Visual Merchandising: Create Effective Product Display for Any Type of Store
Interior Design is used to attract customer to your store and make them stay around. After that, the problem changed to how we can persuade customer to buy our product. There are 3 key points to make people buy your products. Choosing the right merchandise, give appropriate price and display your goods correctly. These 3 points cannot be separated, because if one of them is missing, then the chance for customers to buy your products drops significantly.
Among those 3, shop owners usually spare the least efforts for the third point, displaying the products. This is sad, because this is a very important point that even has a term dedicated to itself, namely, Visual Merchandising.
In this article, we’ll list some of the most effective method for Visual Merchandising to create an effective product display.
Visual Merchandising Tips:
- Know Your Customers
The first step in creating an attractive interior design for visual merchandising is knowing your customers inside out. By inside out, it’s not just about knowing the demographic data like range of age, gender, education level and income. By inside, we really meant doing things like studying their psychology using psychographics and knowing the customers’ overall behaviour in buying products.
In other words, we’re not only targeting customers individually, but we target their lifestyles. For example, popular retail brand Abercrombie & Fitch has been using its admittedly unique Interior Design works to target 18-24 years old people that has “All American” and “Cool Kids” traits.
From a Reddit thread by A&F Employee, the company creates its design and policies based on their complete research about their target customer and most importantly, their customers’ parents! Yes, they have done a very thorough research that also involves the targeted customers’ parents’ conditions. This is why this brand can be so popular, because they know their customers completely.
- Create a Focal Point
To attract customers’ attention, it’s better to put some display in your shop interior design where they can focus their eyes on. The focal point must be on the eye level of the customers. Usually, to create a focal point, a shop will arrange their display in a set of 3.
The reason behind this is, based on a research about connection between human behaviours and symmetrical products, symmetrical things will attract human attention easier and asymmetrical things will just make the customers keep moving and don’t care.
- Change Your Display Regularly
The world is always changing, that’s what people say. What’s popular this week or month will be an old thing thereafter. Sometimes the trends even change in just a day. As a Retail Store owner, you have to follow the trends and make a schedule to change your store’s display every certain period of time.
How often you change your display can only be decided by yourself. See the news and trends in your business and change it accordingly. Too late to change can make the customers think that your store is outdated and rigid. Too frequent changes is also not good, because it can make people think you are indecisive. Do some research and keep experimenting to know how often you should change your display.
- Influence Customers Senses
By adding a little classic aroma, music and dramatic lighting inside your store, you can create good impression to your shoppers. It is also important to match the type of ambiance with the lifestyle and culture of your target market.
We found out that the effects of store interior design and environment for emotional, cognition and shopping behaviour are different in each country because of differences in culture and adaptation level of environmental stimuli. Store environment effects on service quality assessment and shopping behaviours also vary due to consumers’ shopping experience with a store.
- Tidy Them Up
When displaying products, it can’t be helped that sometimes when customers intended to buy a product but half way they changed their mind and just put it in any place. This is very troublesome, but you can’t forbid the customers to not to touch. Because if you do that, you are telling them just to see and not buy anything. Touch sense is one of the most deciding factors that influence customers whether they will buy a product or not.
Never leave your display untidy because it will reflect on your shop quality. You don’t need to tidy up every time people come in to your store. Organise your display when it’s unsightly or 3 times a day and rearrange whole store when closing time.