How HL Display improved on-shelf messaging and visibility

Pharmaceutical company GSK wanted to improve the impact of their toothpaste brand, Paradontax.  Find out how HL Display partnered with Tobii to bring eye tracking insights to their in-store messaging and design.

In marketing, we tend to spend a lot of our time and resources making sure we project the correct message. How our brand is perceived directly affects to what extent consumers engage with us, so it’s hardly surprising that we focus on what to say. But what if your message isn't getting seen at all? On-shelf marketing doesn't just include what to say but also how to say it. Your branding, colors, font sizes, text length, and content all affect your level of consumer engagement. The wrong decisions on any of these design elements will prevent your messaging from having the impact it needs to drive sales - after all, consumers are only in front of the shelf for the blink of an eye.

About HL Display

HL Display is a pioneer in creating innovative shopping solutions that improve the in-store experience for consumers worldwide. They provide a range of products and expertise to grow sales and inspire shoppers, regularly helping brands create relevant and impactful in-store communication. This includes designing powerful shelf-edge signage, clear price and discount information, and impulse displays. Pharmaceutical company GSK wanted to improve the on-shelf impact of their toothpaste brand, Paradontax and used HL Display to help them design the most effective shelf-edge signage to boost conversions in-store.

The challenge

With shelf-edge signage, messaging needs to be balanced with visual impact. That means HL Display needed to ensure that Paradontax’s core message had both the visual and conceptual potency to resonate with consumers. To get the most accurate insights into how shoppers reacted to various shelf-edge signage options, HL Display partnered with Tobii Insight Services and incorporated eye tracking as a research methodology. This helped HL Display measure the attention of consumers when presented with various signage options, which in turn allowed GSK to make an informed decision about which designs, and messages would most reliably result in sales of Paradontax.

The method

HL Display ran an eye tracking study with Sticky by Tobii, complemented with surveys, to gain conscious and subconscious insights into various signage designs; what the results illuminated was surprising. Firstly, the eye tracking data showed that while the version with the shortest messaging attracted the most attention, it had the lowest overall impact on the audience. Similarly, the design that most participants reported preferring in the survey did not match the design that the eye tracking data showed to capture the most attention. That’s where the analysis work began.

The results

By scrutinizing these results, HL Display helped GSK understand a few important things: Firstly, Paradontax’s strongest messaging concept was being wasted in an unattractive format. Secondly, to fully optimize the impact of the shelf-edge signage, GSK needed to combine the creative concept of the most impactful design with the clarity and succinctness of the most noticed design. By reworking its shelf-edge marketing with this in mind, GSK was able to drastically increase Paradontax’s visibility in-store as well as conversions in front of the shelf.

Tobii’s eye tracking solutions offered something wholly unique to this research project. By combining eye tracking with surveys in Sticky by Tobii, HL Display was able to provide their client with well-rounded and robust results that incorporated both implicit and explicit data. Focusing on only one of these would have given a misleading picture of the impact of their on-shelf marketing, but as a partner of Tobii, HL Display was primed to provide their clients with insights they simply couldn’t get anywhere else.