Walk into any store and ask yourself, ‘What’s on sale?’ See anything? If not, management has failed to stimulate the traffic flow. Ask yourself, ‘What’s special?’ See anything? If not, management has failed to excite customers.
 
Now do the same with your store. Stand outside the front of your store and look at the entrance. What is the sell-story? Have you flagged customers with an incentive that says, ‘Inside there is something exciting happening.’? Step inside the front door. Take a pen and paper in hand, and capture exactly what you see. Take pictures of every inch of your store. Create an electronic or physical photo album that walks you through your displays and signage. What’s exciting? What’s new? What’s different? Why should customers stop and look? Why should they buy now?

If your displays would stop a parade and make people look and buy, congratulations. If not, start by setting up at least one feature display that looks great and gives people reasons to buy now. 

Make your displays make sense.
Are there rules for how to make wireless store displays look great? Maybe. The five principles that follow are derived from Gestalt psychology, a school of thought that explains how people make sense of the things they see. Look at your visual merchandising and ask yourself these questions :

1. balance. Is your display of wireless phones, accessories, and services at rest, or is it thrown around higgledy-piggledy? Is it stable visually? Where, if anywhere, in your wireless display(s) are your customers drawn? Can you find a center of attention in the display?
2. line of sight. Does merchandise line up? Does the display lead the eye along a path? Are displays below the line of sight? Are displays above the line of sight?
3. contrast. Do products and service stories stand out from the background? Does background color dominate attention?
4. patterns. Does your display of phones and accessories create a pattern? Are like products grouped? Are non-similar, but comple-line of sight mentary, products grouped (e.g. phones with headset or other acces¬sories)? How are your patterns defined? Signage? Color blocks?
5. definition. Does your signage define what the customer
sees? Does signage give customers reasons to buy?  Does signage tell customers why they should choose to buy from your store?

Display universal & wireless impulse items at your point of sale.
Supermarkets have no salespeople. Instead they depend on their displays to move inventory. And what do you find when you take the last few steps at the check-out line? Special displays that go from the eye to the foot. For children there’s candy; for adults there are magazines with headlines such as, ‘Statues of Elvis Found on Mars’. You’ll find glue, batteries, and shaving razors: the little ev¬eryday necessities and curiosities that retailers call universal needs and impulse items.

In his book, Contemporary Retailing, author William Bolen says, ‘Point-of-purchase displays are the last chance to influence customer behavior. The stakes are high since studies show that point-of-pur-chase displays do sell products. Almost one of two purchases in supermarkets are unplanned impulse purchases.’

Does this mean that you clutter your check-out area with mer¬chandise? No. It means you choose carefully those items in your store that have universal appeal– the things that anyone who comes into your store can use, such as cases, holsters, or belt clips;headsets, chargers, or extra batteries – and create a high impact display that produces a final buying impulse.
 
Bolen adds this observation : ‘Most retail point-of-purchase displays [fail to] make a strong statement. The impact of those that do is great. It will pay the retailer to work on having good point-of-purchase displays. Why? … Increased sales.’ 

Straighten and refurbish displays two or three times a day.
An associate and I walked into a wireless store. Our salesman greeted us, ‘Do you have any questions?’ And he meant it. We had to pull information out of him. He only spoke when we asked questions. He asked us no questions; made no presentation; he did not show phones; he did not explain rate plans or discuss pricing.

Although the store layout was excellent, it suffered from neglect : masking tape held wires to fixtures, dust covered displays, the front window sign had fallen, half of the fixtures had no inventory displayed, several gondolas had completely empty slot-wall, one broken sign read, ‘cellula ’.

In a second store in the same mall, the salesman performed a rate plan dump. End of sale. Someone had ripped off all the dummy batteries from all the dummy phones, and this is the condition in which they remained on display.
What message does your store send prospective customers when they see torn, ripped, scr atched, or smudged displays? Damaged, dusty, & dirty products? Empty holes and gaps, where product should be displayed? Disarranged and disorderly presentations?
To enlist your store in your campaign to turn shoppers into buyers, maintain constant vigilance, fix or replace what is broken, fill voids with product, clean what is dirty.

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©2005 by The Edmond-Howard Network