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Merchandising for the Senses
Helping Your Customer Feel Good
Within 60 seconds, customers respond to visual cues including
color, graphics, signage, and visual merchandising. Baby and toddler products
are bought as much by grandparents as parents. They appeal deliberately
to their softer more sentimental senses through the use of pastels accented
with metallics, interpreting today's trend especially for silver greens.
Strong classic colors like red, bright yellow, and royal blue appeal to
young children and convey a child's sense of the world.
Interpret your color mix or combination of colors according
to what you like, to the type of image you want to project and to the
age group of your customers. Neutrals like silver gray, white and pale
yellow let the merchandise do some of the color talking.
Color is impacted by lighting. A yellow light creates a
more traditional classical look. A high-intensity discharge bulb creates
the fashion white look. Remember that fixtures need their own light; computer
screens and television monitors need an area with less light, without
glare. Lighting creates drama, excitement and even gentleness.
To bring customers into the back of the store, use a little
more light there. Like a window, which looks toward something else, this
draws people in and removes their natural fright at entering dark spaces.
Glass in the storefront or large display windows allows
customers to see what's inside. Use them to provide feelings of well-being.
You've piqued their interest, now encourage them to enter your store with
comfortable and interesting store windows, letting products tell a merchandising
story.
Our sense of touch is primarily used to identify. The use
of different textures in floors, walls and fixtures creates a more tactile
environment; using carpet in some areas of the store and tile or wood
planking in others helps provide direction. Softer, more pliable flooring
like linoleum or carpet with a proper backing, rubber or even tiles made
from recycled tires are more child-friendly than marble or ceramic tile.
Visual merchandising should encourage customers to experience soft and
cuddly, crisp and clean with graphic and tactile cues. Encourage touch
by developing fixtures and display stands that encourage climbing and
tactile interaction.
Interactive technology is critical to this generation of
kids. Provide knobs for them to turn, computer screens to access and sound
through earphones. Sound is part of this mix, very much influenced by
age. For the younger kids, world music provided by musicians like Raffi,
Barachois and Jake Chenier provide the same cheerful music message sounded
by the rest of your store. Be sensitive to the lyrics and the intent of
the rap-music and hiphop artists to be sure they coincide with your own
merchandising appeal. If kids themselves are going to shop your stores,
the scale of things including counter tops, chairs, benches and other
displays should be smaller. In a child-sized world, kids feel safer and
freer to explore independently, leaving the parents to consider more expensive
purchases or to look at whatever their children are investigating with
interest.
Almost everywhere today, people carry bags. Mothers of young
children wheel strollers. Ensure there is space enough in the aisles and
in the doorways to promote easy access. It makes everyone feel better
and more welcome if they don't have to squeeze into a space. Two doors
which open, preferably automatically, encourage traffic. Remove the doors
in a mall store. Plot the traffic pattern in your store comfortably and
plan your space to accommodate the flow, taking your customers in natural
paths around the store.
Customers today are overwhelmed with information. Our shorter
attention span often attributed to television viewing, demands that your
music, your posters and your space all work together to convey the same
feeling. Visual and sound clutter distracts customers; help them relax
and enjoy your shopping experience.
Appealing to the sense of smell, now considered part of
the marketing mix, is a delicate matter. The scent you choose should arise
naturally from the identity of your store. Don't impose something. Contrary
to some market research, neither vanilla nor any other single scent provokes
browsing and purchase. The right blend of essential oils, developed in
collaboration with an experienced aromatherapist, will reflect your store's
identity, helping people concentrate and get along better. Use handmade
glass nebulizers attached to air-pumped diffusers to mist the oil into
the atmosphere without destroying merchandise; it ultimately imprints
everything, providing a kind of branding. Good aromatherapists neither
manipulate people nor use hocus pocus to create the environment that you
wish. The key is individuality.
Taste and smell are integrally linked. Many retailers like
to offer coffee and cookies, violet-flavored or other subtle tasting hard
candies or even chocolates at the cash register to ease customers' minds
while they are paying for a purchase. For obvious reasons, chocolates
and clothing are a poor mix. For some, the bubble gum vendor is a natural
prop and an appropriate taste/scent for their environment.
Our sixth sense joins all the information we gather and
processes what we see, hear, feel, taste and touch, with our memories
and past experience to provide feelings of well-being or a warning that
something is not right. There is no one ready formula. Consider what you
want people to feel and ensure that all the elements of store design and
visual merchandising-color, fixtures, lighting, graphics, signage, storefront,
entranceway, floor and wall covering-work together to create harmony and
a feeling of well-being. A unified appeal to the senses encourages shoppers
and makes them feel welcome in your store. You can have no better advertisement.
Marcelo Albertal, Executive Vice President
of GRID/3 International, a Manhattan-based retail design firm, has aroused
the senses in stores he has designed across the US, in Venezuela, Brazil,
Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America.
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