New Marketing Ideas in the In-store Niche of Bottle Promotions
Walk into your local supermarket and whether you know it or not, you are slap bang in the middle of an advertising and marketing bombardment. In-store advertising and marketing covers just about everything that is in the supermarket including the design of the building, the design of the checkout operators uniforms, massive poster campaigns, special offer displays and right down to little things that you walk past on virtually every aisle like "shelf talkers" and "wobblers". In many instances, the actual packaging of food and household goods carries masses of marketing material but some items, such as wine and spirits bottles do not offer much scope for advertising - or do they. On-bottle promotions have been around for a long time but maybe you are not aware of them. So what is a bottle promotion?
Well, there are three main types of marketing product that are used for bottle promotions and just to keep things simple, this is an explanation of the categories. Each one describes the different ways that the bottle media attaches to the bottleneck. The first type of bottle media is a bottle collar. Bottle collars consist of nothing more than a band of card that wraps around and clings to the bottleneck just like a collar or a scarf. Traditional bottle collars are usually shaped like cones or sloping square towers so that they can slip over the long necks of wine bottles. This type of bottle collar has been around for a long time and is usually printed on a lightweight board as is most bottle media.
A Bottle Hanger, also known as a bottle hang, is a piece of card that has a large hole at the top that drops over the bottleneck allowing the bottle promotion to hang loosely on the bottle shoulders. Bottle hangers are produced as single cards or as folded cards so that they can carry a little extra information.
A Bottle Tag, also known as a Neck Tag or a Bottleneck Tag, has a loop of decorative string attached which slips over the bottle top whilst the tag rests on the neck and shoulders of the bottle. The tags look like gift tags or like tickets that you would typically find on clothing.
Whilst these descriptions cover the three basic types of bottle media, just like in all advertising and marketing, new bottle media products are beginning to appear in what seemed to be a stagnant little niche of in-store marketing. The same basic product descriptions can still be applied but designers have had on their thinking caps and interesting new tweaks and twists are starting to appear on the market.
The new developments are mainly centred on bottle collars and bottle hangers. Some bottle collars seem to have grown wings, whilst others have become dressier and increased the amount of eye-catching display quite significantly and now look more like a bottle collar and tie or a bottle bow-tie rather than a simple bottle collar. The new bottle hangers are no longer simple pieces of card but have merged with products that we have seen being used in everyday circumstances such as the swatch cards and folding cards that fit neatly into your pocket or handbag that come under the generic heading of pocket media. There doesnt seem to be an awful lot that you can do with a bottle tag but with the way things are changing, dont be surprised to see pocket media being presented as a neck tag fairly soon.
Just you watch out for them. What used to be a relatively quiet aisle, seemingly a world away from the bold and brash packaging of neighbouring aisles, might soon become the scene of another marketing onslaught.