Help Your Product Stand Out Among the Crowd

It's not easy to stand out from the crowd. This is especially true in today’s retail environment.

If you're selling a product that goes on the shelves of a store you do not own, how well that product stands out from the crowd will oftentimes determine how well it sells. Each time a person walks through the door of a store where your product is being sold is an opportunity to make a new sale, to gain a new long-term customer. If your product doesn’t stand out from the crowd — i.e., it isn’t displayed in an enticing way — there’s a good chance those customers won’t ever come into contact with it.

Visual merchandising helps products stand out. What a product looks like, including how it’s packaged and displayed, is perhaps the most important factor in whether a new customer will give your product a shot.

The average person’s attention span is eight seconds or less. In addition, 65 percent of people say they’re visual learners. Visuals increase message retention by 42 percent. If you didn’t think what something looks like mattered before, you better reconsider now.

In an age when shoppers seem to be using the internet to make an increasingly high rate of purchases, consumers are still visiting brick-and-mortar stores on a daily basis. Why? Because consumers like the experience; it’s an opportunity to interact with the items they're thinking about purchasing.

The good news for companies that sell products in retail stores are these consumers are impulse shoppers. According to a study conducted by Point-of-Purchase Advertising International, 62 percent of people said they bought products on impulse, a 7 percent increase from only two years before that.

The rise of e-commerce has helped make consumers even more impulse driven. That’s why visual merchandising is more important than ever. Visual merchandising is a way to tell your product’s story to a human with a short attention span.

The first goal in visual merchandising is to make sure your product is seen. If it's sitting on a shelf with other similar products, it will be a crapshoot as to whether it will ever be seen. Having your product displayed separately on an endcap or separate display increases the chances of it being seen.

The next step is to entice a shopper to stop at your product’s display. You need to consider the design of your display, including how it’s laid out as well as what colors and words you use to describe your product. Colors play a crucial role in visual merchandising.

A recent study found people are more likely to recall a color over an object or specific product. The study also found shoppers make purchasing decisions within 90 seconds of interacting with a product, and 60 percent of that decision is made on color alone.

In order for consumers to decide to purchase a product, however, they can’t just see it. They’ll need to interact with it. Retail shopping studies have shown that more than half of shoppers who hold a product will purchase something in that category. More times than not, if your merchandise display catches a shopper’s eye and entices them to physically explore it, he or she will make a purchase of either your product or another in your category.

Visual merchandising will maximize the aesthetics of your product and increase the chances shoppers see it, interact with it and then hopefully purchase it. It’s an essential tool in today’s retail marketplace, where the competition is fierce at every location for every dollar.

Jerry Smith is owner of Rhino Global Solutions, a company that designs and produces POP displays with the goal of increasing sales.