In today’s fiercely competitive retail landscape, brand-building has emerged as a critical strategy for retailers aiming to establish themselves as industry leaders.
Coresight Research, a global data-driven research and advisory organization in the retail industry, highlights the significance of focusing on brand building to excel in the retail space.
Visual merchandisers create reliable and unique customer experiences that coincide with powerful brand-building by creating consistent marketing efforts in every store’s displays.
However, creating messages that resonate in a timely fashion is difficult to tackle alone. Brand-building might have its start with a creative solution, but execution needs to be much more strategic.
Creative ideation can be the starting point for brand-building, effective store execution requires a significantly more strategic approach to take ideation to success.
Coresight Research hits the nail on the head with brand-building being a certain path to success, but how can a visual merchandiser react quickly enough to create retail success through brand-building?
Brand Differentiation
According to Coresight Research, exceptional brand-building is the differentiating factor that sets successful retailers apart from their competitors.
Visual merchandisers act as brand ambassadors. They’re entrusted with creating immersive experiences that resonate with customers and leave a lasting impression. By aligning visual merchandising efforts with the brand’s identity, values, and target audience, retailers can establish a distinct brand image and foster strong customer loyalty.
Understanding the store’s key sales-drivers and how customers interact with displays is crucial to understanding market trends and reacting quickly enough to create and communicate store plans that create impact.
Brand Compliance
Brand compliance is an essential aspect of superior brand building, but this aspect of display implementation is difficult to manage with speed. Visual merchandisers must ensure that their displays and presentations adhere to the brand’s guidelines and aesthetic standards.
Coresight Research emphasizes the importance of in-store and online channels impacting the customer experience. While online experiences move so fast, visual merchandisers need physical stores to keep up to remain as consistent as possible.
Ensuring brand compliance in real time is a necessity for brand building.
Customer Experience Enhancements
The customer experience is critical in the retail industry, and visual merchandisers play a crucial role in shaping it.
Coresight Research emphasizes the need to create engaging and memorable experiences that captivate customers’ attention to further brand-building. Innovative approaches to engaging designs are a fabulous idea but extremely difficult to implement and gather data on without customer reporting tools.
Without real-time feedback, creating experiences that enhance the brand experience for customers can often be a stab in the dark.
The Ultimate Solution: Retail Technology
Retail technology solutions can empower visual merchandisers to elevate their craft and react immediately to the growing marketplace trends to strengthen the retail brand. One of Coresight Research’s pillars to building a strong brand is integrating technology into the visual merchandiser’s everyday workflow.
Solutions, like One Door, can help with the rapid deployment of visual changes (like signage and interactive displays) and ensure in-store brand compliance is adhered to in real-time.
Visual merchandisers also have readily available analytics to understand exactly what is going on in their store, whether it be brand compliance, product compliance, the status of the store team’s execution, and so much more.
One Door’s solution also streamlines communication efforts so visual merchandisers can ship out plans with straightforward instructions.
Not to mention, in-store teams spend less time setting up the fixtures, and more time creating a better customer experience through displays and customer service, something Coresight Research also identified as a core pillar of brand-building.
One Door easily drives plans to the individual store level further bettering the customer experience on a local level.
Visual merchandisers hold the key to superior brand-building in the retail industry, but they need the right tools to be successful.
By embracing technology and leveraging its power to ensure brand compliance, enhance customer experience, and drive successful sales, brand building can drive new successes in the retail space.
As Coresight Research suggests, the combination of exceptional brand building and tech-driven visual merchandising is a winning formula that sets retailers apart, creating memorable experiences and fostering unwavering customer loyalty in today’s competitive retail landscape.
Is your visual merchandising team prepared to build a top-tier brand?
Learn how T-Mobile went from 150 to 17,000 planograms with a two-person team using One Door: