Chapter 14
Creating Product Displays That Sell
In This Chapter
• Craft displays for high impact and sales
• Create buying appeal
• Use signs and graphics effectively
• Tell a story
Visually, you want to present your products on the sales floor and in the windows to create maximum impact and generate top sales. There’s a difference between creating good looking displays (art) and displays that sell (science).
You might have a knack for displaying product attractively and yet not know how to do it to encourage customers to buy more. Or you might know technically what it takes to create a presentation that sells but lack the artistic sense to do it nicely. The truth is that you need to have both, and if you don’t, you need to hire someone who does.
In this chapter, you explore techniques for how to display product in your store. You discover how to use different sections in your store to tell powerful merchandising stories. You also learn how to make it easy for your customers to shop in your store and browse it in its entirety.
Why Visual Merchandising Is So Important
Store design is like a cover of a book that encourages your customers to look further. Product displays tell the story inside the book that makes your customers want to stay. In order to do so, your merchandise must be presented to excite, entice, and encourage the customer to buy.
Research tells us that 80 percent of purchases today are made on impulse. This means that 80 percent of your sales depend on how well you present your product to the customer and whether or not your presentation encourages the customer to buy on impulse. You tap into this impulse with exciting displays that make it easy for your customer to find the product.
Good layout and visual presentation enhances the feeling of service and makes your customers feel good. Atmosphere, comfort, convenience, design excellence, discovery, interactivity, involvement, and store cleanliness are all factors that enhance your customers’ shopping experience.
Visual merchandising can help you …
• Sell more to existing customers.
• Get them back more often.
• Attract new customers.
• Increase profit margins through adding value to your offer.
• Keep customers longer in the store—the longer they stay, the more they buy.
Staging Your Product on the Floor and in the Windows
Think of it like a production. Place your main characters—your best products—front and forward. Make sure your customers see them first. Then place your other characters in the less prominent spots.
In a store, there are what we call hot spots—strategic areas that represent your best opportunity to capture impulse buyers and to showcase exceptional merchandise with exceptional presentations.
Here are the key ones to remember:
• Transition area from the entrance to inside the store (first 6 to 10 feet). Don’t put too much there. Customers need space to decompress from the outside environment.
• Right side of the store—the direction most customers turn.
• Front 20 to 30 percent of the store (13- to 26-foot semicircle area just inside the store). This is the section in your store that most customers are exposed to, including those who just come in to quickly find out what you are about and then decide to stay or leave based on what they see in those first 13 to 26 feet.
Savvy Retailer
In his book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill warns against placing any product in the first 5 to 15 feet of a store (called the “decompression zone”). When customers enter a store, they are decompressing from the outside to the inside environment and they are unable to see or notice any product that is in the decompression zone.
Covered in the following sections are other hot spots where you want to feature your best merchandise.
Power Walls
Walls are used to tell a single, eye-catching story, such as Back to School, Fall Scents, European Best Sellers, New Arrivals, Rare Rugs, Oprah Winfrey’s Selections, and other special-selling seasons or sales.
A customer should understand what a wall is saying in about two seconds. Wall displays therefore should be visually easy to understand and not contain too many different colors or uniquely shaped items.
Focal Points
Focal points are the areas at which a customer naturally looks after entering a store or turning in an aisle. Here you would feature desirable items with a strong sign, a graphic, a display, or lighting to help direct the customer’s eye.
Store Windows
Store windows should never be used as your stockroom! Windows are integral in creating a positive impression and impulse buyers, because they offer an opportunity to begin telling your store’s unique merchandise story immediately. When the story is told well, people decide to walk in your store’s door.
Selling Points
When it comes to windows, less is more. Simple, linear, and uncluttered displays go a long way in delivering a clear and powerful message. The more merchandise you try to jam in your windows, the less value and impact that merchandise has.
The store window is the place where you can showcase one single product, a season story, a special offering, anything that tells a story about the quality and value of the products carried in the store, and the excitement that the customer will find inside.
When economically possible and applicable, try using a video screen or multiple screens to make your windows more exciting and unique. Movement of some type in your windows will be much more enticing to potential customers than just a group of your best products.
The ABCs of Visual Merchandising
Visual merchandising is the science part of product presentation. It is based on years of observation and analysis of how people shop.
The result of these studies is a series of recommendations about how to make it easy, convenient, and effective for customers to find and buy what they need. This includes how to departmentalize your inventory, place your fixtures, present product for buying appeal, design signs and graphics, and create displays that tell a story.
Start by Departmentalizing Your Inventory
Effective merchandise presentation starts with a proper departmentalization and classification of your inventory. You departmentalize and classify your inventory by putting all of the same products in one area. This makes it easier and more logical for customers to find what they want.
For example, one department in a shoe store could be women’s shoes. Within that department, a category or classification could be casual shoes and another category could be dress shoes. In a gift store, a department could be frames, and within the frame department, a category could be wooden frames and another category could be metal frames.
