July 30, 2007
Retailers Need to Get a Makeover
In an era when data dominates and everyone in retailing practices their own brand of fact-based decision-making, some things have gone missing from the business. Among these are creativity and a sense of fun that consumers can connect with as they enter stores.
Barbara Crowhurst, retail makeover (AKA visual display) specialist based near Toronto, told The Ottawa Citizen, that stores do not pay nearly enough attention to display space and the visual impression that stores make on shoppers.
Ms. Crowhurst said that when it comes to visual merchandising, “Most retailers have their eyes closed.”
Smaller merchants are hurt most by not investing the time to set themselves apart through visual display. Strong displays in windows and inviting facades can pull shoppers into stores, she said.
“Window displays, as I see them, are eyes into the store,” she told the Citizen. “What it says to the consuming public is: ‘There’s something exciting happening here’.”
High impact displays in stores draw traffic to key areas and move shoppers to take in a wider percentage of the store.
“We have a competitive edge if we have good display… Show customers ideas,” she said. “Display has to tell an end-use story.”
When it comes to displays, Ms. Crowhurst has her favorites.
“Look at IKEA. It’s all display” she said. The furniture retailer succeeds, Ms. Crowhurst said, because it uses displays to improve the shopping experience by entertaining and education shoppers at the same time.
Discussion Questions: How important is visual merchandising to retail store performance? What is the state of visual merchandising across various retail channels today? Which merchants are best at making a good visual impression on shoppers both outside and inside the store?
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If you can get past the novel idea of a vendor identifying a “problem” that can be solved by using their services, there seems to be a real issue here. As retailers’ backrooms grow smaller and delivery schedules become more erratic (especially for department stores), more and more product is pushed to the sales floor. This is called “densing up.” In many stores, customers are essentially shopping in a storage area.
How does a store keep up with the constant pressure of deliveries, especially if their clerks are tasked with integrating the stuff onto the shelves in addition to making it pretty and selling some of it? In essence, Job #1 becomes getting the stuff to the sales floor. Everything else becomes a lower priority.
It’s amazing how many brilliant minds have gathered here to get behind a concept that should have been a no-brainer–yes! We need great-looking stores and displays to create the visual appeal that brings in traffic and incremental sales!
I’m as big a geek as anyone. I love data. I love it that we have hard evidence about things like customer satisfaction and purchasing patterns, demographics and psychographics, Infobase clusters and Prism clusters.
But the way we’re talking about store design today, you’d think the entire world had been sitting in a dark room blindfolded, and the lights just came on–we seem to have lost our eye for the obvious, as if we won’t believe anything until a statistically valid sample says it’s so.
Meanwhile, that cute boutique around the corner with the great displays and the fresh attitude just went from one store to 230 across the nation while we were debating whether it was really cost-effective to hire enough help to keep the fitting rooms clean….
This seems to be a regular topic of discussion when the pendulum swings between visual presentation and no presentation.
Visual merchandising is a key element that attracts customers into a store…the only thing better is a huge red and white sign that reads ‘S A L E’.
A few years back, when retailers where being challenged by the large studios to build experience stores, companies like Warner Bros. and Disney showed us how to make retailing fun. Every retailer decided they needed to find and hire creative talents to compete.
Now, the big box, specialty, and even department stores think that consumers are only interested in price, lose the presentation. The only place you find passion and fun in retail is those streets lined with independent retailer, like in Wrigleyville in Chicago and Melrose in LA. SOHO has some, but too many national retailers are filling up those streets. I know that it is not absolute, but it does look like this in too many cases. Let’s disguise interactivity and high tech in visual merchandising and display. Now there’s a match!
The visual display of merchandise is very important to store performance. Just look at Wal-Mart Vs. Target! Among other variables, Target stores have wider isles, merchandise never looks crowded, and overall, the store gives a “better/well organized” look.
On a personal level, I was strolling down a street in London once and saw a sports jacket in a display window in a Marks & Spencer store. I went inside and bought that jacket! Had I not seen that jacket displayed, I would not have bought it. Earlier this year I was visiting a retailer in India called “Spencer’s” in Mumbai. The store management there told me that just by changing display of merchandise that people can see from the mall lobby, they were able to increase store traffic and sales significantly.
