Advertising moves people toward goods; merchandising moves goods toward people.
Morris Hite
Visual merchandising is how products are presented in a store and how a store itself may be set up to attract potential customers. Effective implementation of this drives consumers to better identify and understand your product. It fosters curiosity about what you are offering and if done well, can lead to a purchase.
The fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry is where visual merchandising is greatly utilised to draw consumer attention. There are large amounts of capital invested by FMCG brands towards this, making it imperative to grasp what works and what doesn’t. Failure to do so means your product will never see the popularity you envisioned for it.
In the Modern Trade channel, the consumer picks the products while browsing through the retail store and brands need to attract their eyeballs to convert this footfall into purchases. Even in the General Trade channel where the consumers only interact with the shop owner for purchase – signages, banners, visi-coolers and other brand displays can build brand awareness and influence purchase decisions.
Directional signs, hierarchical compliance, and spacing all contribute to a seamless consumer experience. Tactics such as bright themes, soothing fonts, and funky (brand compliant) themes can create positive feelings, leading to impulse purchase. As many FMCG products are perishable or temperature sensitive, it is important that they don’t linger on shelves for too long. The faster they get sold the better it is for your business. All FMCG marketing strategies, therefore, are incomplete without effective visual merchandising.
Understanding Consumer Psychology
The first thing to remember before putting your product on the market is to create a buyer persona and ensure everything from taste and ingredients to design and packaging are on point! Naturally, with visual merchandising, the front line in the FMCG industry, you must be completely confident and clear about what you need to put up or set up to grab eyeballs.
Some of the psychological questions to ask yourself are:
- Whom are you targeting?
It is crucial to consider your target consumer’s idiosyncrasies while strategizing for visual merchandising displays. The first step is research on who your product caters to. Are your consumers young or are they older? What’s their average income? What rung of society do they belong to? What are their expectations? The more accurate your analysis, the more effective your visual merchandising campaign. Consider for instance, if you are targeting consumers who are well-to-do and come from posh neighbourhoods, they will appreciate tidiness, hygiene, organisation, and quality packaging.
- Are you tugging at consumer heartstrings?
Effective visual merchandising strategies tap into human nature. Consumers sometimes go beyond necessities while making purchases at a store or a supermarket. This is, at times, a subconscious action towards a feel-good experience where they pick up a chocolate bar at the checkout area, which they didn’t plan for. As a product owner, you need to take advantage of this urge through well-thought-out visual merchandising. Set up visual cues such as customised shelves and shelf breakers with lucrative and attractive signage, and also identify focal points for product placement to maximise sales.
- Are you generating enough interest?
Your product must interest your target consumer or it will never leave the shelf. If something is uninteresting to you, chances are that it’s the same for your consumers. Your visual merchandising campaign has one goal – generating enough interest that leads to a purchase. You will have succeeded in this when your customers gravitate towards your products and buy them over your competitors’. You can also keep some of your impulse items around your primary product to add to your profit margin.
Here’s an example – Let’s say you are selling coffee beans. Decide on a theme colour that screams “coffee” and a font for messaging that’s easily discernible. Next, stack your coffee bottles one above another or in a nice, distinctive pattern and spread coffee beans around the display. Then, add a nice, warm slogan that welcomes consumers to a nice, warm cup of coffee and you have created an environment conducive to coffee lovers. It’s all about piquing curiosity in consumers and then giving them a reason to make a purchase.
- Have you tapped into your customer’s imagination?
As a product owner or manufacturer, you must be able to create visual merchandising displays that speak to the consumer’s imagination. A purchase will be more likely if the consumer is able to picture themself using the product.
As an example, consider you are selling an energy drink. What comes to mind? Lightning, energy, and excitement, right? You can use these elements in an image attached to the side or frame of the visi-cooler depicting a couple drinking the product, and jumping up together at the same time. Add some lightning flashes and bright colours and your product is already better poised to be sold. Ensure the drink or product itself is easily accessible and you are good to go! Such tactics go much beyond simple shelf presence.
How Customers React to Visual Merchandising
Today, when consumers visit a store to buy something, they also buy into the experience of shopping itself. Product display and arrangement, bolstered with eye-catching props can have a significant impact on how shoppers feel about a product. An ordered planogram that makes products accessible and attractive to shoppers can potentially boost your profit margin. Let’s discuss the various tactics involved in visual merchandising in retail and the consumer’s reaction to them.
- All-Out Repetition
Repetition is everything. The goal is for consumers to see what you are selling again and again, be it strategic placement, parasite dispensers, sampling stations or product promoters drawing attention to your product. With a consistent theme that runs across packaging, placement, and even shop design, you can ensure people notice your product and potentially buy it.
- Always Stand Out
We have established that keeping things familiar can help connect to your consumers and potentially improve sales. While that is crucial, you must also push for novel visual merchandising tactics to keep repeat customers invested in your product. It is important to note that your competition will be evolving their strategy from time to time so it’s only smart that you do the same. When companies try out new themes and strategies based on qualitative research, they are able to put up displays and visual cues that are simultaneously great to look at and interesting.
- Leverage Consumer Nostalgia
Our holidays and festivals come in all sorts of visual themes and elements; from orange and spooky Halloween to red and blue Christmas to the myriad of holidays dedicated to worshipping gods. Recognizing and utilising such themes in visual merchandising will powerfully resonate with potential customers for whom those images and colours are a part of life. Once businesses execute campaigns based on seasonal festivities at the appropriate times, they will be able to sway customers emotionally towards their product.
Visual Merchandising Techniques You Must Know
- Let Your Colours Speak
More than any writing or tagline, it’s your product colours that draw attention before anything else. It is important to maintain uniformity in the colour palette you choose and strive towards a consistent experience for consumers. Choose a limited number of hues to ensure a harmonious sight and the same must go with your brand and objectives. For example, if you are selling packaged instant meals, you should use a combination of red and yellow or even red throughout in your visual merchandising props and strategy as these colours incite hunger.
Smart tip: Remember that bright colours and lighter shades grab more attention than dark colours. Use a combination of both; lighter shades to draw potential customers to your shelf or section and darker shades for contrast.
- Light Up the Aisle
The most fundamental necessity behind a successful visual merchandising campaign is to make it readily visible. Lighting plays a very important role here and the right lighting conditions will create the vibe you want your brand to give off. As more attention is drawn to your products, it gives you the opportunity to do more with visual merchandising.
It’s important to note that there are various kinds of lighting to take advantage of in order to boost your sales. Lighting is used for:
- Ambience – The primary lighting for a section and the basis on which to create the comfortable brand space you want to build. Make sure this illuminates all your products.
- Accentuation – This is used to draw customer attention towards specific products and/or key areas you want to highlight. Accent lighting is excellent for guiding customers where you want and in turn, boost sales.
- Decoration – As the name suggests, this is all about accentuating your stock and is more aesthetic than practical. This is especially true for holidays and special occasions when you must have an extra layer of lighting to stand out. As visual merchandising is all about attracting consumers to your product and blotting out the competition, decorative lighting is a must-have in your strategy.
- Make Customers Follow the Signs
Great signage is an art that not only highlights but also informs on your products and guides potential customers. It is a major factor for consumers to understand what you are selling and how it benefits them. There are some questions to be answered before you can create the perfect signage for your enterprise. Is it to highlight special deals? Is it to highlight product features? Or is it simply something general like pushing your brand name?
Chalking out a plan based on these questions will help you form the best visual merchandising design, and save both time and money. Signage can also be placed outside a store to inform shoppers about your product even before they enter the store. The right font, design, and size are important to grabbing and sustaining attention that brands desperately need for successful sales.
Signage is rightfully called the silent salesperson; effective signage is known to boost sales and some studies even claim that the majority of sales occur at the point of purchase (POP) by signage and other displays.
- Get To the Point
Of all your products, there must be one which you consider as your flagship. Or it may be a particular category you are best known for or maybe something you have just introduced. Or it could be all of these that you are pushing for sale at a store. Point of purchase (POP) displays are those that you can place around products you want to draw particular attention to. These are areas that will stand out in a sea of products and shelves. Be strategic about what you want to highlight. Successfully showcase special deals and products, eliminate clutter and grab eyeballs with a well-placed POP physical or digital display.
Smart tip: Similar to any visual merchandising element, POP displays must be highly noticeable and capture consumer imagination. Since displays are a significant investment and represent your brand voice, think of where they can be most effective in a store. Areas saturated with competitor items or an area where your flagship is getting camouflaged among your regular products is where a POP display may be most useful.
