from the FM radio on your drive time to office as well!

Ground-level selling is therefore amply supported by air-cover of the advertising kind. Where then is the role of POP? How then does POP impact? Why all this noise about dead man selling?

World-wide, the verdict is out! POP advertising is a potent tool to use in marketing mix more and more. POP is silent selling at its best. And this selling happens at the most decisive of points in the buying-selling continuum of consumer and marketer as a nexus at play in commercial society.

POP is a medium that can be used to great advantage in any number of ways. This silent salesperson is out there wanting to sell with a vengeance. POP can be used to create awareness in a big way ... at the point of purchase! Advertising does this with a broad-based appeal that is quite like aerial bombardment to those that want and those that don't want it as well. POP is however very focused. It is 1:1 advertising at its best at the point of purchase. To those that want!

POP can be used to really create that interest in the product on tout as well as fire up that desire to possess and get the consumer onto the action of actual purchase as well! One simple device to use in a plethora of different ways really!

Marketers need to wake up to the potential of this medium in our lives. Over all these years of being out there in our marketing lives, the medium is but an also-ran. Only 3.1 per cent of all advertising expenditure in this country goes into the realm of POP as of now.

The future of selling is all about the clever use of POP! It is also about using the loud mediums of television, press and radio less and less. It is about using these most-used mediums with sensitivity and subliminal ease. The loud mediums will be distrusted more and more as part of advertising hype and over-sell. The quieter mediums will then work more and more. POP is one of them! The silent salesman will succeed more than the loud one! The dead salesperson will succeed more than the live and kicking one! He has kicked around a bit too much thus far!

POP will emerge in the near future as a credible alternative. An alternative that marketers will look at keenly, not as an adjunct medium to use in tandem with the rest of the marketing mix alone, but to use it exclusively as well.

Can a brand then be built by the use of POP alone? Sure it can. And the ones who do this will be the ones who will minimise on cost and these will surely be the ones who will build the more profitable brands of the future.

Are there examples around? Look at the retail segment of the market. A retail food and beverage outlet has really no money to spend on advertising of the mass media kind. Every restaurant is really built on the power of POP. Look at the Café segment as well. The Café really can't afford to advertise. A Starbucks and a Qwiky's alike will be built on the power of POP!

Power to the POP generation then!

(The author is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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