Fact based buying and selling has resulted in sameness to the extent that consumers hardly can differentiate one retail chain from the next. Retail chains today mostly carry the same product assortment, feature the same products in the same ads, and display the same featured products at the same time, in the same types of displays. Even the retail chain’s color themes and schematics inside the stores are pretty much the same right now from one retail chain to another. Absent are the exciting, unique, and creative displays that once lured consumers in and kept them coming back each time for new reasons. Our retail world has lost its points of differences, its sense of humor, and its personality. Fact based data is used primarily these days to enhance sameness, the avoidance of making mistakes, and to measure what has already happened, as opposed to what could happen. Hmm, I guess its all part of global warming.
The visuals that retailers have are all part of the customer service experience. Stores that are messy and disorganized obviously have flaws and that will be shown through their P/L statement. Having a clean and well maintained store is critical to the success of any retail store but merchants need to go beyond that to bring the customers in.
Innovative and exciting window displays are the key to catching the customer’s eye as they walk by. I’d say in all the retail industry, clothing stores are the most boring and have not gone beyond the dressed up mannequin. Some of the the specialty gift retailers such as Brookstone and The Sharper Image have developed some creative and interesting window displays. Canadian Tire (a hardware chain here in Canada) has a knockout summer display in their new prototype locations.
A good rule of thumb for any manager is to make sure the display has some interactivity to it. At Canadian Tire, they have created a sort of paradise backyard type display where customers can sit on the backyard furniture and touch and feel all the associated products.
Endcaps are not just for products anymore. I’m seeing more and more LCD screens with interactive components to it.
It’s a testament to the attention span of today’s customer. Customers need to be visually bombarded to garner their attention and eventually their money.
Visual merchandising may not be the most important element of a marketing strategy, but its importance as a “silent salesperson” can’t be ignored. The key is to use visual merchandising as a branding element consistent with the rest of the retailer’s message. If the message is all about convenience and value, then using visual merchandising to help the customer navigate the store more easily and find the product she’s looking for is essential…and too easily overlooked.
On the other hand, too many stores in the “trend and fashion” business do not make good use of mannequins, mall windows and overhead graphics to sell “big ideas” to the consumer. It’s a particular challenge with most moderate department stores today: If you walk in blindfolded, you won’t get much help from visual cues to tell what store you are in or what you should buy.
Visual merchandising is often a critical success factor. Abercrombie & Fitch locations, blocking the windows with dark wood louvers, force shoppers inside to see what’s available. Whole Foods makes its prepared items look like caterer displays. Target sells clothes better than Wal-Mart, among other reasons, because its signage/visuals don’t look like low-end clutter. The #1 sense shoppers use: their eyes.
Visual display–store merchandising–is an important part of the retail experience. It is, of course, not the whole story of retail entertainment. In many ways, it should be considered part of the price of entry. If you want to attract and engage customers, use a high quality (not necessarily high cost) visual display. The displays also need to marry with the products, work for the consumers (and the employees), and meet many other criteria. The comment that retailers have their eyes closed on this issue seems to be largely correct (though Apple is another exception). One of the great retail mysteries is why retailers ignore this aspect so much? In the grand scheme of store makeovers, this can be a one of the lower cost items to fix.
Visual merchandising is critical to build incremental and impulse sales in retail stores. Up to 70% of consumer decisions are made in-store–creative displays and in-store activity build unplanned purchases. Think of how much more you spend in a store that has new & innovative products, well merchandised displays, and a fun shopping environment (it’s hard on the pocketbook!).
Building in-store excitement makes shopping much more enjoyable for consumers. Contests, exciting p.o.s. material, seasonality, new products, new categories, samples, demos–they all add to the shopping experience. But you seldom see them in the stores anymore, particularly in Grocery.
These may be some of the reasons why in-store excitement has gone done:
1. Retailers have a focus on GM%, so suppliers put all of their tradespend into cost to bring their GM% up;
2. Suppliers don’t get “credit” by retailers for investing in some of the in-store activity (vs putting the $$ into a profit measure), so they opt for buying another ad;
3. Ad costs are high, so tradespend $$ are allocated primarily to feature support;
4. Retailers don’t allow p.o.s. or contests in-stores;
5. Retailers and suppliers have forgotten the importance of creativity when engaging in the category management process; and/or
6. Retail stores don’t have the decision making power to allow for creative in-store merchandising.
Analyzing weekly scanned sales data, to understand promotional impact (and even payout vs tradespend dollars for suppliers and penny profits for retailers), helps retailers and suppliers to determine the most effective features and price points in the category. In many cases, and in many categories, the lifts in sales don’t justify the promotion. Those $$ may be better spent on in-store excitement, to generate impulse purchases through cross merchandised displays, demos, etc.
