Home Sponsored Content ZEISS’s Four Pillars to Profitability

ZEISS’s Four Pillars to Profitability

ZEISS Vision Care

Sponsored by ZEISS

It’s a fact that the level of hygiene awareness among consumers has been elevated exponentially in the span of these past 12 months – in all aspects of their lives. And this amplified sensibility has also extended, quite naturally, to a desire to control and maintain the cleanliness of the surfaces of their most accessed and handled devices: smartphones, tablets and eyeglass lenses. 

Now, at the midpoint of 2021, we are entering a period of increased relaxation of rules on mask-wearing, and restaurant and public arena occupancy limits. There’s never been a more opportune time for retailers to step up and offer customers ways they can continue to support their comfort level of heightened “hygiene smarts” — good habits that have developed during the past year.

The ZEISS Vision Care portfolio, which speaks to consumer care needs with a set of products that are problem-solving solutions to address every aspect of lens and mobile device cleaning and maintenance, includes the following products:

Lens Wipes – individually wrapped, disposable wipes that are gentle enough to use on lens surfaces treated with high-quality antireflective coatings;

Mobile Screen Wipes – for benign, effective cleaning of debris from smartphones and tablet screens;

AntiFOG Wipes – non-abrasive wipes that are especially effective at keeping lenses fog-free when wearing a face mask; and the

Fog Defender System – A lens treatment regimen including both a spray and a cleaning cloth that work together to keep eyeglasses from fogging for up-to 72 hours.

These products are all high-margin add-on sales that offer CE retailers an opportunity to build incremental business – and that harmoniously complement the hardware products they already carry and sell.

ZEISS, for its part, has experienced a great adoption of our Vision Care product portfolio in this period — and is driving the growth in this market segment. Insights from IRI, a company that tracks syndicated data for consumer-packaged goods, revealed total market growth for lens cleaning products from 2018 to 2021 of an impressive 48 percent. And ZEISS’s share of what amounted to a total of $78 million in overall lens cleaning product sales in just the last year accounted for a market-leading 67 percent of that total.

ZEISS Vision Care
ZEISS represents 67% of Lens Cleaning Products sales share (Source: IRI Unify)

Even though the pandemic danger, given the increased vaccination rates, may hopefully be lessening, it’s our belief that consistent hygiene behaviors have now formed that will keep lens and device care and cleaning top of mind with customers.

And, what is more, with the arrival of the Fall season’s back-to-school months, and the return of in-person learning, comes another opportunity to drive home the need for ZEISS solutions.   

The best way for this market growth to be fueled, we think, is by the number of customers who can be captured by offering them knowledge of — and experience with — our products through retailers.

The ‘Four Pillar’ Approach

How can retailers reap the full potential of market penetration possible with ZEISS care products? Through ZEISS’s “four pillar” approach: assortment, sampling, merchandising, and promotion – each element of which can vary, depending upon the individual retail partner.

Product assortment, the first, is central to everything. We’re aware that not every product is right for every retailer, so recommending the right SKUs for a retailer is key.

Sampling, the second pillar, is ideal for getting the word out. Every time we make samples of our ZEISS care products available in-store, we track, on average, a double-digit increase in sales during that week. Customers may not be aware of these solutions at first, but once they try them, they love them  – and will return time and again to re-buy and re-fill their pantries.

Pillar Number Three is ZEISS’s merchandising solutions. We have a diverse array of those for secondary placements, such as PDQ retail-ready packaging, freestanding displays and eye-catching clip strips that help customers identify the products in-store.

Fourth is through promotional strategies that retailers can execute in key selling periods such as holidays and the aforementioned back-to-school period, when our individually wrapped Wipes can become backpack essentials.

These four pillars serve as the support structure for ZEISS’s greatest foundational skill: the ability to customize its programs. Being fully vested in our retailers’ success, we can fine-tune each of these pillars and our dealer support structure to the individual needs of each of our retail partners.

Dealers who sign onto the ZEISS Retail Partner Program can be assured that they will experience our total commitment to them, as the branded market-driver in this space, with a fully conceptualized and executable business model — and with exactly the right product mix for exactly the right time in our business.

To know more about ZEISS’s full line of cleaning products, please visit www.zeiss.com/cleaning.

Dealers interested in learning about participating in the ZEISS Retail Partner Program — and about how to harvest the rewards of high profitability; opportunity for sales expansion, repeat sales and recurring revenue; and the ability to easily attach an accessory to the purchase of a device with a lens or screen that will keep it clean and safe — can contact Valerie Motis at the following email address: Valerie.motis.ext@zeiss.com.