// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did the planogram say? "I've got a layout for success.
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Planograms, also known as plano-grams, plan-o-grams, schematics, POGs or simply plans, are visual representations of a store's products or services on display. They are considered a tool for visual merchandising. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a planogram is "a schematic drawing or plan for displaying merchandise in a store so as to maximize sales."[1] The effectiveness of the planogram can be measured by the sales volume generated from the specific area being diagrammed.
Overview
[edit]Planograms are predominantly used in retail businesses. A planogram defines the location and number of products to be placed on display, often with detailed specifications on the number of product facings and spacing; shelf layout, height, width, slant and depth and necessary or recommended chiller conditions (e.g. fresh meat versus white wine). Any other information deemed necessary or useful can be included. The rules and theories for creating planograms are set under the terms of merchandising. For example, given limited shelf space, a vendor may prefer to provide a wide assortment of products, or may limit the assortment but increase the facings of each product to avoid stockouts.[2]
History
[edit]Retailers have long treated shelf space as a scarce resource to be allocated deliberately, and from the early 1960s researchers began measuring how that allocation affected sales.[3]: 1 Controlled experiments in supermarkets in the late 1960s and early 1970s found that doubling the number of facings given to a product raised its sales by roughly a fifth, a relationship later termed space elasticity.[3]: 2 [4]: 9 These findings were first built into mathematical models for allocating shelf space in the early 1970s, and research on the problem has continued since, with published work increasing sharply after 2000.[3]: 2
Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of the word planogram to 1986.[5] By the early 1990s, numerous personal-computer shelf-management systems were available to retailers, including Apollo from Information Resources and Spaceman from Nielsen; although they offered optimisation features, retailers used them mainly for "planogram accounting", reducing the time spent manually arranging shelves.[4]: 8 Successor packages remain in use, and the research literature continues to note a gap between commercial software, which relies mainly on data processing with limited use of mathematical optimisation, and academic models.[3]: 2, 4
Placement methods
[edit]Visual
[edit]Visual product placement is supported by different theories: horizontal, vertical, and block placement. Horizontal product placement increases the concentration of a certain article. Research indicates that a product's shelf location, including its position relative to customer eye level, has a substantial effect on its sales.[6][4] This depends on the customer's distance from the unit. Vertical product placement puts products on more than one shelf level to achieve 15 centimetres (5.9 in) – 30 centimetres (12 in) of placement space. Similar products are placed in blocks. A store's layout can be compared to a book, with each module a page: customers "read" a module from left to right and top to bottom. Goods are typically arranged from least to most expensive along the shelf, though a retailer may reverse this to promote particular goods, as luxury retailers often do.[7][better source needed]
Commercial
[edit]Commercial placement is determined by both market share placement and margin placement.[8][better source needed]
Data representation
[edit]A planogram specifies where each product sits on a fixture and how many facings it has.[9] It is produced in space-planning software and may be shared in a variety of formats, such as an image of the intended layout or a text file listing the products in order on each shelf.[10][11] The plan records the fixtures and the shelves within them, with their widths, heights and depths. For each product it records its site on the shelf: the space allocated to it, the number of facings, how many units are stacked and how many stand behind each facing, together with rules such as minimum or maximum quantities set by the retailer. The product's own dimensions and images are held separately as master data, and the dimensions determine how many units fit that site.[10] Standards such as GS1's define how height, width and depth are measured from a product's "default front", which may differ from how it is sited on the shelf,[12] and how product images for space planning are captured, cropped and named.[13] Approaches to automated analysis include representing a planogram as a graph in which each node is a facing and edges link neighbouring facings.[9]
Plans are revised periodically, typically when the assortment changes or the space given to a category changes.[10] Research on shelf planning has found that practice often relies on planners' experience and trial and error, and that fixture dimensions are frequently set by hand even where commercial software is used.[10]
Checking compliance between the planned and actual shelf by computer vision, comparing photographs of the fixture with the planogram to find missing or wrongly sited products, is increasingly possible; one such system has been deployed across more than 7,000 stores of a single convenience chain.[9][14][11]
References
[edit]- ↑ "planogram(plan·o·gram)". Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Retrieved 4 February 2022.
- ↑ Rajesh., Ray (2010). Supply chain management for retailing. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 9780070145047. OCLC 616081266.
- 1 2 3 4 Bianchi-Aguiar, Teresa; Hübner, Alexander; Carravilla, Maria Antónia; Oliveira, José Fernando (2021). "Retail shelf space planning problems: A comprehensive review and classification framework". European Journal of Operational Research. 289 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2020.06.018.
- 1 2 3 Drèze, Xavier; Hoch, Stephen J.; Purk, Mary E. (1994). "Shelf management and space elasticity". Journal of Retailing (Author manuscript). 70 (4): 301–326. doi:10.1016/0022-4359(94)90002-7.
- ↑ "planogram". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
- ↑ "The way the brain buys". The Economist. 2008-12-18.
- ↑ "What is it PLANOGRAM". QuantRetail.com. Archived from the original on 2019-01-04. Retrieved 2019-01-04.
- ↑ "PLANOGRAM". prezi.com. Retrieved 2018-10-17.
- 1 2 3 Tonioni, Alessio; Di Stefano, Luigi (2017). "Product Recognition in Store Shelves as a Sub-Graph Isomorphism Problem". Image Analysis and Processing – ICIAP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 10484. Springer. pp. 682–693. arXiv:1707.08378. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-68560-1_61.
- 1 2 3 4 Hübner, Alexander; Düsterhöft, Tobias; Ostermeier, Manuel (2021). "Shelf space dimensioning and product allocation in retail stores". European Journal of Operational Research. 292 (1): 155–171. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2020.10.030.
- 1 2 Ou, Tsung-Yin; Ponce, Andrés; Lee, Cody; Wu, Areoll (2025). "Real-time retail planogram compliance application using computer vision and virtual shelves". Scientific Reports. 15: 43898. doi:10.1038/s41598-025-27773-5.
- ↑ "GS1 Package and Product Measurement Standard". GS1. Retrieved 6 September 2026.
- ↑ "GS1 Product Image Standard". Release 5.0. GS1. July 2026. Section 6.1, Planogram Image and Data Field Specifications. Retrieved 6 September 2026.
- ↑ Laitala, Julius; Ruotsalainen, Laura (2023). "Computer Vision Based Planogram Compliance Evaluation". Applied Sciences. 13 (18) 10145. doi:10.3390/app131810145.
External links
[edit]
Media related to Planogram at Wikimedia Commons