- Narrate a Story
Storytelling is the most natural and inventive way to tell consumers about your brand without it sounding like a sales pitch. Keep it direct, precise and not overlong, and you will generate a lot of curiosity, leading to a lot of attention. Be wary of long sentences and unusual verbiage as those can take away from your messaging, making the storytelling ineffectual. Short statements starting with a power word or very short bulleted lists are the best avenues for storytelling. The story must elucidate your brand identity, what you represent and what consumers can get out of your product. It’s just like telling your friend a story about your business.
Take for example that you sell milk and dairy products. Your story should be such that consumers looking at your visual merchandising display are mentally transported to a quaint farm with cows, milkmen, and maybe mountains and meadows to complete the picture. This would require careful planning to leave consumers with an image that says that your dairy products are sourced from a far better place than others. Every part of your merchandising must come together to create a holistic narrative that stands out from the plethora of such efforts out there.
- Place Your Products
Product placement is the idea of strategically placing products in the store to attract maximum attention and ultimately, lead to more purchases. A planogram is invaluable in this respect; it is a 2D overview of shelf space to accurately figure out where and how products should be placed, based on category, style, popularity, or even size. A planogram could be a photo, illustration or digital design and is a potent concept based on consumers’ buying habits. It also allows for uniformity of placement across stores.
Here are some product placement ideas to consider:
- Boost sales of items that sell slow by placing them in and around the bestselling products. This increases their visibility.
- Placing your pricey items at eye level and your inexpensive options above or below this will drive expensive purchases.
- Items prone to impulse buying should be placed around the payment counter where people line up to checkout. Customers are more likely to pick up a candy or breath mints here along with the rest of their shopping.
- Gather regular-use items together as this makes it more likely that consumers will buy more than one item.
- Seasonal Merrymaking
No man is an island. We have feelings and nostalgia that lead us to celebrate annual occasions. We are sensitive about it and whenever we come across something we have grown up with, we pause and think about it. This is what your visual merchandising should be able to take advantage of. If your visual merchandising design is in line with current festivities, your products automatically appear to be more relevant to consumers.
For example, red, green, and white colours and a life-sized Santa complete with a Christmas tree and reindeers (maybe) create a wonderful feel of the holiday season. On the other hand, diyas, empty firecracker boxes, and free sweets can build up a Diwali vibe in your section. You can build your props, displays, and merchandising strategy around these ideas.
Plan in advance, conduct adequate research to ensure you create a visual merchandising campaign that everyone finds relatable. Talk to the store owner and see if they are willing to decorate the rest of their store akin to your product section for consistency. This will help you double down on consumer emotions and buying trends and generate greater sales than on regular days.
- Technological Innovations
Our tastes are always changing as we embrace new age technologies and technical innovations around us. Visual merchandising must evolve with consumer expectations and current trends in technology. Digital signage and other advanced display options add that extra flair to a store. With today’s tech-savvy demographic, product owners are under constant pressure to innovate and remain relevant in this digital age.
To sum up, technological innovation in visual merchandising:
- Enhances customer experience
- Saves money
- Makes the shopping experience more contemporary and entertaining for consumers
- Can show more with simple tweaks and potentially take less space in-store
- Enables the brands to effectively plan and execute their visual merchandising strategy
Some novel innovations available today are:
- 3-Dimensional Viewing
Showcasing your products in 3D is fast gaining traction in various countries. This adds a wow-factor and the messaging seems to leap out of the display. Naturally, this attracts more attention and generates more sales.
- Smart Applications
Companies like BeatRoute have come up with technology that brands can use to select the right set of stores to make visual merchandising investments. At the same time, they offer workflows within their field sales app that sales representatives or product promoters can use to check if product placement is in line with their planogram, check their share of shelf vis-a-vis their competitors and receive a quantitative score for the visual merchandising compliance at any store. A low score of any deviation from the planogram would trigger immediate alerts to the persons in charge of visual merchandising campaigns. This allows everyone – sales representatives to regional managers to merchandising teams – access to information on one single platform to make quick decisions.
- Quick Response (QR) Code
A 2D barcode, the QR code has black squares on a white background and can provide more information on scanning than a regular bar code can. These can contain reviews, video links, and product details and discounts.