From a category management perspective, defining category strategies, and determining which categories are “Excitement Creators,” is very important. These are the categories that make consumers excited to shop at the retailer, and the ones that can be displayed with the low profit destination categories to drive profit and sales.
In net, creative in-store merchandising will build impulse sales, and incremental volume and profit, for retailers. That is where the “art” in the category management process is so important, vs. only focusing on the “science” through the analytics and data.
The visual merchandising used by retailers really needs to match the message they are trying to present to the consumer.
The recent articles complementing Safeway on the redesign/repositioning of their store interior to the consumer are a great example…are you presenting price, quality, or selection to the consumer and how do you do it?
I’ve seen it done well across almost every channel–when it’s done right, you see it immediately upon entering the store!
Visual merchandising can be a big factor in engaging consumers in the purchase cycle because great design can trigger an instant emotional connection, creating an inspiration, a want, or a desire. Think of the many stores we shop in week in and week out–it’s so often just practical and logical–we look at rows of product displayed like toy soldiers, we have a list, we shop price, we look for sales. Productive, yes, but not very inspiring.
A good visual display is like an invitation, it can give us an instant read on what outcome the products in the store can have in our world, invoking desire to explore the store for something bigger and deeper than just the stuff inside. In that mental state, value is perceived quite differently, and may have nothing to do with price.
When that happens, both sales and shopper satisfaction go up.
In today’s retailing environment, the store is the primary demand generator. The role of the store is to help the shopper construct the information needed to make the “right choice”…by making the time invested to shop worthwhile. This means using merchandising to spark creative thinking about possible purchase solutions; helping connect product differences to important purchase requirements; showing the shopper, who is just looking, where to find relevant ideas; and helping the shopper invest time wisely by providing an information rich experience that has solution relevance.
While many senior retail executives are talking about the shopping experience, few retailers have the shopper insights necessary to understand how to create a more effective shopping experience. They have consumer mind space research such as brand image and positioning, ad research, wants and needs research and lifestyle segment insights. And, of course, a wealth of POS and loyalty card data. But, none of this provides insight relative to the shopper’s emotional purchase drivers or how to change behavior to improve the shopping experience.
Only when retailers understand the emotional drivers of the purchase decision will they know how to create differentiated shopping experiences that truly build shopper loyalty.
In order to gain this insight, both retailers and suppliers are going to have to open their eyes and break away from traditional research methodologies and how they think about the shopper.
The bottom line…Ms Crowhurst is right on target.
Wow. What an important topic. Shoppers want more…more help in understanding their options and more help in visualizing the possibilities. Smart retailers are answering this need by bringing visual merchandising inside the store. Safeway’s Lifestyle stores are a great example. Their cross-merchandised solution endcaps are beautiful to look at (the box of crackers is selected to visually complement the appetizer pesto topping) and they bring together product bundles that deliver solutions(health benefit related themes, kid’s themes, cooking themes, and meal occasion themes like a Weekend Breakfast endcap combining pancake mix, syrup, jam and fruit). Shoppers are rewarding retailers who help them shop better and visual merchandising is a driver of improved shopping.
It’s a testament (good or bad, I’m not sure) to retailing of the late 20th century that we are even asking this question today. A mid-20th century retailer wouldn’t even have asked it. It was a fait accompli, and “window dressing” was so important, it became a part of the popular lexicon. Of course, window dressing extends into the body of the store. And also of course, you need more than window dressing to retain customers. But it’s a start.
After over a decade of focus on the supply chain, retailers are re-awakening to the value of the customer experience. And where else to start but the visuals? Even “value retailers” recognize the importance of a specific visual experience–even if it’s just a jumble of boxes that tell the tale of “good stuff cheap.”
