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Every industry has a different way of selling its products. The key is to get consumers excited about the product and purchase it before your competitors do.
Visual merchandising is the art of exhibiting products and structuring a business to increase sales and provide a dynamic and delightful shopping experience. It’s an important part of creating a positive customer experience, increasing revenue, and identifying your brand. We’ll go through the 14 most significant visual merchandising methods in this post, as well as how using them might help your company.
1. Use Color to Create a Consistent Visual Experience
Color contributes to a unified visual experience in your store. A color scheme may be used to communicate a narrative to your consumers and draw them into your area, providing life to your shop. Color is an important aspect of your visual merchandising process, and it should correspond to your brand, sales, and business objectives.
The first step in deciding what colors you want to utilize for your shop is to choose a palette. You’ll want to keep the amount of colors you use to a minimum in order to provide your consumers a pleasing visual experience.
The color scheme you chose should complement your brand as well as your sales goals. Let’s assume you own a pet supply business and want your brand to be family-friendly while still conjuring up images of animals and environment. Stick to earth tones and greens, since these colors evoke feelings of relaxation and warmth.
For its little yogurt stores, Menchies, a frozen yogurt business, adopts a bright and joyful color scheme.
Menchies, a little yogurt business, is another illustration of color’s influence. It chose a bold and colorful color scheme that invigorated the whole room. It also made use of hues from the red and green families. Green tones because they are connected with relaxation, serenity, and nature; and red tones because they are associated with food and may even promote appetite. Menchies’ color merchandising decisions not only create a unified and physically pleasing shop, but they also help to support its brand image and sales objectives. Find out how different color palettes affect consumer reaction.
2. Use lighting to draw attention to merchandise and create an atmosphere.
A lighting design is an important part of completing any area. Your lighting selections will help establish the vibe you want to create in your business, and by extension, your brand.
Keep the following guidelines in mind while designing your lighting scheme:
- Make sure your lighting illuminates the whole room. Anything with limited visibility may inhibit purchasers, thus no corner should be lighted.
- Make sure the lighting you choose sets the tone for your location and corresponds to the sort of company you operate.
A spa, for example, would attempt to create a quiet and relaxing atmosphere by using minimal warm lighting.
The guest will have a peaceful session in a dimly lit spa. (Image courtesy of DesignspiritsCo)
A medical supply shop, on the other hand, could choose brighter and cooler lighting to increase visibility and contribute to a more energetic and hygienic environment.
A well-lit pharmacy offers an atmosphere in which clients can readily see and locate merchandise. (Image courtesy of retaildesignblog)
Smart lighting design may be used to emphasize or draw attention away from certain objects, in addition to keeping everything illuminated and creating an environment for your place. By shining a light on a product you want your clients to notice, you may attract them to it and increase sales. Lower lighting, on the other hand, may be used to deflect consumers’ attention away from older products that you don’t want to pay special attention to.
Lighting is used in a boutique to emphasize certain merchandise. (Image courtesy of Shopify)
You may also employ lighting to create eye-catching visual displays for your consumers. A lighting show is extremely effective as a company façade because it packs a visual punch and allows you to create an entirely visual presentation rather than a shoppable one.
Lighting was employed to produce a visually appealing show. (Photo courtesy of Environmental Lights)
Create a lighting strategy that not only keeps your business lighted and visible, but also establishes the tone, draws attention to the things you want consumers to view, and makes a statement.
3. Direct and inform customers through signage
Signage may be used to emphasize goods or features, direct consumers to particular things, or provide information to customers. It has a big impact on what your consumers see, how they engage with it, and how they perceive your shop.
Choosing signage boils down to figuring out what you want your signs to accomplish. Do you use them to promote special offers? To draw attention to particular aspects of a product? To offer your shop a distinct personality? Before you start printing, figure out what you want your signs to achieve and how you want them to appear. This will save you both time and money.
There are a few important do’s and don’ts when it comes to creating and putting signs, in addition to selecting your signage objectives and style.
Outside of your shop, signage is also necessary. Outside signs are a terrific way to promote specials, inform people about your company, or even share a piece of art, all before anybody enters the building.
Exterior displays are all about grabbing people’s attention and piqueing their interest, and they’ll typically be the most striking visual exhibit in your business. Consider your business’s external signage to be the welcome it sends out into the world. Is it attractive enough to entice passers-by inside?
