Marketing Your Store to Grandparents
Grandparents come in a wide range of ages, and from various cultures but they share one common passion: their grandkids. First-time grandparents are especially enamored. They want only the best. How can you appeal to these shoppers?
Make your store a fun and accessible experience. From the moment you catch grandparents' eyes, give them the message that you want their business and you're going to go out of your way to get it. But how?
Consider for a moment - what makes a grandparent special? It's that sentiment of love, pride, and possession that pushes grandparents to become the indulgers of their grandkids' dreams and aspirations.
Appeal to that loving sentiment boldly. Store windows are your street signature. Develop a strong identification with a clearly readable logo visible from a passing car and repeated up-close-and-personal at eye level with your window displays.
Tempt passersby with cute, sophisticated, environmentally safe and educationally superior product. Impossible you say? Certainly putting all those elements in one window would be overwhelming. Instead, separate them out. Focus on one element and develop a merchandising story that details the one idea you have chosen. Show merchandise that teases and provides a taste of what you have inside. Use mannequins or other props that help illustrate, explain or simply support your ideas. Light your windows brightly, preferably not with exposed fluorescent bulbs. Adjustable lighting allows you to be flexible and to focus on your merchandise.
Today's trend toward the use of light boxes, which advertise product in use, provide a good starting point. Vendors will often provide you with up-to-date images. Yours need to feature children of all ages with adults of different shapes, abilities, and races. Cast them in the picture. Encourage their identification with your images of grandchildren and grandparents in action in parks, in kitchens, wheelchairs, and in comfortable chairs; playing baseball in apartment gardens and watching from the sidelines; pushing grandpa's walker along with him and skipping alongside a grandmother who is gardening.
Show your welcome by making your entranceway easy to access. A glass door with an automatic opener is a surefire winner for grandparents and parental customers pushing a stroller or a walker. Heavy doors offer unwanted threshold resistance. If you buzz customers inside from the street, welcome them personally. Hold the door open if you don't have an automatic opener. Break the barrier of strangeness.
Design a well laid-out floor plan whose aisles are wide enough for walkers and wheelchairs, strollers, and those on foot. Keep them uncluttered. Allocate your visual merchandising to end-caps and clearly marked areas. Here's your chance to make your store fun and functional.
Whether you organize your store by function or by brand groupings, make sure it is easy to shop with clear directional signage. Explain visually and in simple text what some of the newer items are. Education is a valued commodity. Whenever you provide information about a product, you add value. Like anyone else, grandparents are more tuned into the magazines that reflect their lifestyle and concerns. They won't necessarily know the latest advances in fabric technology creating diapers that wick the dampness away from the baby's body to the outside of the diaper. Explain why these products provide more costly, but more environmentally-friendly solutions. These indulgences are what grandparents, not necessarily the parents, can afford. Nor do all grandparents know that Harry Potter has spurred an interest in witches and all matters of spiritual, and even spooky, things.
With the emphasis on brands, trends, and keeping up with it all, grandparents need information like everyone else. Provide tips on trends, materials, popular colors, and information about how certain products work. Think about the myriad of drinking cups for toddlers which can be very simple—if you know how they work!
Educational toys and specialized accessories need a lot of explaining. Let your displays illustrate the advantages of a product, even as they illustrate how they work. Show a product in its package as well as opened, assembled and in use. Your visual merchandising needs to be compact and specific, like a short story that tells you everything you need to know in less than a page. Show and tell, combining product, graphics and signage. Illustrate specific uses, use graphics which are easy to read. Provide inspiration and ideas.
Remember a cloth napkin can blow a nose, wipe up a lunch, signal that a man is married, or act as a cricket hat when the sun is bright. A little off-the-wall humour, like the detail about the knotted kerchief, which comes from another era and another culture, is memorable and fun. If you have insights into another culture, use that knowledge in your displays.
By the age of 40, many of us wear glasses. By the age of 50, most of us need them at least for reading. Make your signage readable first and foremost. Curlicues and elaborate type are hard to read. Use sans serif typeface, which means letters without elaborate curves and in a large enough font size to be legible.
Lack of contrast, between the letters in the foreground and the background page, make signs impossible to read. So too can shiny paper or glass which reflects. Try yellow on black, white on black, or matte black on beige. Although pink and grey are a wonderful combination of colours, they don't read well in signs. If these are your store's colors, try hot pink on a dulled out grey. Experiment with the tones of colours to interpret them, using today's trends while maximizing contrast in all of your signage.
Merchandise below 18 or 24 inches above the ground won't sell. If you have to bend for it, strain for it and pull your glasses out of your pocket to read it, chances are it won't be read or bought. Do a walk-through with your own grandparent or parents to check out accessibility and readability.
Make sure you have sufficient ambient light to wash a whole wall of merchandise without bleaching its colour or eliminating its detail. Spotlight signage so it can be read from a distance. Highlight your specific visual merchandising areas. Incandescent light provides a soft residential feeling. The ideal is a hierarchy of light which provides visibility and creates excitement.
Floor covering needs to be low maintenance and tough. Choose low or medium pile carpets. Carpeting is the easiest to maintain and the most sound-absorbent floor covering and it also contributes a residential look. Wood flooring is becoming increasingly popular. Vinyl flooring - either brightly coloured or dye–cut with the store's logos - is easy to keep clean and looks good in kids' stores, contributing to their individual image while also being functional. Cork floors are environmentally friendly and contribute warmth and resiliency. Properly treated, they also clean up easily. All of these floor coverings facilitate walkers, strollers and wheelchairs.
Take a page from the booksellers and scatter your retail space with some comfortable well-upholstered arm chairs for customers to use while checking out your books or just to rest if they are weary. Place at least one close to the dressing rooms so grandparents, who shop with their kids and grandkids, can be there to check out the purchases. Make at least one dressing room large enough to accommodate wheelchairs and strollers, a prerequisite for ADA and essential for this particular crowd.
Older people tend to have less acute hearing. Make sure your sound system doesn't blare. Try to eliminate the mechanical sounds of the air conditioning or heating. Train your sales staff to speak up clearly, not shout, and to look into the face of the customer when they are talking. Lip reading supplements hearing.
Consider the small details and train staff to provide them as a routine part of your customer service. They spell out welcome for all of your customers.
Many grandparents want to indulge their grandchildren but they're on a fixed income. Make your prices and your price tags clearly readable without simply talking about bargains, which can imply cheapness. Suggest quality and value, rather than cheapness. This gives your store brand more cachet. You need to develop these extra values which set your store apart on something other than price.
Grandparents come in all shapes and sizes. De-stress their shopping experience. Aim to be special, accessible, and affordable. That's a winning combination.