- Going Digital
Digital signage is super easy to modify at a moment’s notice and can display a whole lot of content in an eye-catching manner to drive more sales.
- Interactive Options
One thing all consumers favour is interaction. Touch screen kiosks painted in company colours are two-pronged; they promote a brand while boosting brand presence in the store by acting as a one-stop shop for product information. Displays and navigation on-screen is typically fun and creative, making for a pleasant experience.
The Challenges of Visual Merchandising and Their Solutions
Step 1. Choosing The Stores
- Determining Sales Potential of Stores: Before anything else, it is necessary for a brand to identify suitable stores worthwhile for their visual merchandising efforts. What this means is that for the strategy of visual merchandising to work, you will need to ensure that there are sufficient footfalls in a store coupled with acceptable sales for your product category.
What are customers going for? Are your competitors successfully selling their stock here? Are there any remediable issues at the root of slow sales? What sales uplift can we expect from a particular store if we make X amount of visual merchandising investment there? All these are on the frontline of choosing the right stores for your brand. Always remember, consumer interest should be present for your merchandising efforts to bear fruit.
- Location And locality: The location of a store is of massive importance as it directly correlates with how visible you are to consumers. If a store is deep inside a neighbourhood and far from the main road or street, there will be far fewer footfalls and, in turn, less sales. Additionally, the people residing in the locality around the store are also of importance.
For example, if you are selling pricey perfumes, you will want to make sure that the store is somewhere high-income consumers have easy access to.
- Tone, Aesthetics and Space: The look and feel of the stores in question must match with the kind of visual merchandising you are planning for each.
For example, a breakfast cereal campaign will be out of place in a store which primarily deals in medicines and sanitary items, even though they sell cereals well enough.
Another important thing to consider for your campaign planning is whether the store has the necessary space to accommodate your visual merchandising plans. Consider that you notice excellent sales for your soft drink product at a store and decide to add a visi-cooler there. But if you place a visi-cooler without making sure there’s space for it in the store where it will be readily visible to the consumers, that’s an unnecessary investment. A loss.
There should be adequate aisle space for customers to walk on, shelf size that can fit your items properly, and overall hygienic conditions for your product placement.
Without these, it’s a wasted exercise from the beginning.
The Solution: Your sales representative needs to visit the stores, and gather the relevant data points which will help the brand build a data-driven profile of each store. Some of the data points can include the exact location, neighbourhood type, store size, store stype, competitor presence and activity at the store, display opportunities at the store etc. It should also include photographs of the store and the areas where the displays can be set up. This profiling data can then be used to segment the stores in order of priority and your visual merchandising campaign can be formed accordingly.
Step 2. Investment On Visual Merchandising
Once you have zeroed in on your stores, you now have to figure out what your investment would be in each. This will depend on your consumer, the demographic you are targeting, upcoming holidays, and how much sales uplift you are expecting from each store.
The Solution: The brand needs to calculate potential sales uplift and visual merchandising ROI from the available store profiling data and determine the investment that they should be making on each store. They can also use the profiling data to understand what kind of display setup, signages and shelf displays they should set up at each store.
In some cases, the sales rep might notice a display opportunity or receive a display request from the store staff. In such cases, the brand needs to provide the sales reps with a workflow to raise these requests to their manager or the merchandising team.
Step 3. Compliance
Seeing is believing and when customers see your merchandising, they are supposed to be impressed and make a purchase. This principle is dependent on your setup looking pristine and operational. You may have a contract with the store where you put up an electronic screen, a cut-out gate or a standee, or set up a visi-cooler.
This is hardly enough as your displays or equipment may malfunction or get moved to a location non-compliant with company interests.
What happens when your celebrity brand ambassador is not visible to consumers because the prop holding up the cut-out fell down? Or when a customer opens your visi-cooler for a cold drink but instead wraps their fingers around a warm bottle? Your brand image takes a hit and you end up with stunted sales or a stock of wasted products, leading to a terrible bottom line.
There is a very distinct image that you and your merchandising team have decided on for your visual merchandising strategy. A prop with cut-outs here, a sampling there, the visi-cooler on the right near the entrance, the products in the middle shelf on the first rack on the left, and so on. Whatever your vision, there is a body of research behind it and you’d want to stick to it.