Customers are drawn to a well-lit sign outside a Converse shop. (Image courtesy of Starfish Signs)
Folding sidewalk signs and illuminated window signs are two examples of eye-catching external signage. They’re particularly useful if your business is near to rivals or off the usual route, since they’ll draw attention to it from consumers who may otherwise overlook it. During off-hours or holidays, both foldable sidewalk signs and illuminated window signs signal that you are open for business and entice visitors toward your door.
A coffee shop’s foldable sidewalk sign attracts prospective customers and urges them to stop in for a cup of coffee. (Image courtesy of Aosom.com)
4. Use Point of Purchase Displays to Draw Attention to Products (POP)
Temporary digital or physical displays placed around items that you wish to attract attention to or market are known as point of purchase displays. They might highlight product characteristics, highlight special offers, or bring attention to a particularly interesting item. Consider your POP displays to be one-dimensional employees: although they are limited to a single product category, they are the expert and primary salesman for that product, and they will assist you in selling that product more quickly and easily.
What If I Told You…
The majority of spontaneous purchases are made within a retail store by eight out of ten buyers. POP displays are an excellent approach to get customers to buy something they would not have considered before entering the business.
When deciding on the ideal POP displays for your company, consider what your top goods are, as well as what things have intriguing qualities that you believe your clients would like. Merchandising science–or the use of analysis to guide your merchandising decisions–is the key to figuring out exactly what those parts are. Using sales data, keeping track of what’s selling, and determining which things need to be pushed are all aspects of merchandising science. This sort of data may help you make data-driven choices about how to apply the most successful merchandising methods in your shop. This essay delves further into merchandising science and how you may use it to your company.
You’ll want to consider not just what items you want to promote in your POP displays, but also how you want them to appear. The options are unlimited, but the POP style you choose should be eye-catching and bring people in, as well as speak to your brand voice and blend in with the rest of your business.
What If I Told You…
The average person’s attention span is eight seconds. Visual learning is used by 65 percent of consumers, and providing visuals may help a client recall knowledge by 42 percent. (Image courtesy of Intelligence Node)
In a home goods shop, a point of purchase display displaying culinary equipment. (Image courtesy of Grand Image Inc.)
POP displays should also be a part of your store’s design. They’re ideal for clearing clutter in high-traffic areas, filling empty space, and directing people around your business. Consider whether portions of your shop have repetitive shelving or little product variety. These might be excellent locations for POP displays to help generate visual interest and break up visually monotonous regions.
POP displays are excellent merchandising tools for practically any company since they break up boring images, encourage client interaction, and generate visual intrigue.
5. Use focal points to guide customers around the store.
Creating focus points is one of the most effective methods to split up your business and direct people through it. These are special points of interest that will capture the attention of your clients and lead them to the items you want them to view.
You’ll need to consider a few factors when deciding where your emphasis points should be placed and what they should be. First and foremost, focus points will pull people in and encourage them to interact with that particular section of your shop. Consider which sections of your shop you want people to interact with, avoiding regions that can accept less traffic or directing them out. Furthermore, emphasis points help to sell your items by making them aesthetically attractive and engaging. You should think about the things you want to bring attention to and how you want to present them. Keep in mind that your displays should be intriguing but not distracting—they should blend in with the rest of your environment without becoming obtrusive.
While POP displays are a form of focus point, they do not have to be overt advertisements. They may also be design elements that help to brand your shop and tell a story to your customers. A cluster of mannequins, a piece of wall art, or a table display may all serve as focal points, generating visual appeal and encouraging consumer interaction without requiring the creation of a new shoppable area.
In a home goods business, a focal point display (Source: Juliequidiagan)
When thinking about your own focus points, you’ll need to decide what sort you want to make. Will it be a commercial or just aesthetic? Will it be a shoppable exhibit or one that you can simply look at? This will mostly depend on how much room you have to devote to non-shoppable or aesthetic regions, as well as whether you want to make an overt advertisement or a display focused only on aesthetics.
You’ll also have to consider how your focus spots relate to the rest of your shop and your overall brand. Is this exhibit beneficial to your shopping experience, or does it obstruct your space? Overall, you’ll want to consider the usability of your display as well as how it fits into your overall merchandising and branding strategy.
6. Play Music to Set the Mood in the Store
In addition to visually engaging your clients, merchandising is incomplete without also engaging their audio sense. Music, like lighting, increases the mood of your location and influences how people view your business.
