Most in-store point-of-sale material is read by nobody, for about two seconds, before a shopper moves on. That’s not a design failure so much as a category failure — most POS is trying to say too much, to a shopper who has already decided how much attention this aisle deserves.
Why the standard approach fails
A shelf-edge strip crammed with three features, a price, and a QR code asks a shopper to do more reading than a two-second glance allows. Almost everything on it goes unread, and the one thing that might have landed — a single sharp claim — gets lost in the crowd of competing information.
What consistently earns a second look
POS built around one claim, stated in a way a shopper can absorb while walking, outperforms a feature list every time. The launches that saw genuine uplift from in-store material almost always had a single memorable line doing all the work — everything else was moved to packaging or online, where a shopper who’s already engaged is willing to read more.
A simple test before you print anything
Cover everything except the largest piece of text and ask whether that line alone would make someone pick the product up. If the answer’s no, the hierarchy is wrong before a single other design decision matters.
Want in-store and digital content that’s actually built to be read?
Steven Woodgate, Founder, Emmer Green — former Head of Category (Technology), John Lewis & Partners; former senior commercial leadership roles at Samsung, Dell Technologies and Microsoft.
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