Product display is a set of activities used to promote and sell products in your store. These activities range from visually displaying products, special promotions, and pricing. The ultimate goal of product display is to attract customers to visit your store and purchase products, but also to provide an enjoyable experience that encourages them to revisit your store.
What is Product Display?
Product display is the practice of intentionally promoting, showcasing, and selling products in your store. A significant part of this involves visually displaying products – the process of creating a display plan, designing, and presenting products to highlight their features and benefits. Colors, lighting, product placement, and store layout all play an important role in promoting the product.
Product display also includes interactive elements, such as allowing your store visitors to engage with the products, trying product samples, taking pictures, or sitting down to take a break.
Promotions and product bundling are also part of product display efforts – in addition to email marketing, social media, and any other digital marketing strategies you may be using.
Why do merchants use merchandising?
1. Brand building and recognition
When customers visit your store or look at your products online, they interact with shapes, colors, product arrangements, and many other visual elements. Therefore, how customers perceive and remember your brand plays a role in how they conceptualize and recall your brand. The perception of your brand is often a result of more than what people can consciously recognize. It is subtle yet powerful.
For example, Apple is known for its simple and elegant store design with plenty of white space. This bright and sleek look creates a luxurious and focused experience. This bright and sleek look also applies to its online store, which features very few colors, short lines, and ample space between different elements.
Another example is Lush, a brand of handmade natural cosmetics. If you have visited a Lush store, you are likely to vividly remember what it smelled like. You may also walk through a mall and smell a Lush store nearby, even if you don’t see one.
Once you enter, you can see hundreds of products with no packaging that you can touch, smell, and try samples of. Lush is famous for its colorful and fragrant in-store experience.
2. Increased sales
Product display emphasizes the best features and benefits of your products, leading to increased sales as well as an increase in purchase volume through cross-selling and upselling.
For example, you might promote a new hair care line by offering travel-sized samples. A customer may not need a new hair conditioner right now, but they may try it once their current bottle runs out. They like it and choose to purchase it the next time they are in the store.
This way, they also discover hair styling tools and products they were looking for, so they buy them and take samples of other products from the same line – and the cycle continues.
Encouraging promotions through samples and showcasing complementary products motivates the customer not only to make larger purchases but also to return to the store again.
Excellent Customer Experience
The best thing you can do for your customers is to make them feel comfortable from the moment they enter your store until they leave (and beyond).
Their experience depends on more than just product display, including their interactions with sales staff and the payment options they can choose from.
However, your products play a crucial role. Were they able to find what they were looking for? Could they easily ensure they were buying the right product for their needs? Did the store layout and signage make it easy to browse the options? Would they tell a friend to visit your store to buy those products?
The goal is
Presenting products to meet the needs of customers in a timely manner will, in turn, create loyal customers who will return and become ambassadors for your brand.
Improving Inventory Turnover
Carrying excess inventory is costly. However, maintaining the right amount of products that customers want improves cash flow, maximizes your storage space, and avoids unsellable inventory (products you can no longer sell because they are out of season or out of style).
This is why product presentation is critical. Instead of passively holding inventory and hoping customers find their way to it, you can consider different seasons and customer needs, historical product demand, and upcoming trends to manage inventory purposefully and promote the right products at the right time.
Your inventory affects sales (by determining how much you can sell) and expenses (by determining what you need to purchase), so focusing on product presentation is worth the effort to maximize sales and cash flow while minimizing risk.
Tips for Product Presentation
1. Consider Customers First
Your products need to speak to your customers, from your product range to how you name, describe, display, and promote each product.
This is not just about the customer needing the product but also about their shopping style and decision-making process.
For example, people go to IKEA to buy furniture and home supplies, but customer needs are not that simple. If they were, IKEA would be just a basic showroom displaying popular furniture pieces with a checkout point at the end.
Instead, IKEA gives its customers the opportunity to plan and visualize designs using its products. They can walk through model rooms for bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, hallways, and patios for inspiration to implement a solution in their own home.
IKEA takes this to another level with fully furnished and decorated model apartments, which often emphasize spaciousness and organization despite small space.
Consider what your customers need and want when they enter your store.
2. Optimize Store Layout
Your store layout plays another role. To optimize your store design, consider your products, the consumer behavior you want to encourage, and your store’s space.
Some store layout options include:
- Grid: A pattern of long aisles, typically seen in grocery and pharmacy stores, with essential products at the back.
- Loop: A defined path that customers follow, as seen in an IKEA store.
