Simplifying and educating through SEAL

Last year, Rite Aid named Johnson & Johnson its 2014 Innovative Spirit award recipient for taking a leadership position in a creative merchandising approach called SEAL (Simplify, Educate At Last). According to Rite Aid, SEAL is a unique merchandising approach that utilizes eye-catching aisle displays to inform and educate consumers about specific products and categories. One of the key ideas behind SEAL is that making a category easier to shop encourages customers to not only buy more, but also to buy more often. The SEAL program also is designed to entice consumers to trade up to a premium product.

(To view the full Special Report, click here.)



Across some of those categories where SEAL has been put into play, sales are up as much as 10%, Rite Aid reported.



“SEAL is a great example of addressing categories that are extremely important to the drug store business — like OTC categories — but lacked a dynamic presentation,” Tony Montini, Rite Aid EVP merchandising, noted. “These categories were also starting to become confusing because of all of the new products that were entering the marketplace,” he said.



So Rite Aid and J&J tackled the issue by creating shelving units that split the planogram by sub-category and helped educate the consumer on what they were buying.



“It’s a really good example of an initiative that differentiates us from other retailers,” Montini added. “We tested the idea by doing walkalongs in the store with consumers. The displays were easy for them to use and easy for them to understand. And we also designed it so that we can easily update the educational content to drive even better results.”