Four elements of visual merchandising

Follow these steps to create a successful retail display

By Jerry Smith

?The value of visual merchandising is immense in today’s retail climate. Simply having a product that’s useful and meets the need of a large group of consumers is not enough.

Even the world’s most powerful brands spend countless hours focusing on visual merchandising for their products. Just think of Coca-Cola, Apple or any other number of widely-popular products, and you’ll see that even they have a keen grasp on the importance of presenting their product in a clean, effective and attractive way.

Visual merchandising becomes even more important when your brand isn’t as powerful as Coca-Cola or Apple, and especially so when you are selling your product in a store that you don’t own. The challenge in this case is, how do you get consumers to choose your product over others?

The idea behind visual merchandising is to tell your product’s story, your company’s story, through the power of sight. Consumers today are impulse-driven. They see something that’s visually attractive, they inspect it further to ensure it’s something they could use, and they pounce. How well you capitalize on that impulsive nature, and that focus on how your product looks, will go a long way in determining how well your product sells.

Once you’ve come to the correct conclusion that visual merchandising is essential and worth the time, money and effort, what should you focus on? What are the elements that create successful visual merchandising?

Choose the Right Color

Color is a powerful thing. Choosing the right color, or the wrong color, for your retail display can have an enormous impact on customer response to your product. This isn’t just conjecture, either; it’s been proven.

A recent student found that people are more likely to recall a color over an object or specific product. The study also found that 60% of a shopper’s decision on purchasing a product is based around the color of the display alone, and that those decisions are made within the first 90 seconds of interacting with a product.

What this tells us is that color is probably the most important element in your retail display. Colors ignite emotions in our brains, so choosing the right color combination that catches a shopper’s eye and elicits a positive emotional response is key in how effective your visual merchandising is.

Just think about color in a different way. Think about how we as homeowners often paint the walls of our home when we first move in. Why do we do this? In addition to wanting to personalize the space to be our own, we desire to choose colors that are pleasing and calming to us, that elicit positive emotional responses within us.

Color has been used in this fashion at doctor’s offices, spas, casinos and just about any other place where consumers visit for eons. Color is powerful.

Create a Focus

Once the colors are chosen, the next step in visual merchandising is to create a focal point. The first step is to get consumers to notice your product. The second step is to get them to interact with it.

By creating a focal point, a place where shoppers can explore your product further, you’ll be making it easier to understand what your product is and what it does. If you don’t have a focal point, it’s easy for shoppers to get confused, which will then lead them to walk away from your display without making a purchase.

The key here is to display your product in a visually pleasing way. You need the text that accompanies your product on the display to be informative, but the star of the show here needs to be the product itself. As such, you don’t want too much text distracting from the product. No one wants to read a book when they’re looking at a product.

Pay attention to the height of your focal point, ensuring it isn’t too high or too low for any of your potential buyers.

Tell a Story

The idea of visual merchandising isn’t to just display your product but to tell your product’s story. That’s the point of all marketing, at its essence, but especially in regard to retail displays.

Color will attract a person to your display. A focal point can show them where to look. But neither will tell the story of your product by themselves.

To tell your story, you have to be quick and to the point with the words you use and where you use them. Remember that people have very short attention spans, so keep your message short and sweet. Studies show you have about five seconds to engage customers, so being informative in as concise a way as possible is key.

The most important part of the display, in this realm, is the header. Just like the headline on a news article, the header of your display is what will, or will not, get consumers to stop at your product. Studies have shown that merchandise displays with headers are significantly more effective than those that don’t have them.

Your header should be bold and prominently displayed. It should include your product’s name, as well as other elements such as a company slogan, or a quick description or background of the company and/or product.

Fill Out Your Display

This final element of visual merchandising combines two crucial points – having enough product for people to buy and choosing the right shapes. Neither of these items will initially attract shoppers to your product, but they will round out the entire picture you’re trying to paint.

You don’t want to overfill your retail display so products are stacked on top of each other or too close together that it looks sloppy. However, at the same time, you don’t want the display barren and devoid of product, either. The more products a customer sees, the more they buy. That’s just a simple fact. Make sure your display has enough product on it.

Lastly, design your display by using shapes that will make it stand out from the rest. Designing a display in simple squares and rectangles will make it look too plain. Instead, opt for rounded edges on headers and even integrate product-specific shapes that can draw a consumer’s eye in and that work hand-in-hand with the product itself

Consumers will look at a well-designed retail display and conclude that the product must be well-designed as well. Following these simple steps in visual merchandising will go a long way to ensure your retail display attracts the shoppers you need to to get your product in as many hands as possible.

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Jerry Smith is the president of Rhino Global Solutions. Rhino specializes in the design, production and delivery of Point of Purchase displays with the goal of helping companies increase their sales by differentiating their product from their competition. Rhino has delivered thousands of displays for large companies, medium-sized companies and small companies across various industries, which gives Rhino unique insight.