Visual Merchandising: An Overview


Visual merchandising refers to all of the display techniques used to highlight the looks and usage of the products and services being sold in a retail or digital space. Visual merchandising can include elements of spacing, lighting, and design, and is a term that can be applied both to in-store merchandising and online merchandising. Investing in visual merchandising helps customers have a better shopping experience, serves as a powerful marketing tool for your company and enhances customer loyalty. But it also comes with its downsides.
Featuring the best aspects of a product for the benefit of the customer, to understand the function of the product with a fleeting glance and also to appeal to the tastes of the customer is known as visual merchandising. The major benefit of clever visual merchandising is that it could help get the most value out of products that would be hard to market any other way.
Enhancing the looks and features of a product may be done by great use of space available, lighting in the store, floor plan layout, colour palette selection, three-dimensional displays, product banner alignment and using seasonal design and décor for a physical store.
In digital space, vibrant colours, uncluttered clean outlook, web design, updated features, seasonal design elements etc. used for visual merchandising. Here are 5 facts about visual merchandising that you need to know before you start a retail career.
Encourage the customer to explore – The art of capturing the customer’s attention through visual appeal is just not enough. You have to make that sale. It can be achieved only by creating a positive experience that encourages a purchase. This leads us to goal number 2: to create a positive ambience in-store that makes customers feel good by being in it and encourages them to explore.
Reinforce their choice – The customer might not notice it, but too many choices and variations of the same product only creates doubt if they are unsure about what they need. So, be very specific about cataloguing appropriately and ensure the displays are not random, that customer stumbles upon irrelevant products every few feet into the store. This ensures the customer has an easy, pleasant and positive experience. (https://colorreflections.com/)
Visual Merchandiser – As a visual merchandiser, your job is to enhance the visual image of the store that encourages sales for the store by creating a pleasing and positive experience for the customer. Making the store more attractive and appealing to the customers might sound like a simple task but there are several moving parts, which is why your job as a professional visual merchandiser is important and crucial, in terms of walk-ins, the amount of time a potential customer spends inside the store premises and the resulting sales conversions.