Honesty is the best policy. When I was just starting out in my career, long before HRG, I was responsible for all the marketing materials provided to the sales team. This included planograms.
Our planograms made the management team very happy. However, I doubt they were ever executed widely in the field. We dominated the space showing all of our SKUs and presented ourselves as the category captain. Great aspirations, but not really capitalizing on the helpful tool that planograms should be.
Retailers are looking for scenarios that offer realistic opportunities for differentiation in the market. They are looking for you to be honest in the assessment of your products and where they fit in order to improve their overall bottom line for the category. This means being honest about what SKUs should be added, the amount of space required, the right product adjacencies, and what competing SKUs need to come out in order to achieve the goal.
How do you do that? It requires access to good data and analytics. Planograms need to be based not only on history (data), but they also need to have insight to consumer and market behavior changes and upcoming trends. The business principles setting this future vision should be customized to the retailer as well.
Planograms must be honest, objective, and relevant. These are the same characteristics you should look for in your planogram partner. Choose well.