Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Branding Of The Vending Products

Brands are the synonyms of a reputed and a well established company. Purchase of a branded product verifies smart shopping as the products are well known in the market. Advertising or marketing of a company’s products inform and persuade the buyers to make a purchasing decision. Consumers very well identify with the branded products and achieve satisfaction with the fact that they have purchased a genuine thing.

Vendors need to identify the brand loyalty and preferences of the customers and cater as per their choices. Sales will notice an upward trend in case the venders are stocking up the machines with branded products. Consumers of vended products will not face any confusion while making a purchase through these machines as long as the products dispensed are branded and quality products.

Planet Antares guides you through the best of the products to vend through your machines. The most common vending machines are soda and snack machines. Brands such as Pepsi and Coca-cola are the consumer’s preference and stocking the Planet Antares vending machine with such reputed products will lead to the goodwill of your business and generate high sales.

It is also important to keep introducing new brands in addition to the already existing brands. This will provide variety to consumers in case they want to try and shift to something else. Introducing the variety will attract more people as they have wide range to choose from and hence higher sales. The prices should not differ from those kept in the c-stores. Any hike in prices of the brands will lead to the lower sales as consumers will find it beneficial to buy from the stores rather than the vending machines.

Understanding your niche market and their choices will make you go places and help in the expansion of your business. Scheduled refilling of the machines is also required so that the machines are never out of stock of the branded products. Quality and safety of the products has also to be maintained. Any case of expired branded products will bring bad name to your business and affect your sales.

Branding of the products in the vending machine is as important as the branded machine itself.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Challenge Of Small Planet Antares Vending Accounts

It is not possible for most vending machine operators to service accounts with fewer than 50 employees profitably. In order to do this in your Planet Antares operations, you can develop a system to do that. To service your small accounts efficiently, service frequency and sales-per-stop should be reviewed with care.

You don’t get much gross profit dollars to capitalize your investment, but the good thing is that you won’t have as much sales volume concentrated with a single customer. Even in case of smaller accounts, you can exceed the NAMA operating ratio average.

In the past few years, many operators have either given up on the small account market or tried to use smaller machines and less frequent servicing. Through efficient route management, a Planet Antares small account can be serviced in a profitable manner. A specially designed flexible route accountability system can be used to schedule routes based on historical sales data of each machine.

The most critical cost in servicing vending machine locations is labor and not equipment. You are able to capitalize equipment investments with smaller than “industry standard” account sales volume by leveraging labor productivity gains. The accounts are serviced as per the sales volume. Sales are tracked for a period of six months to determine service frequency.

Optimal time to service the account of closed front machines is at 60 percent sell-off. Thus, only 40 percent of the machine needs to be filled at the time of service. For Planet Antares glass front vending machines, a different sell-off ratio is assigned due to the negative consumer perception caused by empty spirals in these machines. Handheld computers are a great help with data tracking. The easy part involves developing a database to determine when the account needs service while route scheduling is the hard part. To chalk out an efficient schedule, you can use a grid map of the Planet Antares service area. This allows you to get your pre-service selling margins up substantially.

All in all, category management and computerized data collection will help you to succeed in the vending trade. Moreover, you can use technology to serve small accounts profitably.

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