Wal-Mart Stores—disruption builds sales

Wal-Mart stores can be as large as 300,000 square feet for a SuperCenter, which includes a full grocery as well as all the traditional dry goods categories.  Enticing shoppers to notice anything is simply daunting in this vast warehouse of vendor-supplied packaging and vendor-supplied displays all competing for attention with proprietary graphics in colors chosen to stand out. More difficult still is getting shoppers to pay attention to basic goods not related to any major holiday, gift season, or national sporting event.

 

Here is how it got done for basic baking supplies: aluminum foil, flour, chocolate chips, peanut butter, plastic wrap, baking trays, etc.

 

• A 16-foot long metal shelving unit was designated by Merchandising and Store Ops to house baking supplies. Nothing glamorous and no sale items—just the basics.
  
• A simple retail strategy was developed by Creative Marketing: make the shelving unit into a separate, defined destination within the visual blur of the store.
  
• A three-pronged tactical approach was deployed: name the unit, visually display the potential end products, visually display the end-user. Which meant luscious photographs of fall pies, cookies, and cupcakes on their own or being devoured by great looking children were used to wrap the top of the shelving unit and create an island of focus in the flurry of the store.
  

 

The results showed the power of building focus as a disruption in the blizzard of vendor packaging; the power of creating a focus through signage; and the power of telling the shopper what to think of the goods arrayed before her rather than leaving her alone to fill in all of the blanks and make all of the connections between these basic items and her family's happiness. 

This simple, 16-ft metal shelving rack:

• exceeded plan by $65 million
• exceeded previous year by 20.6%
• exceeded margin plan by 2%.

--Timothy Cohrs

www.TimothyCohrs.com

Retail Signage—those three common objections

When stores fall silent they leave money on the table, shelf, or rounder. They let their customers decide everything about their goods: what features to notice, what constitutes a collection, where good/better/best reside, why something minor may be interesting or will be overlooked, and what constitutes the value proposition. And when retailers do this, there are often three standard reasons:

 

• We can’t afford it. With margins already pressed, the pennies, dimes, and dollars that signage, endcaps, and in-aisle features may cost are seen only as bottom line depth charges, rather than an essential fuel for sales.
• We don’t have the manpower. Having cut staff in each of the last three or four quarters, Store Ops barely has a crew capable of getting merchandise out of the backroom on time, let alone deal with transient, time-consuming signage programs whose importance has never been hinted at, let alone explained.
• We sell merchandise, not signs. Usually this objection comes from Merchandising and it can, at its roots, hide a couple of frightening lacks. Namely, that there is nothing special about the items in store—no proprietary theme, no function or feature stories, no seasonal echo of what the brand exists to express—nothing that differentiates this delivery from what the merchant across the street sells.

 

The business answer to all of these objections is that no retailer can afford to leave customers to form their own impressions. Selling is what stores are about—not just displaying goods and keeping aisles neat. Without a sales staff large enough to sell individual customers on individual items, signage must take up the slack and sell, sell, sell.

 --Timothy Cohrs

www.TimothyCohrs.com

 

 

Retail signage– essential tool now in decline

From big box merchants to intimate specialty stores, signage is in retreat. It seems as though there is nothing retailers feel they need to tell their customers other than a percentage off, a two-for offer, or to point the way to the clearance section. When stores fall silent they give up all responsibility for shaping the shopper’s perception of their wares. In other words, they abandon the task of selling.

 

J. Crew Gets It—signage is your salesman

On a recent trip to J. Crew I found myself in the back of the store in the men’s section. Before me stretched a wide wooden table covered in its entirety with neatly folded tops and flanked at each end by a bust form. In the middle of all this merchandise, raised on a little metal stand at the far edge of the table, was a beige canvas sneaker that I easily could have overlooked. But I did not.

The reason I noticed the shoe was because there was a simple declarative sign beside it, a sign that told me to consider the sneaker, to see that it wasn’t common, to note that it had been distressed, and to take the next step and think of it as part of an outfit. No sales associate came up and steered my attention toward this shoe, and certainly no personal shopper was there to make me consider how it may work into my wardrobe. Instead, the silent signage salesman told me to pay attention.

 

Around the store were lots of other such salesmen—some announcing categories and some, like the sneaker sign, highlighting individual items. Not too many and not in every category, just an occasional nudge to notice something, to actually sell me.

 --Timothy Cohrs

www.TimothyCohrs.com