Working in lagos
Project Scope: creating a merchandising solution
Deliver: One tool kit
Audience: Sales force
Project working period: two years
Assign by: Multinational FMCG company
sum
The concept (brief) was to create an integral merchandising tool used by sales force, based on the open market of Lagos/ Nigeria that equals to 60% of total market sales leaving the remaining 40% to the organised market.
Open market in Lagos could be described as many a small unorganised sales points appearing in groups or stand alone around the city.
Anyone in Nigeria may create such a point either by converting the front part of his house or by setting up a table on the street.
Surprising enough the case we encountered walking by a security kiosk when the security guy full in uniform projected right in the front a table with various products for sale!
Although such sales points seem, quite messy and disorganised the fact is that both sellers and shoppers are highly versatile with the whole shopping process, they actually feel at home!
This local shopping culture redeemed to be the most difficult part of our job as it was exactly what we had to respect in our proposal.
Along with the key word of “simplicity” we achieved the success!!
“in simplicity we trust” John Maeda
Explore the case study
The open market: Market visit
steps that we followed
Skype calls and information gathering before we spend a month in Lagos
Visiting Lagos
Spend almost 3 weeks to market visits
Part of the trip was to get to know the Nigerian culture
Meetings with company and strategy sharing
"Mapping" the open market in a piece of paper
Start to working on a merchandising tool
Presentation
Rework on comments and details
Applyed
mapping the open market
Actually we spend days to find a way how to organize and mapping the disorganized market of Lagos!!!
Finally a clue comes .. and we start to build on the word "simplicity.
After 3 days we end up with a table that includes everything and as crossing rows and collum you will find any type of point sale
examples of point sales types: Just in front / Just in front and table / table and shelf/ just out/ out and inside etc.
Set the merchandising tool
As we finish with open market mapping we cooperate with an official designer to create sketches / type of point of sale.
find examples below:
Then using the sketches
and we start
to build our merchandising standards/ type of sales point and category
find an example below:
using colors to present
categories and brands
then we applied the
proposed planogram
merchandising rules
included also
find an example below:
...Finalizing...
conclusions
Project can easily be described as disruptive and exiting.
Full of passion and enthusiasm
The feedback we get was that:
"Many of the principles we set out during the project have already been implemented across the sales team and are clearly helping in ‘aligning the way we standardise our merchandising’ across the organisation strongly supporting our ability to ‘win at retail’. (from marketing director of the company")
Many thanks to all the people that we working together and especially for their welcoming.
.... feel already nostalgic ...
