When shoppers enter brick-and-mortar stores, they expect their interactions to be even more fulfilling than online shopping. Interactive retail store displays provide the means to give them this engaging, personal and immersive shopping experience. New digital innovation options meet today’s shoppers’ evolving needs and inspire more purchases by reaching them at the right moment with the right message.
It also taps strong consumer preferences for a human, in-person experience at retailers, even with the increasing integration of artificial intelligence. This is backed up by data from PwC that shows 46% of consumers value seeing and touching products, and 40% enjoy the instant gratification of an in-store purchase. Remarkably, the affinity grows with Gen Z, 60% of whom use stores for discovery and 56% for purchases.
Seamlessness across all channels is another expectation that digital displays, kiosks and other technologies can help deliver. As a result, retailers who leverage them effectively can meet customers where they are with a multi-sensory, immersive shopping experience that feels both personal and easy. Here’s how.
Brick-and-mortar stores remain vital for retail, but shoppers still want in-person shopping to be more like it is online: seamless, immersive and interactive. All three can be achieved when retailers leverage digital solutions, such as displays and kiosks, and those that do see significant benefits.
A great example is Good American, a size-inclusive and diverse fashion brand co-founded by Khloé Kardashian. Two Samsung LED Displays welcome customers in the entryway of the retail store location in Century City, Los Angeles, while a large-format display further inside the store showcases inventory. A 98-inch vertical display of Khloé offers a bit of spectacle and fun that works well on social media.
The social media element is powerful, too. It encourages customers to interact with the display and share the experience with a potential pool of new customers. If a person has a lot of followers, the impact can be even greater on the bottom line. According to the Influencer Marketing Report by Sprout Social, 49% of all consumers are inspired by influencer posts to make daily, weekly or monthly purchases. As such, businesses that create dynamic, immersive experiences that appeal to social media may reap significant rewards.
With an intuitive, all-in-one payment and ordering system, self-service kiosks can also make the shopper journey more seamless. Creating an “endless aisle,” retail devices like Samsung Windows All-In-One Kiosk allow customers to order products that aren’t currently on the shelf, and the same kiosk can be used for quick self-checkout and more.
When it comes to customer journeys, personalization has become the credo, and retailers have every reason to recognize and act on that. In fact, according to a report by Deloitte, nearly 75% of consumers are not only more likely to buy products from brands that deliver personalization, but they’ll also spend 37% more. The same report showed tremendous gains for personalization leaders in revenue goals, customer loyalty and purchase frequency.
Retail stores can implement interactive displays such as Samsung Interactive Display to customize and curate the in-person shopper journey. Linked to Bluetooth-based location services, the displays can greet customers with a personalized message when they enter the store, as well as provide user-friendly wayfinding — even step-by-step directions to a specific section of the store and certain products. Samsung’s QB13R-TM Series provides a 13-inch display, ideal for placing screens throughout a retail environment, while Samsung QMR-T Series allows stores to showcase the excitement of their brands on 32-inch, 43-inch or 55-inch displays.
This becomes all the more effective with a robust content management system (CMS) like Samsung VXT. Not only does it provide the tools, templates and graphics to create dynamic content for displays, but also a streamlined, centralized management system to deliver the right message at the right time to the right people.
Customers who shop in-store rather than online seek enjoyment and convenience. Stores that use interactive retail displays, self-service kiosks, sensor technology and social media integrations can better engage with their customers. Guiding them through the store and informing them about the products they’re interested in, these display solutions allow brick-and-mortar stores to create a more fulfilling, memorable, and immersive retail experience that is as seamless as today’s consumers expect — online and in-person.
“We've designed out all the elements of the display that were not sustainable, like the trays which used to be put on the bottom to stop it from getting wet when they mop the floors,” said Mike Devine, Creative Services director at Smurfit Westrock. “We now have a waterproof, corrugated version that does the same job, and the displays can go straight into recycling when they’re no longer needed.”
Major retailers have been setting sustainability requirements for brands they carry, such as reductions in plastic use. Therefore, if your retail display is made from recyclable materials and showcases sustainability, a retailer may be more likely to give you their stamp of approval.
Creating depth in a design makes it more interesting and appealing, which leads to more engagement.
“We do a lot of layering of boards on headers to give you depth,” said Devine. “We've done some where you curve pieces of printed material and it gives you a 3-D effect.”
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Playing with scale, such as making a graphic like a cereal bowl much larger than it would be in real life, can also grab more attention by being clearer to see from a distance. And greater scale can also be achieved with the sheer size of the retail display. Shoppers are sure not to miss a pirate ship built out of beverage 12-packs or a walk-through display that doubles as a pop-up store.
In order to best appeal to your target customer, it’s important to dig into their psychographics as well as their demographics. What do they think and believe? What are their opinions, attitudes and interests? What is their lifestyle like?
Once you understand these things, it’ll be easier to find a creative way to show you understand them.
“When your ideal customer sees your display, they should see themselves,” said Leon Nicholas, vice president of Retail Insights and Solutions at Smurfit Westrock. “It should not only resonate with them but should make them think, ‘This brand gets me.’”
Walking kids through a home improvement or big box store before Halloween or the holidays can be an event. Once they realize that some of the lawn decor on display lights up or plays music or sounds when they walk by, they want to walk past those sections over and over again.
Retail displays that are interactive can have a similar effect on your audience. Interactive displays were found to increase customer engagement by an average of 60%, according to research from Ombori.
“We created one for a deodorant brand that had a number of scent buttons on the structure,” said Devine. “So, you could press each scent button to give you a little sense of what each would smell like.”
Whether you use motion sensors with lights, sounds or movement, push buttons, QR codes, cameras or touchscreens, a POP display that invites your audience to participate will increase the amount of time they engage with it and make it more memorable.
Sometimes it’s not just about the way the display looks but how fast you can meet demands and capitalize on trends. Creating an in-store display used to take weeks and months; during the design process physical samples had to be sent to customers, marked up and sent back. But thanks to digital design tools with 3-D environments, designers have sped up the process.
Now, as long as customers provide feedback quickly, our design teams may be able to turn a design around for an established customer in as little as 7-to-10 days. This allows brands to more easily leverage trends or more quickly respond to market demands.
For example, in response to a global pandemic a brand could quickly create a display promoting things such as hand sanitizer, work-from-home supplies, or false eyelashes (for the only facial feature seen while wearing a mask).
By focusing on what your consumer is looking for and how the product provides it, you can come up with many creative ways to reach them within those parameters. The key is to make a point in an unpredictable way.
For example, to better sell its coats, Canada Goose developed a “cold room” display where you can test out their coats in below-freezing temperatures. And Lego has developed such a reputation for creative in-store displays that they are now being sold as collectors’ items. Bricks fans sometimes spend thousands to purchase one display.
Whether your approach is interactive or Instagram-able, aim to create something your consumers will want to talk about and share because it was “different” or gave them more of what they wanted.
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