- Free Flow: No specific pattern, ideal for smaller spaces and stores with fewer goods.
- Luxury Store: A popular type of free flow design that groups products by brand, category, or complementary products.
Check out all 10 store design options to create one that helps you achieve your product presentation goals. Do you want customers to slow down and browse? Do you want to see complementary products together? Do you want to consider more variations of the same product?
3. Leverage a Variety of Display Types
Product displays can help attract customer attention to specific products and highlight their relevant features.
For example, you can display clothing on mannequins, clothing racks, and display tables. Small accessories like bags, jewelry, and perfumes look great on standalone displays, showcase cases, and countertop displays.
The idea is to create an exciting and visually appealing mix of product display types to put customers in the right mood and mindset while browsing your store.
Pay attention to how customers move around the store and interact with different products and how they are displayed so you can understand what works and what doesn’t. You can adjust your product displays and experiment with any of the 19 popular commercial product display types for optimal results.
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Product Display and Retail Trade Ideas
1. Turn Your Products into Art
Have you ever walked into a store where the products are also works of art? It’s strange and unforgettable. While it may not always be practical, it can be a new way to illustrate your products and affirm what makes them special.
I love when there are artistic displays of products because it shows the true craftsmanship in design principles. It’s like conceptual art, or conceptual commerce. Chris Gillette, founder and business consultant at Merchant Method
The eye-catching art for the nose makes passersby stop and take a closer look – and discover fragrances beneath their nose. It’s art and product in one, a fantastic balance between taste and effectiveness in attracting customers.
“In the ability of [commercial traders] to create a piece of art, they also display that this piece is important to the customer. It’s an artistic version of the spotlight on the product and I love it,” adds Gillette.
2. Create a Complete Body Experience
One of the strangest store and product designs is Victor Churchill, a retail butcher shop on High Street in Melbourne, Australia. Every aspect of the interior, exclusive product choices, and elegant service makes it a unique and eye-catching butcher shop. The dramatic lighting, dark colors, curves, and marble floors resemble more of a luxury fashion brand.
“We also love that the store in Melbourne is a complete body experience. There is not a single screen in sight. Instead, guests breathe in the aromas, admire the displays, watch the showcases, taste samples, and talk to each other and team members. They’re engaging, interacting, and enjoying,” according to a report by The Cool Hunter.
No matter what products you sell, you can create an immersive experience that draws store visitors into your world.
3. Leverage Technology
There are many possibilities when it comes to technology – you just have to find the right method that works for you.
Big tech companies like Apple and Verizon do this because technology is at the core of their products. But it can also work to the advantage of other industries.
Eslite Bookstore uses digital screens to help customers find the location of a specific book in-store and view promotional video displays. The British retailer Harvey Nichols uses large touchscreen displays to showcase collaboration videos and product information. Customers can also add products to the shopping cart for payment.
4. Use the Power of Flowers
There’s scientific evidence behind the benefits of fresh flowers – they have been shown to make people feel comforted, relaxed, and natural. And what trader wouldn’t want a comfortable, happy customer in their store?
Macy’s recognized this over 70 years ago with the annual Macy’s Flower Show. It’s a two-week exhibition that attracts around half a million people to participating stores.
There is a good reason why we give flowers as gifts to special people in our lives. Most traders do not provide such grand artistic displays because they are not feasible within their space and budget, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add flowers to your store.
Place fresh flowers outside your store to greet customers, sprinkle them throughout your store and near checkout points. Look for ways to cleverly integrate them with your product – perhaps using a large pitcher as a bouquet, or creating fresh flower garlands for human displays.
5. Repurpose Product Displays
You can choose a less traditional way of presenting your products than standard shelves, racks, and display cases. Trina Turk Boutique did this using old records. Instead of displaying fashion clothing and accessories on standard product stands, they took a rustic and creative approach using trees.
It’s
It adds a different visual appeal and speaks to your brand identity when you use innovative product displays. And if you reuse them smartly, you may save some serious space in your budget.
Displays are not the only way to be creative. Look for something that fits your store: refurbished record players can be used in a music shop, wind chimes or necklaces can be showcased on an old coat rack, or a wheelbarrow can hold flower seeds in a home and garden store.
6. Use Real People Instead of Mannequins
Using real people in your store instead of mannequins can be a powerful tactic for visually showcasing products – especially if you run a clothing and accessories store.
Abercrombie & Fitch has mastered this. When the targeted teenage market walks by the store, they are drawn to this real-life embodiment of what they aspire to be.
