What two additional tasks are required in order to make merchandise floor-ready

The Natural Insight Ultimate Guide to Retail Merchandising is here to offer you information and insights into nearly every aspect of the retail merchandising universe. In every major section, you'll discover information and inspiration designed to help retailers, brands, product companies and merchandisers handle the many pieces that complete the retail merchandising puzzle. 

Visual Merchandising Displays

Nothing moves a product like a compelling, unique visual merchandising display, whether it comes from splashes of color, haute designs for luxurious tastes or ingenious attention-getters.

In this section of the guide, we’ll explore visual merchandising displays and strategy and their place in the arc of product sales, including a special focus on:

• Product placement marketing;
• Next-Gen planograms;
• Designing and managing retail product displays;
• Exciting new retail display ideas;
• The tools and processes that work;
• Optimal shelving strategies; and
• Boosting sales with retail signage.

These topics are designed to benefit the entire range of players that operate with one goal:

Fill that shopping cart!

So if you’re designing your latest product, planning out your store’s latest new retail execution strategy or plotting your next grand scheme to ignite the world with legendary (yet efficient) merchandising – we’ve got something to offer you, right here, right now.

We’ll also sprinkle in a dash of psychological strategy, add a dollop of layout and store design, and create a sturdy base of practical tips, tools and insights along the way.

Get Started with a Quick Read: The Good, Bad and Ugly in Retail Product Displays

Product Placement Marketing

Brands, merchandisers and retailers put massive time, thought, energy and negotiation to ensure everyone benefits from their symbiotic – sometimes contentious – relationship with one another.

Meanwhile, customers are bombarded with options that can pull their attention from the delightful experience of seeing, feeling, touching the product in real life – a proven (and enjoyable) process that leads to a better bottom line for all involved.

Don’t let the competition distract your market. Keep customers interacting with products, entering stores and filling baskets by getting your product placement fundamentals right.

Necessities: Whether a store focuses on specific categories of products or they run a one-stop shop for every need, carefully placed necessity items will draw shoppers to the areas where your highest-profit impulse items will jump into their baskets.

For instance, game stores can attract shoppers with essentials like controller batteries, cables and cleaning kits that emphasize an uninterrupted entertaining experience. Home improvement stores can keep a stock of high-replacement items like disposable gloves and masks. Home décor stores can stock well-placed consumables like air-freshener replacements, clean-up gear and Swiffer pads – people still love that handy little broom… Or is it a mop? Is it a duster? We don’t know what a Swiffer is – but it’s awesome.  

Whatever you choose, the science behind layout mandates that you make these magnets visible from flow points and doorways, so that customers commit to a journey through your money-making impulse items as they meet their everyday needs.

Tip: Window signage product marketing that advertises discounts for these oft-replaced items will help get them in the door.

Impulse Buys: Visual product placement marketing allows some flexibility for impulse items, but it usually boils down to what kind of placement is possible – more than one company will be vying for certain spaces.

Since you’re forced to rank your options, the counter and checkout zones are top priority, always. End caps along necessity zones or a spot along the main thoroughfare make a great second.

Sale Items: You can’t go wrong with sale items that deliver high-volume profit. But which product placement will market them the most successfully? Forced pathway layouts will give an advantage if you take care to position displays that “bump” customers along their journey. Eye-catching visuals for your products will be more important than physically impeding their progress.

Execution Is Key: All of this planning won’t mean much if your product placement marketing strategy never comes to life. Digital product marketing tools can help bring order to the chaos of product merchandising execution. How? Through visual confirmation on execution, easily managed merchandiser scheduling, and more. Read more about bringing order to the chaos of product marketing in our free guide.

Entryway Tip: One might think that the entrance area is a great spot for a fun grab, but experience tells us that the first 30 seconds or 10 steps through the door, upon entering, are more of an orientation and acclimatization zone: a great tip here is to ensure this area is inviting and has signage that encourages exploration or directs to a necessity.

The Advantages of Next-Gen Planograms

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to build an engine from a schematic?

Better question: how do you think you’d fare building that beautiful back yard shed with only a blueprint to guide you?

In both of these scenarios, you’re left holding the bag – literally – and have no guideposts to help you. With outdated strategies to instruct your merchandisers, these examples might just trigger annoying memories for field reps who used old-school planograms.

Worse still, these clunky old planograms jeopardize planogram compliance, turning execution into an all-or-nothing situation in the field.

Here’s a few ways next-gen product merchandising planograms turn that antiquated process on its head. How?

Next-gen planograms isolate steps in execution and make them easy-to-follow, helping improve compliance, speed execution and break down the process into digestible chunks for hard-working field reps.

More Advantages for Retail Merchandising and Product Companies

1. The process starts with step-by-step, checkpoint-enabled instructions.
2. Employees or merchandisers then snap a photo to verify their work.
3. Photos are auto-tagged with time, date, location and more metadata to prevent gaming and falsification
4. Real-time verification and display status data is quickly searchable to keep a health check on all progress, deadlines, and inventory status.
5. The Natural Insight platform integrates this performance data with other data like attendance, check-in/check-out times, task completion, employee strength data and tagging, and more.
6. It’s awesome. This is literally the science-fiction reality of product and retail merchandising.

