Part of the reason is simple familiarity. Even the most radical departure from accepted retail behavior becomes a known quantity, then an expected quantity, then a familiar quantity, and ultimately an invisible quantity that slips into the general background and clutter of retail. In 1994, the neon signs, the metal racks, and the pick-up truck of t-shirts distinguished Old Navy as something new, novel, and actually exciting. Fifteen years later, their novelty has evaporated and they pack no visual punch.
The Commodity As Powerful Visual Chorus
Every reader can conjure up a mental picture of the vegetable bins in the local grocery. Usually they are half filled, festooned with uninviting scraps of broccoli crowns or carrot greens or corn silk, and look completely utilitarian. They are bins of vegetables, nothing more and certainly not memorable.
It's a very short conceptual leap from those bins to tables of t-shirts, aisles of Barbies, shelves of light bulb packaging-- all picked over and disarrayed and left askew-- that we generally encounter and simply ignore as standard retail background clutter.
Then there are the vegetable bins at Whole Foods.
These take the simple commodity of bulk vegetables and the utilitarian notion of a bin and toss them away. In their place, Whole Foods provides a powerful vegetable assault on complacency. It demands to be noticed. It elevates the produce displayed from simple vegetables found in any local grocery store to an experience, to something special, to something memorable.
Whole Foods has done for lowly bulk vegetables what dozens and dozens of retailers fail to do every day with higher price point merchandise that is intrinsically more compelling.
The Transporting Experience
Great visual display is a transporting experience. It removes the browsing shopper from the day-to-day. It takes her away from cluttered aisles and pawed-over merchandise in skewed stacks and crammed rounders. Instead, it sends her into an experience directly and exclusively with selected product.
Anthropologie is another retailer that understands the absolute transporting power of focused visual display. Its stores are composed of multiple islands of clothing, books, housewares, beauty aids, jewelry, decor. Each island is an experience unto itself, a small vacation from mundane retail into a personal experience of pure visual discovery. Each invites us to explore how the cover colors of a book's graphics match to those of a pillow's pattern and to those in a bottle of bath salts and a dozen other items in different categories and on differing topics.
Thought provoking visual displays. Unanticipated visual displays. These are simple but hugely powerful tools to focus shopper attention and transport merchandise from retail clutter to customer consideration.
--Timothy Cohrs
