To increase customer engagement.
As online shopping continues to gain popularity, it is becoming more difficult for bricks-and-mortar retailers to capture buyer attention. With this in mind, Crossmark director of client services Anthony Di Francesco says customer experience is now a paramount part of a brand’s instore sales strategy.
“A key way for brands seeking to differentiate themselves instore, particularly amongst a sea of products that are all vying for premium shelf space, is through interactive retail store displays,” he said.
“These increasingly sophisticated fixtures have become particularly prolific within the consumer electronics sector, in an effort to help products stand out in store and even act as an interactive ‘silent salesperson’.
“The success of consumer electronic brands is heavily reliant on service, experience and loyalty more than most sectors such as FMCG products. Electronic products are typically more complex with the buying decision and point of purchase more likely to be in store rather than online as customers rely on technical advice and product trials.”
Di Francesco believes interactive working product displays enable customers to try the products and engage with various features. Albeit expensive, they are a huge sales driver in his opinion.
However, brands are investing in the displays but maintenance of the fixtures is often complex and time consuming, from developing demo software, installing it instore, setting up shelf displays, training retail staff on how they work, and maintaining the technology.
There are many working parts to keeping these displays functioning efficiently which can be exhaustive for in-house teams, he said.
“With the surge in demand for interactive store displays, field marketing specialist, Crossmark, now has a team specially trained to handle individual campaign elements, are able to fix or replace broken displays and undertake regular spot checks in retail stores to ensure the product is positioned appropriately and that the campaign is being executed to the highest standards.
“Brands can spend upwards of $500,000 by the time they install fixtures across all the major electronic retailers, but they can achieve significant savings by outsourcing to specialist merchandising experts.
“At Crossmark, we not only help implement the demo displays, we manage the ongoing support and maintenance. This means we can deliver an end-to-end live device management solution in an efficient and cost effective way to maximise their instore impact and deliver sales growth.”