Also, share of shelf is no joke but something laid down in stone in the contractual agreement between store and brand. If, for example, you have both agreed upon 50% share of shelf for your brand (you pay a rent for it), placing any item outside of your brand here is considered a breach. Should you choose to, you can take legal action or even stop your shelf rental until the issue is resolved.
However, despite your best efforts, a contract and its ramifications, store owners may still rearrange your setup according to what they think is best. Customers may also do so unintentionally when they pick up your products from the shelves and put them back incorrectly. If you don’t fix this issue fast, you could miss out on critical sales opportunities.
The Solution: Regular audits are critical to address and solve maintenance issues to visual merchandising components. Sales representatives or merchandising teams must accurately identify and record everything. To ensure this, companies must make it mandatory for their sales reps and merchandisers to do the audits while on location. The audit form will have questions covering all aspects of the inspection or auditing process, from condition of displays to share of shelf compliance. All the data entered into the application would be objective and precise, allowing for a structured mode of information transfer from sales representatives to decision makers.
Step 4. Negative Return on Investment
- Overshadowed By Competitors: The FMCG industry can be highly-competitive to the point of being cutthroat. You follow your planogram, set up highly exciting or elegant signage, take care of factors like lighting, shelf breakers, and shelf labels. You do a whole lot of different things to create your own identity in the store that sets you apart. And yet, competitors will sometimes put their items on top of yours, push your products aside and take up some of your shelf space, keep cold items in your visi-cooler, or even put their standees in your allotted space. All of these divert consumer attention from you to them, the very thing you hoped to avoid with your visual merchandising efforts.
- Inconclusive Campaign Research: For any visual merchandising campaign to be genuinely effective in the long-term, the merchandising team or the team in charge must research buying habits, customer expectations, and trends. This will help develop ideas and components with consumer sentiments in mind and you will be able to anticipate what will work and what won’t.
For example, if there is a sudden global pandemic and you are a mineral water manufacturer but fail to capitalise on the growing concerns with anti-viral signage and more, then your visual merchandising campaign will never hit the desired mark.
The Solution: The previous solution on audits is applicable here. Additionally, placing product promoters at high-priority stores with good sales potential can ensure that the visual merchandising remains compliantly set up. Finally, all campaign decisions must go through proper channels seamlessly, from representative to decision maker, before an idea is greenlit. This will ensure more minds contribute to the planning, eliminating potential roadblocks and addressing previous misses for a better visual merchandising campaign.
How BeatRoute Helps You with Visual Merchandising
BeatRoute has configurable workflows which help brands in building data-driven profiles of the stores to:
- Select the right stores for visual merchandising
- Decide on the right investment and display type for each selected store
- Audit the merchandising compliance on an ongoing basis at low cost
- Communicate any issues found during audits to the merchandising team for resolving
For audits, brands can easily create configurable audit forms from BeatRoute’s admin panel and customise them for specific stores according to the in-store merchandising. During store visits, sales representatives can accurately capture data in these forms within a few minutes.
The audit forms contain Shelf Eye, BeatRoute’s proprietary tool that allows sales representatives and merchandisers to automatically document the accurate face count of the items on the shelf and the share of shelf compliance. They simply have to point their camera towards the shelf and they can instantly see their calculated share of shelf vis-a-vis their competitors.
A quantitative score can be assigned to each store based on the data captured in the audit form. If the score is below a certain threshold, alerts can be automatically triggered to the managers or merchandising team responsible for fixing the detected issues.
The Final Word
FMCG is a diverse and lucrative industry, stretching from regular, daily use products to premium consumables. As such, it caters to both well-to-do sections of society and middle to lower middle classes. With many FMCG items being food items, perishables or with a fast-approaching expiry date, it is imperative to focus on attracting consumers as soon as products hit the shelves.
But it is not enough to stick to the norm.
The future is uncertain, always shifting. New technology, new events, evolving buying decisions, socio-political factors, and globalisation are all responsible for an ever-changing landscape in FMCG and effectively, in visual merchandising. We have already seen the advent of digitisation in this regard.
This is where BeatRoute offers a seamless but useful experience in helping your visual merchandising campaign to run smoothly and effectively. We have built it with experience, care, and foresight to ensure you get the most out of it, visual merchandising or otherwise!
You can book a free demo of our visual merchandising software here.