When choosing music for your shop, there are two important factors to consider. First, consider the emotion you want to evoke with your music selection and how it relates to your entire brand. Second, consider how your music choices match with your product, since good alignment has been shown to promote sales in several retail surveys.
Elevator music vs. pop will elicit extremely diverse atmospheres and feelings in your clients. Your music selections may have an influence on how long consumers remain in your shop and how happy your employees are while working there.
When your music choice is in sync with your product, it may also be a sales driver. According to a research published in The Journal of Retailing, music that is related to your product enhances sales. They cited the example of playing French music in a wine shop, which resulted in more French wine sales and less Italian and American wine sales. Choosing music that is relevant to your brand and product, in other words, can help you create a more enjoyable shopping experience and may even increase sales.
7. Use your store layout to direct customer traffic.
A store layout relates to how your business’s shelves and furnishings are organized, as well as how that organization affects traffic flow, customer mobility, and the shopping experience. The shop layout you pick will have a big impact on how consumers navigate around your area. The layout of your business may influence what people are attracted to, how long they remain in your store, how many sales you can make, and the narrative your store tells.
You may pick from a variety of shop layouts, each of which will give unique merchandising options. Consider the number of goods, the space you have, how you want to display your items, and the traffic flow in your business when deciding on the optimal layout for your store.
Your visual merchandising approach will be defined by selecting the ideal shop layout for you. There are a variety of plans to pick from, each with its own set of flows and possibilities for your area.
8. Use storytelling to define customer impressions.
After all, you want your company to convey a narrative about who you are, what you believe in, and what people can expect from you. Customers are drawn to this story because they desire to comprehend and ascribe significance to the areas where they purchase. This is where the art of storytelling comes into play. Consider your company’s narrative as the way you’d like your consumers to describe it if they were telling a buddy about it. For example, if you were opening a gardening business, you may want consumers to leave feeling as if they had just walked out of a charming English rural garden, or as if they had just walked out of a rich chateau estate. Both of these tales would need distinct merchandising to make them obvious, but if merchandised well, buyers will have a clear image of who you are and the narrative you’re presenting.
- Choose a tale that is relevant to your goods and appealing to your target market.
- Consider how we might use color, music, and displays to create that narrative using our visual merchandising tools.
- Your setting should be appropriate for your tale.
For instance, if you wanted to make an English garden tale, you’d want to make sure that everything—from the music to the lighting to the decor—fits into the plot. Would you know what to make of this garden shop if they were playing heavy metal music, utilizing a cold gray color scheme, and selling English roses? No. Instead, the business owner would probably go for soft natural hues that represent lovely flowers and classical music.
You’ll want to make sure that each piece of your merchandising makes sense as part of a larger visual narrative in order to communicate your story. Customers will be able to recognize your brand and business as a result of this, and they will remember it.
The brand Free People is an excellent example of clever marketing storytelling. Customers leave a Free People shop feeling as though they’ve just had a feminine, bohemian retreat. This would be ideal for a shop such as Free People. Its target market is mostly young girls, and the apparel is bohemian in style. As a result, its narrative is consistent with its consumer base and product.
Furthermore, every visual merchandising move made by Free People portrays this feminine, bohemian tale. Everything fits with the story’s intended narrative: pale hues, gentle lighting, and quirky design. Customers grasp the Free People story and keep this image beyond the shop doors due to the intentionality of Free People’s marketing selections.
Customers will be able to observe and absorb your narrative if you make consistent merchandising selections that speak to your company’s story, enabling them to ascribe meaning to their shopping experience.
9. Make Product Placement a Sales Driver
While lighting and displays are excellent for attracting consumers’ attention to certain things, product placement can also be used to influence client attention and direct them to specific items. Product placement is a marketing method in which items are deliberately positioned around the shop in order to attract attention to them and, as a result, increase the likelihood of people purchasing them.
Product placement may be done in a variety of ways. It may be as complex as a focal point display or as simple as putting important goods on eye-level shelves rather than knee-level shelving. When evaluating how you want to apply product placement, the first important thing to ask yourself is what items you want to showcase. Will it be your best-selling item or a lesser-known one that may need some more attention? In your product placement efforts, you should prioritize goods that you believe would gain the most from increased interaction.