A soon to be released RSR study on Business Intelligence reveals that the visual merchandising group hardly ever gets a look at BI data. Survey respondents reported that only 7% have access to it. Clearly this needs to change.
We’ve all beaten this subject to death, but it remains true–the marriage of art and science is the holy grail of 21st century retailing. The art of visual merchandising informed by the science of what local customers are interested in, product-wise, are critical partners in retail success.
I would like to second two comments made this morning. First, Kenneth Grady refers to “retail entertainment.” For a significant portion of the brick and mortar retail world, “retail entertainment” is a far better descriptor than “retail” alone. Delivering entertainment is almost the only way a retailer can significantly differentiate themselves in a world of instant price comparatives and fast track commoditization. As has also been pointed out, the economics of creating entertainment are counter to those most retailers think they face: higher costs, lower retail prices, less profit.
The second point was made by Anne Howe, and it provides the “why” behind Kenneth’s observations. The reason retail entertainment is so critical is that it creates the emotional connection Anne speaks about. Without emotional connections, there simply is no reason to exist (outside of convenience).
The real challenge in this space is to articulate strategies and tactics which allow retailers to invest both the capex and the operating cost associated with creating an emotionally connective entertainment environment. My “recipe” looks like this:
1. Have a significant portion of the merchandise mix invested in differentiated product. If not completely differentiated, at least within your channel or geographic customer radius.
2. Creativity is two parts talent and one part process. The talent can only be recruited or hired, but the process can be designed and controlled. Create a process to consistently reinvent the store environment, within the context of your competitive positioning and the shifting attitudinals of your customer.
3. Hire less experienced merchandisers. If you have the process, and can provide the “data” that all creative people need (and yes, they really do…even if the “data” consists of walking around malls and watching people), then “experience” is not only overrated, but probably counterproductive. What you’ll get is what they succeeded with in the past…which is not what you want. Don’t be afraid of turnover in creative positions. Your customer shifts, morphs, redefines and realigns constantly. Having new “takes” on how to create that emotional connection isn’t a bad thing. It also keeps your costs down.
4. Be very “loud” in your execution. Subtlety is fine during genteel conversation. In the game of consumer attention grabbing, being “loud” is vital. Be so obviously, so overwhelmingly who you are that it’s impossible to overlook.
This is a great topic and one that our company embraces. The total retail experience is what helps consumers feel a sense of belonging and inspiration.
As an example, we are embarking on an RxTreme Makeover for a group of pharmacies. Basically gutting them and starting from scratch. Not moving around shelves that are already there, but literally starting from the parking lot and addressing the total experience. We’re studying demographics, psychographics and customer segmentations. We are reviewing shopper loyalty data, interrogating point-of-sale and pharmacy information and interviewing consumers within the stores, at the competition and on the street.
If retail organizations are willing to invest in their futures by truly reinventing the experience, the future of shopping in an exciting, in-store theater-like setting is viable.
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If you can get past the novel idea of a vendor identifying a “problem” that can be solved by using their services, there seems to be a real issue here. As retailers’ backrooms grow smaller and delivery schedules become more erratic (especially for department stores), more and more product is pushed to the sales floor. This is called “densing up.” In many stores, customers are essentially shopping in a storage area.
How does a store keep up with the constant pressure of deliveries, especially if their clerks are tasked with integrating the stuff onto the shelves in addition to making it pretty and selling some of it? In essence, Job #1 becomes getting the stuff to the sales floor. Everything else becomes a lower priority.
It’s amazing how many brilliant minds have gathered here to get behind a concept that should have been a no-brainer–yes! We need great-looking stores and displays to create the visual appeal that brings in traffic and incremental sales!
I’m as big a geek as anyone. I love data. I love it that we have hard evidence about things like customer satisfaction and purchasing patterns, demographics and psychographics, Infobase clusters and Prism clusters.
But the way we’re talking about store design today, you’d think the entire world had been sitting in a dark room blindfolded, and the lights just came on–we seem to have lost our eye for the obvious, as if we won’t believe anything until a statistically valid sample says it’s so.
Meanwhile, that cute boutique around the corner with the great displays and the fresh attitude just went from one store to 230 across the nation while we were debating whether it was really cost-effective to hire enough help to keep the fitting rooms clean….
