The story is that in an effort to sell more beer, a supermarket apparently put the alcoholic products right next to the nappies. When dads call in on their way home to pick up nappies, they think Hmmm. Hard week at work, I’ll pick up a slab while I’m here. The new positioning makes for a great impulse buy.
An interesting exercise in nappy-buyer demographics - Demo = people, and graphics = writing or study-of.
In a marketing sense, if you don’t know who your customers are and why they buy, you are, in technical terms, in the poop. This goes a bit further in the example above instead of identifying the buyer of nappies, they identified the buyer of beer and said “Where else can we put our beer so that these people will see and buy it?”
Was this beer-placement a deliberate exercise by management to sell more beer? Who knows? It could have been an accident, a bright idea or a deliberate initiative.
By Accident. Someone left a pallet of beer next to the nappies one day and someone else noticed the increase in beer sales and tracked it back to the accident.
Bright Idea. One of the staff said to themselves, “My wife sent me to get some nappies, and also needed some beer while I was out, if they were in the same place?” And this thinking led them to ponder how many other men might be asked by their wives on a Friday afternoon to pick up some nappies on the way home?
Deliberate Initiative: A specific management activity aimed at discovering, by a series of steps, the buying habits of beer drinkers, and so on.
But each of these methods need support from the organisation or business to occur.
The Accident needs someone to notice and be supported by management enough to make the changes needed to capitalise on the lucky discovery.
The Bright Idea also needs management support so that new ideas are supported and trailed.
The Deliberate Initiative also needs management support - even if coming from senior management, it needs support from lower management and from staff so that the findings will be supported and implemented.
If you want to increase your sales, you must get more attuned to your buyers and find out where they buy, when they buy, why they buy and how they buy, and you also should pay attention to who they send to buy on their behalf, or who sends them out to buy products they buy that can be positioned as above.
There may well be a hidden vein of gold waiting to be tapped. | 