You may utilize product placement to boost your sales margins by putting high-margin goods in strategic locations, in addition to picking products that will benefit from increased attention. To encourage the purchase of high-margin products, display them in areas where they will be seen by your clients. Customers will be more inclined to pick up and take home your most costly things if you place them in their line of sight. Any manner you can highlight your high-margin goods, whether via displays, strategic positioning, or clever grouping, will help you move them quicker and, in turn, increase sales.
Bath & Body Works strategically positions goods in high-traffic areas to increase sales and entice customers to essential products.
Consider putting things that aren’t as appealing or have a smaller profit margin on lower shelves or away from showcase pieces. Because these items aren’t a top priority for you, they shouldn’t take up valuable shelf space.
It’s also a good idea to put your most popular things at the rear of the shop. Customers will be forced to wander the length of your store before accessing the item they want. This will extend their shopping experience and enhance the chances of them seeing something else they want to buy.
Planogram: To plan out their shop and work out product placement, many merchants use a tool called a planogram. A planogram is a comprehensive depiction of the shop layout that can assist you in planning and deciding where to best display items.
10. Increase Product Exposure by Avoiding Empty Space
Utilizing your area is one of the keys to good visual merchandising. While you want to reduce clutter by breaking up how you present merchandise, there should seldom be any empty space. The more product exposure you can provide your customers, the more likely they are to locate something they like and, as a result, make a buy.
Keeping your consumers aesthetically attracted means avoiding useless space. This, in turn, will encourage greater contact with your shop and with your items, resulting in more sales. While unoccupied space reduces consumer engagement, keep in mind that you want your shop to be full and intriguing, not busy and distracting, while filling it. Going too far in the other way, or overstocking your business, will not benefit you and will turn off clients who are hesitant to enter what will be viewed as clutter.
A business that isn’t making the most of its area for the consumer experience.
11. Make Shopping Easier by Organizing Your Space
Visual merchandising requires that you keep your shop organized. Having a well-organized business can make it easier for your consumers to locate what they’re searching for and reduce shopping aggravation. Furthermore, keeping your storefront clean and organized will add to a great shopping experience, positive consumer sentiment, and make operating your business simpler.
The first step in organizing your storefront is to assess your goods and the area available to exhibit it. A supermarket shop with a lot of room and products could choose a categorized organizing system, but a clothes boutique with fewer things and less space might prefer color organization.
Your merchandise and space will define your organizing method, but it should be consistent across the business. Additionally, regardless matter the organizational style you adopt, implementing signs, labeling, and wrapping tactics will make your business more structured.
A grocery shop manages the flow of fresh food in a systematic manner.
12. Combine products to increase the number of units sold per ticket (UPT)
The technique of grouping or combining things that may be bought together in the same place with the purpose of encouraging consumers to buy numerous items is known as bundling.
Units per ticket (UPT) is a statistic that estimates the average number of things purchased in each transaction.
Displaying a garment with a matching necklace, for example, may encourage your consumer to buy the necklace even if they just meant to buy the dress. Customers will be naturally enticed to expand their buy volume as a result of bundling techniques, as they will be directed from things they are presently purchasing to items that will improve that purchase.
When considering bundling techniques for your own shop, think about what goods logically belong together and how you may present them so buyers can notice the link. If you ran a boutique, you could show shoes and bags next to each other, or hats and scarves next to each other.
13. Use seasonal displays to connect with customers.
Seasonal considerations should be considered while planning your visual merchandising. Making sure your shop merchandising reflects what your consumers are going through, whether it’s a holiday or the time of year, can make your company seem more relevant to them and more integrated into their life.
POP displays, focal points, window displays, and seasonal décor are all examples of seasonal displays. The most important thing is to add timely merchandising into your shop to leverage on seasonal moods and purchasing patterns. Many companies will even make their life easier by allowing seasonal displays to take the place of another display item during its window of relevance, rather than re-doing a complete part of their shop.
However, there are a few things to keep in mind while employing seasonal decorations. First, although you want seasonal decorations to be effective for as long as possible, you don’t want to put them out too early. Customers may get irritated as a result, and they may decide not to buy from you.
Get a sense of when the rest of the town and other businesses put up their seasonal decorations so you don’t have to take yours out too early. Additionally, your seasonal display should not exist in a vacuum. The season displays will seem less gimmicky and more joyous if you use many displays or tiny décor items around your business. Many more suggestions and strategies to make your seasonal displays glow may be found in our other post.