This seems to be a regular topic of discussion when the pendulum swings between visual presentation and no presentation.
Visual merchandising is a key element that attracts customers into a store…the only thing better is a huge red and white sign that reads ‘S A L E’.
A few years back, when retailers where being challenged by the large studios to build experience stores, companies like Warner Bros. and Disney showed us how to make retailing fun. Every retailer decided they needed to find and hire creative talents to compete.
Now, the big box, specialty, and even department stores think that consumers are only interested in price, lose the presentation. The only place you find passion and fun in retail is those streets lined with independent retailer, like in Wrigleyville in Chicago and Melrose in LA. SOHO has some, but too many national retailers are filling up those streets. I know that it is not absolute, but it does look like this in too many cases. Let’s disguise interactivity and high tech in visual merchandising and display. Now there’s a match!
The visual display of merchandise is very important to store performance. Just look at Wal-Mart Vs. Target! Among other variables, Target stores have wider isles, merchandise never looks crowded, and overall, the store gives a “better/well organized” look.
On a personal level, I was strolling down a street in London once and saw a sports jacket in a display window in a Marks & Spencer store. I went inside and bought that jacket! Had I not seen that jacket displayed, I would not have bought it. Earlier this year I was visiting a retailer in India called “Spencer’s” in Mumbai. The store management there told me that just by changing display of merchandise that people can see from the mall lobby, they were able to increase store traffic and sales significantly.
Fact based buying and selling has resulted in sameness to the extent that consumers hardly can differentiate one retail chain from the next. Retail chains today mostly carry the same product assortment, feature the same products in the same ads, and display the same featured products at the same time, in the same types of displays. Even the retail chain’s color themes and schematics inside the stores are pretty much the same right now from one retail chain to another. Absent are the exciting, unique, and creative displays that once lured consumers in and kept them coming back each time for new reasons. Our retail world has lost its points of differences, its sense of humor, and its personality. Fact based data is used primarily these days to enhance sameness, the avoidance of making mistakes, and to measure what has already happened, as opposed to what could happen. Hmm, I guess its all part of global warming.
The visuals that retailers have are all part of the customer service experience. Stores that are messy and disorganized obviously have flaws and that will be shown through their P/L statement. Having a clean and well maintained store is critical to the success of any retail store but merchants need to go beyond that to bring the customers in.
Innovative and exciting window displays are the key to catching the customer’s eye as they walk by. I’d say in all the retail industry, clothing stores are the most boring and have not gone beyond the dressed up mannequin. Some of the the specialty gift retailers such as Brookstone and The Sharper Image have developed some creative and interesting window displays. Canadian Tire (a hardware chain here in Canada) has a knockout summer display in their new prototype locations.
A good rule of thumb for any manager is to make sure the display has some interactivity to it. At Canadian Tire, they have created a sort of paradise backyard type display where customers can sit on the backyard furniture and touch and feel all the associated products.
Endcaps are not just for products anymore. I’m seeing more and more LCD screens with interactive components to it.
It’s a testament to the attention span of today’s customer. Customers need to be visually bombarded to garner their attention and eventually their money.
Visual merchandising may not be the most important element of a marketing strategy, but its importance as a “silent salesperson” can’t be ignored. The key is to use visual merchandising as a branding element consistent with the rest of the retailer’s message. If the message is all about convenience and value, then using visual merchandising to help the customer navigate the store more easily and find the product she’s looking for is essential…and too easily overlooked.
On the other hand, too many stores in the “trend and fashion” business do not make good use of mannequins, mall windows and overhead graphics to sell “big ideas” to the consumer. It’s a particular challenge with most moderate department stores today: If you walk in blindfolded, you won’t get much help from visual cues to tell what store you are in or what you should buy.
Visual merchandising is often a critical success factor. Abercrombie & Fitch locations, blocking the windows with dark wood louvers, force shoppers inside to see what’s available. Whole Foods makes its prepared items look like caterer displays. Target sells clothes better than Wal-Mart, among other reasons, because its signage/visuals don’t look like low-end clutter. The #1 sense shoppers use: their eyes.