“I’m a big proponent of this thinking … to be this living embodiment of wearing the clothes,” says Gilot. “That personal experience, whether it’s visual or not, is absolutely critical. But I love it when it’s visual because you seamlessly weave it into the space.”
This is extremely effective for these stores due to the style they sell and their strong brand image, and the models are tangible proof that the Abercrombie & Fitch image is attainable.
Customers will be eager to buy the clothes those models are wearing so they can live that style too – not to mention the photos with the models that they will share on social media.
And if your store is completely different from Abercrombie & Fitch, you can still find ways to use real people instead of mannequins to showcase your products. Make your products part of employee uniforms, hold a fashion show, or conduct demonstrations where your employees showcase how to use products in real life.
7. Guide Your Customers Through Your Store
If there’s a retailer that has mastered how to guide customers through a store, it’s IKEA. They have laid out their real-world store locations so well that they guide every step customers take. This works incredibly well because when you know how customers navigate the space, you know where they are likely to look and what they are likely to see. Using this knowledge, IKEA can place promotions, new products, and other priorities in those visible and high-traffic areas.
Essentially, IKEA can pinpoint where its customers spend most of their time. This is valuable for steering consumer behavior.
Gilot always recommends considering the customer’s sightline when assigning or updating floor layouts. “Customers scan and view the store at a 45-degree angle from their path of travel. So often when retailers or owners, or even employees, assign or fix product displays, they do it in front of them, directly, without respect to how customers are wandering around them,” she adds.
Gilot has advice to break this habit: “After setting up displays, or when you’re displaying products, walk around the space and scan the customer’s sightline to ensure they see and approach the product from that 45-degree angle.”
8. Utilize Your Customers
Gilot once organized an event at The Carrot Flower Company, a local flower shop. “The owner had the windows open, an outdoor seating area, and we were using that – not just inside, but the front of the store as well.”
Passersby see that there’s a group of people in this store – proof that this is a place worth checking out. And while there were no products as part of this display, it is a showcasing of your brand and the experience you provide.
Welcomed
By having your customers spend time in your store, even if they’re not shopping. Offer a comfortable space for customers to relax. Little things like offering free water, tea, and coffee can go a long way.
9. Create Interaction
The word “interactive” may seem related to technology, but you can create an interactive product display without technology.
IKEA Canada organized the IKEA Play café, a temporary storefront in Toronto. This home goods store turned its downtown space into an area where guests could eat, play, and shop.
While almost everything in the store was interactive, one low-tech but popular game was a Tic-Tac-Toe table made using food items.
LIVELY, a lingerie brand, considers its spaces more than just a place to purchase products. You’ll see customers chatting, sipping coffee, and taking photos in front of stunning walls.
“Retail in the past was about sales per square foot. Today, [shoppers] don’t need to come to a store to buy. They want to come to a store for human interaction. They need something to do that’s not on their screens anymore,” said Michelle Cordeiro Grant, founder and CEO of LIVELY, at the IGNITION: Redefining Retail event.
Women strolling around the city need a place to stop and rest, and they know they can rely on the LIVELY store for that. Some even came in and nursed their babies in the store.
“It’s like a private club. We want women to come in and feel comfortable. They can rely on us to come in here and not feel any pressure to shop,” Michelle added.
Discover ways you can create comfort for your customers during their visit without pushing them to buy. Grocery stores can provide free snacks in-store, while children’s stores can offer free use of a baby carrier for new moms.
10. Challenge the Store Concept to Better Serve Your Customers
LIVELY, a lingerie brand, considers its spaces more than just a place to purchase products. You’ll see customers chatting, sipping coffee, and taking photos in front of stunning walls.
“Retail in the past was about sales per square foot. Today, [shoppers] don’t need to come to a store to buy. They want to come to a store for human interaction. They need something to do that’s not on their screens anymore,” said Michelle Cordeiro Grant, founder and CEO of LIVELY, at the IGNITION: Redefining Retail event.
Women strolling around the city need a place to stop and rest, and they know they can rely on the LIVELY store for that. Some even came in and nursed their babies in the store.
“It’s like a private club. We want women to come in and feel comfortable. They can rely on us to come in here and not feel any pressure to shop,” Michelle added.
Discover ways you can create comfort for your customers during their visit without pushing them to buy. Grocery stores can provide free snacks in-store, while children’s stores can offer free use of a baby carrier for new moms.
11. Reuse
Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, is the top tourist shopping and dining destination. The promenade stretches for several blocks and
Source: https://www.shopify.com/retail/10-unique-visual-merchandising-ideas-you-should-steal
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