 Tip: Check out our blog post for more ideas on how to beat out competing retail displays.

Designing and Managing a Retail Product Display

What’s the best way to design and manage a retail product display? Planning ahead and ensuring execution is flawless. Here we’ll be exploring some principles of retail store display designs and the strategies that make them competitive and effective.

The Purpose of Eye-Opening Retail Product Displays

Retailers and the product companies all win when great displays work. When they don’t work, however, the pain is felt on all sides. The first step to avoiding this fate and delivering a cash-box-brimming success is ensuring any display, be it storefront, free-standing or wall-mounted, is built with these three principles.

1. Entice: Turn heads and move feet (toward the store or the product).
2. Sell: Sell the product and/or increase sales on a steadily purchased product.
3. Leverage Space: Make the greatest use of space possible.

Design to Entice

Visual Research Advantage: Research by the University of Sydney noted that unexpected motion, changes in direction, visual jitter and changes in brightness all have a reliable effect on capturing attention. Here’s a quick list of display features that make use of neurological attention:

1. Use reflective surfaces to create motion around the product.
2. Organize color and brightness in gradient fashion to trigger luminance awareness.
3. Try hologrammatic surfaces to trigger visual jitter cues.
4. For subtle color schemes, try layers with holes using a background with high brightness or intense darkness behind it. Also, a continuous pattern behind hole-punched surfaces will provide multiple visual effects that create motion and changes in direction.

Displays that Sell

Emotion and necessity are two of the driving factors behind sales in any display. We’ve covered a great deal on the aspects that turn heads from these angles, but what about a competition-based approach?

There’s a way to make that happen. Start by gathering competitor information on displays and upkeep schedules to keep your own setups moving and get a solid idea of the replenishment regimes that work for each local area or store. Natural Insight empowers your field staff to do just that. Field reps can easily collect, report and monitor information that can help you make your own competition-informed strategic display choices. The platform helps you monitor:

• Competitor pricing, pricing placements
• Competitor hot sellers and items which never move
• Display arrangements, designs and locations
• Display takedowns and new build timing

Managing Displays and Maximizing Display Space

Retail display designs operate on some very straightforward principles. Generally, you’ll want to always ensure customers can approach displays from every angle. That means that special attention needs to be paid to the proximity of nearby displays, walls and architecture – customers can’t buy what they can’t reach (let alone see).

Also, make sure that displays don’t obstruct walkways to and from the main thoroughfares. It can be tempting to use a huge display along these routes, but customers are focused on their needs, not a single product. If you cut off the route to something they need along the flow pathways, they will not only be unable to touch, hold and inspect the product (critical to sales in many cases), they won’t even come close enough to see the display, no matter how awesome it might be.

You can ensure that this doesn’t happen with any size display by having field reps take photos or submit reports on the general floor layout. Also, with the right tool, they can easily ensure displays are up to date, well stocked and looking perfect with the right field quality control tools.

Retail Display Ideas 

Retail displays constantly need fresh ideas and new twists. Below, you’ll find some research-based insights for displays that pop.

Entryways and Storefronts – The Moody Debate

There is such a thing as too dark, even for luxury brands! A sultry, spooky or somber mood can fit a multitude of different products and store types. That being said, huge indoor shopping centers and outdoor storefronts will usually be flooded with light. Dark retail displays and entryways will absorb this light and necessary illumination for important parts of a display.

Take a look at this compressed footage of a journey through the Mall at Millenia in Orlando, Florida. In the first minute, this YouTuber passes multiple storefronts which are poorly lit, uninviting and – in places – struggle to properly illuminate their brand names, store names and interior.

Shoppers can’t buy what they can’t see!

An example of the right way to “do dark” lives at 1:55 in the video. This is the Abercrombie storefront. It captures their white-on-black brand with heavy, dark windows – but passers-by can clearly see their trending merchandise without struggling to see inside the store. You can see another imitable example of an on-brand dark storefront with Gucci, at 3:25 – it’s right after Michael Kors. Instead of white in the background, they use red as their highlighting layer. Red seems darker emotionally, but actually carries long distances due to its long wavelength and low dispersion – a little red goes a long way, in other words.

Tip: Don’t let your products go unnoticed. Have field teams conduct field quality control checks of storefronts or submit feedback forms that assess areas of improvement like lighting, setup compliance, and more.

Open or Closed Storefront Design

Walled-off or line-of-sight interrupting storefronts have both drawbacks and advantages. Boxing in the window display area can make for some very impactful, eye-catching displays. However, if you take this tactic, you’d better showcase your hot sellers.

With many stores having limited doorway views of the interior of the store, there’s a risk of losing the magnetizing power that comes from open, browsable and experiential internal design. Balance your storefront display by knowing when and where you want to showcase a shopping experience versus driving sales of a particular product.

Find more ideas for your displays in the Natural Insight blog, or take a deep dive into the upkeep and execution strategy that keeps it all together in our free resource library.