Placement of Your Fixtures
After organizing your product by departments and categories, you will then need to position your store fixtures based on traffic flow and sight lines. Fixtures, however, should never be placed where they will impede the traffic flow. Fixtures can include tables, cubes, countertops, shelving, and slat walls.
The customer should be able to move freely throughout the store. Even if you have limited space, leave enough area to properly display your products so your customers can see them.
By all means, avoid what is often called the butt brush. This happens when a customer is examining an item, making a buying decision, and someone walks by and brushes her from behind because of the narrow aisles. This is death to a deliberation buy. The recommended aisle width is 36‘ minimum and 48‘ would be ideal.
def·i·ni·tion
Butt brush, an expression introduced by Paco Underhill in his book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, involves the likelihood of a shopper being brushed from behind. In repeated and close analysis of his extensive videotape library on shoppers’ behaviors, Paco concluded that the likelihood of a woman’s being converted from a browser to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being brushed on her behind while she’s examining merchandise. So he recommends that store aisles and sections be wide enough to avoid any butt brushing, especially when it involves merchandise that requires time to inspect.
Fixtures should also not block sight lines to other parts of the store or create hidden areas where shoplifting can occur. Chairs or benches are fixtures, too! They must be comfortable, easily accessible, and there should be enough of them for busy times.
Presenting Product for Buying Appeal
Once your fixtures are in place, you need to present the merchandise in such a way so that customers will want to buy it. Here are some key points to consider when deciding how to present your product.
• There is a very fine line between too much and too little merchandise. Your shelves should never look bare nor should they look like you are trying to cram too much merchandise in too small a space. If there are not enough styles in the assortment to fully display the product in the store, then duplicate the product in the display rather than make it look empty.
• Customers visually scan at eye level. You should try to place, especially on walls, the highest profit items at eye level. Research tells us that the optimum buying height is at about 5 feet. That is the height at which most merchandise is noticed. Conversely, you should place low-margin products at waist to knee level. Products that are placed at a lower level are less visible and yet customers who are interested in bargains expect to have to “work” harder to find these lower price and lower profit items.
• Change merchandise frequently. Your product in the front and most visible area of the store, which is where you want to generate most of the excitement, should be changed almost daily. Merchandise presentations in the rest of the store should be changed according to your store marketing/promotions plan requirements. Traditionally, you have seasonal changes every four to six weeks and mid-seasonal changes every two to three weeks. In addition, you will have weekly changes to include new arrivals and to make small adjustments.
Savvy Retailer
Change makes us pay attention and notice things. Sameness makes us gloss over them. Have you ever had the experience of finding an item in a store that you regularly shop in and, when you mentioned to the cashier that you never knew that they carried that item, you were told that they have always carried it? They probably just recently moved it to a place that was different, and you saw it for the first time!
• When you shop online, you probably notice that it’s sometimes easier to find the products you want. As a retailer, you must create effective, easy-to-read shelf cards—which are sometimes called shelf talkers—that describe the product in terms of its benefits to the customer and what it does for them. Stories about the product also work very well. Every product has a story that makes it unique and different. It could be where it was produced, for example, “This wine was produced in the smallest village in the entire Italian Peninsula.” Or it could be a story about where the product was last featured, for example, “This coffee machine was featured in one of the last episodes of The Sopranos.” Customers love stories and to learn new things. Whatever you decide to include on the shelf tag, stay away from long lists of technical features that only a few customers would be interested in.
• Clean, tidy, and dramatic. If you ever shopped at Whole Foods, you probably noticed how tidy and neatly those oranges and bananas are stacked and how shimmery those apples are! Take special care in the way you present your product. A dramatic presentation contributes to a positive impression and a great experience. It also shows respect for the customer. So take the time to properly display product for maximum impact.
• Keep related products close. Place products that go well together near each other. This is called adjacencies. This type of placement can create a total look or total solution for the customer. It is one of your most powerful tools to sell more to the same customer, because customers can see how one product would look or function so much better with other complementary items. Think of a display of a purse and pair of shoes, a bottle of wine with a bottle opener, a printer with cartridges and photo paper, and so on.
What you sell dictates your choices when it comes to fixtures. Your goal is to make the product stand out and sell.
When selecting fixtures, always make sure that they are both good in form as well as function. Durability, flexibility, value, and appearance are all qualities that define the right choices.
Signing and Graphics
The paradox of signs is that we have to have them and that no one reads them! You can have a sale sign up in the store, and yet customers are still amazed that it is on sale when they pay for the item! The reason is because we are bombarded with so many signs everywhere we go that we often do not pay attention to them any more.
However, when we do read them, we tend to believe them. Remember the TV program called Candid Camera in which they used to play tricks on people and film their reactions with a hidden camera? On one show, they put a sign up on the side of a highway saying that the state ahead was closed. About 80 percent of the cars who approached this sign stopped and then turned around. The joke was that the road was not blocked in any way!