Highlighting a certain time of year might also assist your brand or market. For example, promoting cold and flu season for a health and wellness company might help make their goods more relevant to their clients and assist people appreciate the relevance of their company at that time.
Candy is advertised to consumers in a colourful Halloween display. (Image courtesy of Jersey 101.5)
Seasonal displays link your company to your consumers’ lives and provide opportunities for relevant marketing storylines.
14. Use Window Displays to Draw Customers Inside
Windows are another way to show off your visual merchandising skills and entice passers-by inside your business. You may use this space to showcase items in a visually attractive manner, announce specials, or even create an eye-catching art project.
When it comes to window displays, you’ll want to make sure you’re focused on designing something that will attract your clients’ attention and offer them a taste of what they can anticipate once they inside. Your window displays should not be deceptive just to make a statement. Consider your window display to be the front cover of your company’s book. It should be appealing and entice them to learn more, while also assisting them in understanding what is going on within.
Window displays are one of the few locations in visual merchandising where you don’t have to worry about making your display shoppable and can instead concentrate only on aesthetics. Many companies take advantage of this chance to design something really unique for their company, so have fun with it.
A bright and cheerful window show.
The options for what you can do with your window space are numerous, but at the end of the day, you want your display to be eye-catching, speak to your brand language, and pique your clients’ curiosity.
Factors Affecting Your Visual Merchandising Plan
In the retail industry, some client habits are unavoidable. They aren’t always beautiful, but if you keep them in mind throughout the merchandising process, you can take efforts to lessen them.
Preventing Theft
One of the biggest dangers in the retail sector is theft. It’s unavoidable. You may, however, utilize a variety of merchandising tactics to address this problem. Products towards the front of the shop or near the register, for example, are more likely to be stolen, therefore keep your most valuable items near the rear. Keeping your environment orderly can also assist you avoid stealing. Thieves may also be deterred by strategically placed mirrors and placards.
While merchandising methods might help prevent theft, we recommend employing a security system like SimpliSafe to keep your company safe.
Customer Attitudes
Try as you might, there are certain Customer Attitudess that you cannot control—no matter how effective your visual merchandising. These are considerations you should work around, not work to undo when merchandising your store.
- When entering a shop, customers always turn right and proceed counterclockwise till exiting on the left. Customers may feel uncomfortable at a shop that is designed to propel them clockwise around the area.
- Shoppers avoid the higher and lower levels, preferring to remain on the one they arrived on. Your main level will be the busiest, therefore it should showcase your greatest items.
- Narrow aisles are avoided by shoppers, who will not glance around if they feel hemmed in. Customers are more likely to browse your complete area if your aisles are broad enough for at least two persons to pass comfortably.
- Shoppers want to get a sense of the place before going, therefore providing free space at the entry will enable them to do so before beginning their shopping.
Conclusion
Every customer-facing part of your organization is affected by visual merchandising. Visual merchandising is much more than simply arranging things in a visually pleasing manner. It includes everything from your brand voice to customer experience to sales. With all of the strategies and tactics discussed in this article in mind, you’ll be able to design a storefront that is not only attractive, but also reflects your company’s values and the experience you want to provide your clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the techniques of visual merchandising?
There are four fundamental methods of visual merchandising. They are promotion, design placement, layout and space utilization.
What are the 4 principles of visual merchandising?
A: There are many different definitions that can be applied to the principles of visual merchandising. Here is a list of 4 common ones.
1) Form follows Function – at least in theory, form should always follow function; Designers need to consider what their products or services actually do and how they will perform those functions before designing them from scratch (e.g., things with handles are designed around being held).
2) Simplicity – there’s usually an aesthetic answer for everything, so if it doesnt look like anything else, then it must be better? Thats not necessarily true- simply because something looks different does not mean it is necessarily superior in some way (e.g., simplistic design can often lack character/visual interest).
3) Hierarchy – this principle states that good design makes clear distinctions between important items and less significant ones by using simpler forms on top while more complicated elements come below these simplified parts; Visual hierarchy also includes arranging objects into larger groups within a frame without compromising any individual items prominence relative to others present in the same area (i.e., hierarchically arranged frames create tension by making certain areas feel more crowded than others when all other factors remain constant ).
4) Contrast & Clarity – contrast refers generally speaking to difference among objects or features having contrasting colors but sometimes implies degrees of lightness as well; clarity highlights differences between similar shapes through value contrasts rather than color contrasts alone; both contrast and clarity emphasize lines over masses.