Optimizing Retail Shelving

Ideal retail shelving optimization means high product velocity off the shelf. There’s a little more to it than a tidy arrangement, however. Here you’ll learn a few strategies that have made waves stores around the world.

Advanced: The Billboard Effect

Use shelf positioning to create the billboard effect.

What is the billboard effect? Simply put, it’s using the packaging across several individual units to create a larger, on-brand visual message – a billboard. But why try this approach?

For brand-loyal shoppers, it will help find the products they came to the store to buy. The billboard effect helps to identify product category and brand simultaneously, attracting customers directly to that aisle, shelf or display.

Think of the billboard effect as great marketing. You wouldn’t use off-brand colors to promote your storefront – and on the shelf in retail spaces, your only storefront is the shelf.

Coca-Cola, for instance, has no shortage of product innovation and new flavor launches. However, they found that their shelf space was lacking in brand recognition – Coke Lime with its green packaging, Coke Zero, all black – but the signature circular red logo commanded little of the visual real estate when stacked in a group.

How to Billboard:

Don’t stress about your packaging design – this can be achieved with great retail shelving execution. You could start by framing new products with on-brand, on-color product. Also, one of our researchers has seen soda and snack displays where new products were used within stacked items to spell the brand name. Try a twist on that by creating a display pattern that recreates the logo.

Controversial: The Starter Gap

Starter gaps are exactly what they sound like – a gap in the merchandise that gets people started in picking your display clean.

This is a bolder move, too, so grab the safety bar as we click, click, click! up the rollercoaster of ideas.

Is knocking a hole in your display maybe the ultimate sin in display execution? The perfectionist in us says yes. Our inner accountant, however, knows a starter gap can kickstart product sales velocity.

Why does it work?

Well, people come in many shapes and sizes. Some are “wait and see” shoppers, which means an untouched shelf could reflect a flawed or overpriced product. Other shoppers may see a flawless display, walk up to it, and reach for the messy shelf next to it, because… Who wants to make a mess?

Don’t mistake our meaning – displays must always be at their best. A little psychology, however, can kick off that fresh display’s path to a restock.

Reliable: Data Collection and Analytics

Experimentation, innovation, brand-adherence and aesthetics all play critical roles in your shelf optimization. However, none of these insights could exist without solid, data-based refinement based on research.

Try in-store shelving optimization through data capture that includes images, qualitative information and customized surveys that capture real-time data about your retail locations.

With this strategy, you can continue to play with your field execution tactics to discover which arrangement, height, displays, packaging, pricing and sales work for your merchandise.

Boosting Sales with Retail Signage

Shoppers are pressed for time, and most would consider themselves equally pressed for cash.

If you fail to give them a compelling reason to come inside, they’re going to follow their plan and emotional motivations past your doorway and on to their next stop.

That’s why, when it comes to your exterior retail signage, it pays to know your market and connect with shoppers on an emotional level.

We’ve already pointed out (above) that one of the top pulls into any store is a financial motivation and necessity – that’s right: give them a sale. Why is that, though? Well, for most, they are thinking in terms of their financial motivations while shopping.

There are always more motivations to tap into, however. Here’s a quick list of strong motivations to get your retail signage attracting more customers than ever:

Rest and Relief: Shoppers get tired and sick of chores, so offer them something that promises free time in the future. For instance, a huge pack of batteries on sale means less trips to market at inconvenient times.

Act on Caring: Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries – these events fill people with an urge to express their caring for others. Offer them a way to make that tangible! Or play with the dark side and remind them that it’s been a while since they spoiled the ones they love. In any case, signs which remind shoppers of the role of seasonal and annual gifts in any relationship will work to draw them in and around your store.

Make an Impression: Today’s shoppers love being seen as much as they love shopping. Entice them with retail signs that show the impression they’ll make with your latest product. Images should use wish fulfillment with items featured prominently – try vacations, social events or life milestones to make a big impact and get them moving.

Accessorize the Trip: Signs suggesting a useful cross sell or offering a sale on an accessory to a more profitable item work. Think about your biggest draws and how you can enhance their purchase.  

Regardless of whether you’re enticing customers through the door or magnetizing your high-profit merchandise, flawless retail execution mean getting it done right – and on time. The Natural Insight platform gives you immediate visibility and accountability in your retail execution. Try out one of our most popular check-up forms, today.

The Rise of Experiential Merchandising

The retail apocalypse is here!

Well, maybe not. But try to tell that to shareholders watching 10% of sales disappear to the internet.

Rather than resign the battle for the shopping basket, product companies, retailers and merchandisers are turning to experiential merchandising. The prevalence of this trend has spread from luxury stores to fashion, CPGs and everyone in between.

Explore this section to learn:

• Brand experience marketing strategies
• Experiential event ideas and basics
• Luxury merchandising principles and experiential ideas
• Fashion merchandising insights and tactics
• The path to capitalizing on the impulse buy
• Refinement and optimization through mobile merchandising.

Dive in to dial up your sales through experiential events, create displays that dabble with experiential design, and learn demo ideas to help move products fresh off the production line.