Signs help your customers find what they need and learn about your products and promotions. Of all the visual elements in a store, graphics and the use of words in particular, create a dialogue between your store and the customer. Through them, customers learn what you are about and what’s unique about your store and your products.
Because signs and graphics are part of the visual elements that help create the right environment for your customer, they need to reflect their lifestyle and overall social needs.
When selecting signs and graphics for your store, it is important that you achieve a proper balance of aesthetics, functionality, and accessibility.
• Aesthetics. You can enhance and reinforce the brand image or the promotional message through the aesthetics of your graphic images. In order to do so, images, typography, and colors must work together for a unified, consistent, and recognizable look. It’s the look that will appeal to your target customer. This is particularly important if you are using lifestyle images. For example, Abercrombie, the young clothing retail chain (www.abercrombie.com), appeals to its customer base by making large use of lifestyle signs and posters that portray young women and men engaged in activities that mirror their target customer’s lifestyle. No matter how controversial their signs might be to some people, they succeed at reaching out to their customer segment and significantly help drive the company’s profits.
• Functionality. Functionality refers to how well graphics and signs perform every time and over time. It will cost you more money to produce signs and graphics that will last you a long time. But have you thought about how much it’s going to cost you to regularly replace less expensive ones to ensure you maintain a good image? Or, if you decide not to replace worn out signs, have you thought about the cost (lost sales) of having signs that scream: “cheap,” “old,” “no respect for the customer”? Remember, you are in retail to provide a unique experience for your customer, and details truly matter.
Functionality also means that a sign’s main purpose is to sell. That’s why they are often called “silent salespeople.” When no sales associates are available to help the customer, signs should give information that the customer can use. Signs must sell benefits. They should tell the customer how the item will help them, not just describe features. For example, if you saw a sign that said “Brazilian Hardwood” you would likely say “Who cares?” But if you saw a sign that said “Lasts 50 Years, The Always Perfect Hardwood Floor” you would have a very different impression of the product!
• Accessibility. Signs must be user-friendly. For instance, if it is a product description (shelf-talker), make sure it is not too technical for the average shopper. Make it fun, engaging, benefit oriented, and easy to read, understand, and remember. And speaking of fun, I know an artsy store that uses a fun, artsy font that makes reading the signs enjoyable. Remember, stores that work don’t just sell product, they sell entertainment.
Telling a Story with Displays
Although display uses most of the techniques introduced under merchandise presentation, it is considered a function in itself. While merchandise presentation is for customers’ selection, display is the more “technical” arrangement of merchandise, such as windows or formal in-store displays that showcase a product or tell a story. Effective display techniques are meant to properly show the merchandise while at the same time adding excitement.
In addition to just having all the categories in their own areas as you saw earlier, you should have a “story” or a reason why merchandise is grouped together. Always ask yourself: “What kind of a story would interest my customer?”
Typical themes or story topics for display include:
• Commodity or item selling story. Put merchandise that is very similar in one place, such as all your French wines, all your vintage posters, or all your Chinese silks, and so on.
• Price story. Group similar or identically priced merchandise together. For example you might have a display of all your gift ideas below $20, all your value wines between $8 and $18, and so on.
• Color story. Use your products to make a color statement. Develop color blocks by pulling together a display with a single, dominant color so that the customer sees the same groups of colors together. Make sure to stay abreast of fashion trends in colors. When fashion designers come out with their styles for a season, they always have a few key colors that they focus on. Everyone else, including cosmetic, furniture, appliance, electronics, and many other industries, then rush to feature those colors in their products. Their retailers are encouraged to create displays by these fashionable colors. For example, if white is hot this season, make sure to have lots of white stories in your store.
• Brand story. Create blocks of products with the same brand so that the customer sees them all in one place. Your ASICS shoes in different styles should all be in one place or window if ASICS is a hot brand that season. Once again, check for trends in the market and make sure not to miss out on them.
• Seasonal story. Create visual displays based on the seasons, such as fall, winter, spring, or summer.
• Calendar story. Create visual displays based on the calendar, such as back to school, holidays, country events, anniversary sales, Olympics, Halloween, Christmas, and so on.
• Markdown story. Display all your markdown products together in one section of your store. What is the best location for your markdowns? Place them at the back of the store except in January and August. You want the customer to go through your best merchandise before they get to your reduced price inventory.
I’ve given you just a few of the millions of stories that you can tell your customer. The stories you choose can be different, but the key thing to remember when creating your stories is that they should all be related to your customer’s lifestyle and your products’ unique benefits.
The Least You Need to Know
• Stage your products to create an environment that generates excitement and improves your sales.
• Present your products to create a feast for the senses that makes your customers want to stay and look.
• Use signs to get your story across, but realize that many people won’t read them.
• Use your visual displays to tell a story either about your brand, a season, an event, or a special markdown or sale.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.