Category Archives: Signage

Retail is detail – customer demands increase with new technology

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The least enjoyable part of most shopping experiences is queuing to pay. Once customers have made their selections they want to get out of the store as quickly and easily as possible. Some customers will even choose not to go to stores with long queues. In fact several retailers who cut the number of staffed checkouts to reduce costs have now reinstated them because their sales loses were greater than the cost savings. One solution to reducing queue sizes is self service checkouts however Read more [...]

Shelf edge is critical for brands

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Brands are starting to pay much more attention to the messages that they give to shoppers at the shelf edge. One example is from Tim Cofer, President of Europe at Mondelez, the owners of Cadbury's and other snack brands. Tim told Marketing Week  "If we are not absolutely brilliant at the point of sale then we will not win."  Other brands are also putting a much stronger focus on the shelf edge and a number of retailers are talking to us about their own brand products too. Tim summed up the Read more [...]

Making mobile apps work in stores

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Mobile will be an increasingly useful tool for many shoppers and retailers are right to invest in technology that will help shoppers and increase revenues. The challenge with any new technology is that it must work as expected by the shopper or they will simply stop using it. So every aspect of using a mobile needs to work smoothly. For many mobile applications once the software has been written and tested there is a good chance that it will work as expected every time. The one area that is Read more [...]

Reasons to buy at the shelf edge

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Why do lots of shoppers walk out of electrical and electronics stores without buying anything and what can you do about it? Most of us don't buy electrical and electronic products that often and therefore few of us are experts on assessing all of the options available. This makes having enough confidence to believe that we are purchasing the best product for our needs quite difficult. Sometimes it's so difficult that it puts shoppers off making a purchase at all and a sale is lost. What about Read more [...]

Signage – The top 5 issues for store staff

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Signage is a recurring theme that we keep hearing about on our visits to various stores.  It's obviously a problem area for quite a number of in-store staff so we asked what specific aspects caused them the most frustration.  They were: The time it takes to sort out tickets and signage when it's sent to the store The delay, or sometimes impossibility, of getting replacement tickets Compliance and knowing which tickets are most current Dealing with all the other non ticket signage Read more [...]

Retail is detail

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Tesco's Chief Executive, Philip Clarke, emphasised in his strategy for putting Tesco UK back on track that "retail is detail".  I'm sure that we all agree with him. The challenge for Tesco, and most other retailers, is that shoppers have increasingly high expectations about their shopping experience. They have a much lower tolerance of long checkout queues, missing price tickets, misleading promotions and poor customer service.  Not only has the base line risen but it keeps rising. For Read more [...]

Promotional tickets that sell

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As retailers move closer to an omnichannel strategy we need to see what more can be learnt from the eCommerce channel and applied at the shelf edge in stores. Of course ways to increase revenue and profitability are particularly interesting. One source of information about eCommerce is a benchmark report from RSR called eCommerce 2012.  In this report RSR identified what retailers thought were the top opportunities to increase eCommerce revenues. At the bottom of the list of opportunities Read more [...]

What’s important in a new signage or ticketing system? Survey results.

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Thanks to everyone who completed our survey and shared their comments with us. One of our objectives for the survey was to find out if there were significant differences in the views of  IT, Retail Operations and Marketing about what's important in a new signage or ticketing system.  Representatives from all three functions are involved in selecting and operating a signage or ticketing system but we discovered that their priorities are often quite different. At the top of IT's priorities Read more [...]

Get more customers to buy now

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One of the most effective ways to get customers to make a positive buying decision is if they believe the product they really like might not be available if they return later. In stores like Forever21 and TK Maxx, where customer know that this is almost certainly true, a higher proportion of store visits result in a purchase. This obviously works in fast moving fashion but how can other types of retailer boost sales by creating the same urgency to buy? A reduced price or offer is one tool to grow Read more [...]

Why should I buy this one?

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A recent report from McKinsey called The value proposition in multichannel retailing pointed out that retailers can carefully craft product assortments in ways that influence customer value perceptions. For instance, in categories with clear “good,” “better,” and “best” ranges—such as flat-screen TVs retailers can display models side by side, attract consumers with hot prices on good models, and then encourage trading up by clearly articulating the features and benefits of the better Read more [...]