Visual display–store merchandising–is an important part of the retail experience. It is, of course, not the whole story of retail entertainment. In many ways, it should be considered part of the price of entry. If you want to attract and engage customers, use a high quality (not necessarily high cost) visual display. The displays also need to marry with the products, work for the consumers (and the employees), and meet many other criteria. The comment that retailers have their eyes closed on this issue seems to be largely correct (though Apple is another exception). One of the great retail mysteries is why retailers ignore this aspect so much? In the grand scheme of store makeovers, this can be a one of the lower cost items to fix.
Visual merchandising is critical to build incremental and impulse sales in retail stores. Up to 70% of consumer decisions are made in-store–creative displays and in-store activity build unplanned purchases. Think of how much more you spend in a store that has new & innovative products, well merchandised displays, and a fun shopping environment (it’s hard on the pocketbook!).
Building in-store excitement makes shopping much more enjoyable for consumers. Contests, exciting p.o.s. material, seasonality, new products, new categories, samples, demos–they all add to the shopping experience. But you seldom see them in the stores anymore, particularly in Grocery.
These may be some of the reasons why in-store excitement has gone done:
1. Retailers have a focus on GM%, so suppliers put all of their tradespend into cost to bring their GM% up;
2. Suppliers don’t get “credit” by retailers for investing in some of the in-store activity (vs putting the $$ into a profit measure), so they opt for buying another ad;
3. Ad costs are high, so tradespend $$ are allocated primarily to feature support;
4. Retailers don’t allow p.o.s. or contests in-stores;
5. Retailers and suppliers have forgotten the importance of creativity when engaging in the category management process; and/or
6. Retail stores don’t have the decision making power to allow for creative in-store merchandising.
Analyzing weekly scanned sales data, to understand promotional impact (and even payout vs tradespend dollars for suppliers and penny profits for retailers), helps retailers and suppliers to determine the most effective features and price points in the category. In many cases, and in many categories, the lifts in sales don’t justify the promotion. Those $$ may be better spent on in-store excitement, to generate impulse purchases through cross merchandised displays, demos, etc.
From a category management perspective, defining category strategies, and determining which categories are “Excitement Creators,” is very important. These are the categories that make consumers excited to shop at the retailer, and the ones that can be displayed with the low profit destination categories to drive profit and sales.
In net, creative in-store merchandising will build impulse sales, and incremental volume and profit, for retailers. That is where the “art” in the category management process is so important, vs. only focusing on the “science” through the analytics and data.
The visual merchandising used by retailers really needs to match the message they are trying to present to the consumer.
The recent articles complementing Safeway on the redesign/repositioning of their store interior to the consumer are a great example…are you presenting price, quality, or selection to the consumer and how do you do it?
I’ve seen it done well across almost every channel–when it’s done right, you see it immediately upon entering the store!
Visual merchandising can be a big factor in engaging consumers in the purchase cycle because great design can trigger an instant emotional connection, creating an inspiration, a want, or a desire. Think of the many stores we shop in week in and week out–it’s so often just practical and logical–we look at rows of product displayed like toy soldiers, we have a list, we shop price, we look for sales. Productive, yes, but not very inspiring.
A good visual display is like an invitation, it can give us an instant read on what outcome the products in the store can have in our world, invoking desire to explore the store for something bigger and deeper than just the stuff inside. In that mental state, value is perceived quite differently, and may have nothing to do with price.
When that happens, both sales and shopper satisfaction go up.
In today’s retailing environment, the store is the primary demand generator. The role of the store is to help the shopper construct the information needed to make the “right choice”…by making the time invested to shop worthwhile. This means using merchandising to spark creative thinking about possible purchase solutions; helping connect product differences to important purchase requirements; showing the shopper, who is just looking, where to find relevant ideas; and helping the shopper invest time wisely by providing an information rich experience that has solution relevance.
While many senior retail executives are talking about the shopping experience, few retailers have the shopper insights necessary to understand how to create a more effective shopping experience. They have consumer mind space research such as brand image and positioning, ad research, wants and needs research and lifestyle segment insights. And, of course, a wealth of POS and loyalty card data. But, none of this provides insight relative to the shopper’s emotional purchase drivers or how to change behavior to improve the shopping experience.
Only when retailers understand the emotional drivers of the purchase decision will they know how to create differentiated shopping experiences that truly build shopper loyalty.
In order to gain this insight, both retailers and suppliers are going to have to open their eyes and break away from traditional research methodologies and how they think about the shopper.
