How do you win the battle for local shoppers? An expensive marketing campaign in the local press? Hire a plane to tow a banner with your address over the town centre perhaps? Maybe sponsor the local Premier League football club?

Of course there are easier ways and leading wholesalers, publishers, and manufacturers will be gathering, along with 200 retailers, at the inaugural Local Shop Summit to discuss a few of these.

Representatives of Booker, Imperial Tobacco, News International and PepsiCo will be on hand to offer independent retailers tips to grow their profits.

We spoke to PepsiCo’s Kate Woolf last week at Pro-Retail and she told us that her presentation was going to be on the potential benefits of using social media in your store, a subject that we at Better Retailing are of course very supportive of!

The entire event is running alongside the NFRN annual conference in Torquay on June 7, so many of this blogs readers may well be on their way down to the English Riviera anyway.

Tickets are £37; to find out more about the event, which is being organised by Newtrade Publishing’s face-to-face team, call 020 7689 3369.