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The Ultimate Guide For Navigating The World of Visual Merchandising
2 min read
by Helen Spade
The study of how to effectively connect with your customers, in store, in public and online, is ongoing and helps inform so many of the decisions that the biggest companies in the world make.
It isn’t hard to see that there is a certain need to be deliberate with every single element to what you present to your customers and that is true regardless of what stage you are in with your company. In this instance, we’re looking at visual merchandising which is an important aspect of retail merchandising, itself one of the biggest areas in a company’s marketing strategy.
When you get into visual merchandising, the range of options available to you as you advance is quite overwhelming and knowing what to do, even understanding what it is down to you to influence can be really taxing. So here are a few tips for approaching visual merchandising.
What Is Visual Merchandising?
Visual merchandising is essentially the boots on the ground version of digital marketing design.
“A visual merchandiser is responsible for the design and management of in-store displays of products and marketing material in such a way as to boost the potential for sales. It’s an important job that can easily be taken for granted”
- Roberto Perez, business writer at BritStudent and WriteMyx
Arranging displays, choosing color palettes, laying out the store and conducting the overall visual aesthetic in a way that will best attract sales is mainly where you will find yourself working in visual merchandising.
Qualifications And Specifications
Visual merchandisers are hired by any company with a physical store. Less efficient companies will leave the job to employees that already exist in the store, though this would be rare for any company with more than one or two stores.
Mostly it requires an expert eye. Good visual merchandisers will be designers at heart with an eye for business management and business psychology. Design plays a huge part of visual merchandising and you need to have great aesthetic understanding that relates both to your brand and to your target customers. Without that, you won’t have the ability to effectively ‘market’ the products through visual elements.
Management skills are needed for the coordination of products and staff to effectively use the shop space.
Data Use
It’s important as a visual merchandiser that you have access to and understand in a detailed way large amounts of data.
“One of the great tools available to visual merchandisers is the ability to look to the countless other examples, essentially look to the data to understand the success and failure of various merchandising schemes”
- Kim Soo-young, tech blogger at 1Day2Write and NextCoursework
Being able to look at the complete data from all of retail merchandising and draw conclusions that help you to develop strategies for the visual aspect is also another important aspect to the job.
You need to be making constant improvements to your stores that relate to past trends and future predictions. Without these elements you risk falling behind the competition and losing out on sales that could be yours.
All Elements To Visual Merchandising
Visual merchandising requires work on several different areas of your store. All of it should come together with a certain flow and harmony that encourages customers to purchase and draws them in off the street.
At the most basic level you have the store layout which involves an almost architectural understanding of the space you have. This can be adjusted, but in general it is work that needs to be done before the store opens to avoid major restructuring.
Following that, you need to deal with the window display and exterior marketing. This is the stuff that you use to start the customer’s journey, the initial point of contact. It’s vital that your best work is done in getting feet in the store itself.
Lastly, there is product display which is an obviously vital element to the overall design. This includes use of colors and positioning.
Conclusion
Visual merchandising is an excellent field within which there are plenty of opportunities for interesting, engaging work on several different elements to the merchandising experience. Hopefully this guide has helped get you up to scratch as you begin your visual merchandising journey!
About the author
Helen Spade teaches English in Portland, PA. She is also a top writer at Academic Brits and PhD Kingdom. Her writing centers largely on marketing and entrepreneurship and she contributes blogs on the topics at Origin Writings.