La Gestione Dello Scaffale Oli Nella Moderna Distribuzione: Le Potenzialita’ Del Visual Marketing Per Il Posizionamento A Scaffale[The management of oil shelf in modern distribution: the potentialities of "visual marketing" in the shelf placement]

The process of product selection in the large retail stores is increasingly influenced by food merchandising techniques (Stocchetti and Volpato, 2002).. In this context, the products positioning on the shelves is as strategic and critical variable, both for manufacturers and for the distribution companies (Pellegrini, 1997). The construction of planograms thus becomes the main marketing activity of the sale point and the principles that underlie it are all geared to increasing visibility of product categories. These decisions affect the contractual parameters that bind the manufacturer with the distribution companies (Marchini et al., 2009). Some lines of operating marketing research based on in the neuroscience field discoveries give interesting results in applications to define the behavior of the consumer and the critical variables of purchase. The result of empirical analysis is to identify the planogram that maximizes the consumer's attention and then the visibility of each product in the competitive arena. The approach of emotional marketing develops new empirical models for the study of consumer choices. Thanks to these new techniques it is possible to simulate the behavior of a generic consumer in the store with obvious advantages in terms of competitive positioning strategies (De Luca and Vianelli, 2001).. This work, by developing a empirical prototype, based on the visual marketing approach, examine the extra virgin olive oil shelf of distribution company. The results show that positioning strategies are confirmed by the graphical maps resulting from administration of the test to a sample of consumers. In addition, important startegic considerations are derived on the basis of case study.