The bottom line…Ms Crowhurst is right on target.
Wow. What an important topic. Shoppers want more…more help in understanding their options and more help in visualizing the possibilities. Smart retailers are answering this need by bringing visual merchandising inside the store. Safeway’s Lifestyle stores are a great example. Their cross-merchandised solution endcaps are beautiful to look at (the box of crackers is selected to visually complement the appetizer pesto topping) and they bring together product bundles that deliver solutions(health benefit related themes, kid’s themes, cooking themes, and meal occasion themes like a Weekend Breakfast endcap combining pancake mix, syrup, jam and fruit). Shoppers are rewarding retailers who help them shop better and visual merchandising is a driver of improved shopping.
It’s a testament (good or bad, I’m not sure) to retailing of the late 20th century that we are even asking this question today. A mid-20th century retailer wouldn’t even have asked it. It was a fait accompli, and “window dressing” was so important, it became a part of the popular lexicon. Of course, window dressing extends into the body of the store. And also of course, you need more than window dressing to retain customers. But it’s a start.
After over a decade of focus on the supply chain, retailers are re-awakening to the value of the customer experience. And where else to start but the visuals? Even “value retailers” recognize the importance of a specific visual experience–even if it’s just a jumble of boxes that tell the tale of “good stuff cheap.”
A soon to be released RSR study on Business Intelligence reveals that the visual merchandising group hardly ever gets a look at BI data. Survey respondents reported that only 7% have access to it. Clearly this needs to change.
We’ve all beaten this subject to death, but it remains true–the marriage of art and science is the holy grail of 21st century retailing. The art of visual merchandising informed by the science of what local customers are interested in, product-wise, are critical partners in retail success.
I would like to second two comments made this morning. First, Kenneth Grady refers to “retail entertainment.” For a significant portion of the brick and mortar retail world, “retail entertainment” is a far better descriptor than “retail” alone. Delivering entertainment is almost the only way a retailer can significantly differentiate themselves in a world of instant price comparatives and fast track commoditization. As has also been pointed out, the economics of creating entertainment are counter to those most retailers think they face: higher costs, lower retail prices, less profit.
The second point was made by Anne Howe, and it provides the “why” behind Kenneth’s observations. The reason retail entertainment is so critical is that it creates the emotional connection Anne speaks about. Without emotional connections, there simply is no reason to exist (outside of convenience).
The real challenge in this space is to articulate strategies and tactics which allow retailers to invest both the capex and the operating cost associated with creating an emotionally connective entertainment environment. My “recipe” looks like this:
1. Have a significant portion of the merchandise mix invested in differentiated product. If not completely differentiated, at least within your channel or geographic customer radius.
2. Creativity is two parts talent and one part process. The talent can only be recruited or hired, but the process can be designed and controlled. Create a process to consistently reinvent the store environment, within the context of your competitive positioning and the shifting attitudinals of your customer.
3. Hire less experienced merchandisers. If you have the process, and can provide the “data” that all creative people need (and yes, they really do…even if the “data” consists of walking around malls and watching people), then “experience” is not only overrated, but probably counterproductive. What you’ll get is what they succeeded with in the past…which is not what you want. Don’t be afraid of turnover in creative positions. Your customer shifts, morphs, redefines and realigns constantly. Having new “takes” on how to create that emotional connection isn’t a bad thing. It also keeps your costs down.
4. Be very “loud” in your execution. Subtlety is fine during genteel conversation. In the game of consumer attention grabbing, being “loud” is vital. Be so obviously, so overwhelmingly who you are that it’s impossible to overlook.
This is a great topic and one that our company embraces. The total retail experience is what helps consumers feel a sense of belonging and inspiration.
As an example, we are embarking on an RxTreme Makeover for a group of pharmacies. Basically gutting them and starting from scratch. Not moving around shelves that are already there, but literally starting from the parking lot and addressing the total experience. We’re studying demographics, psychographics and customer segmentations. We are reviewing shopper loyalty data, interrogating point-of-sale and pharmacy information and interviewing consumers within the stores, at the competition and on the street.
If retail organizations are willing to invest in their futures by truly reinventing the experience, the future of shopping in an exciting, in-store theater-like setting is viable.