Since the arrival of online retailing, bricks and mortar retailers have had to work harder than ever to capture buyer attention. In an effort to entice buyers back into the physical store environment, customer experience (CX) has become a paramount part of a brand’s instore sales strategy.
The high value nature of consumer electronics also relies more heavily on customer service, technical advice and product trials.
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. 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,” says CROSSMARK’s Director of Client Services Anthony Di Francesco. “Electronic products are typically more complex with the buying decision and point of purchase more likely to be in store rather than online.
The high value nature of consumer electronics also relies more heavily on customer service, technical advice and product trials. Having an interactive, working product display in store for customers to try the products and engage with all the various features is critically important. It’s also imperative that all the features within the interactive displays are functioning because as soon as they stop working, customers stop buying,” Di Francesco continues.
While interactive shelf displays may be very costly to develop and set up, they are a huge sales driver. In fact, Consumer Electronic Retailers & Dept Storesencourage brands to invest in store displays as they see the substantial impact they have on profit margins and customer experience.
Yet, while many brands are investing heavily in interactive displays, maintaining these fixtures can be tricky, time consuming and the process isn’t as straightforward as it may seem; from developing the demo software, installing it instore, setting up shelf displays, training retail staff on how they work, and maintaining the technology so it keeps working. There are many working parts to keeping these displays functioning efficiently which can be exhaustive for in-house teams.
With the surge in demand for interactive store displays, field marketing specialist CROSSMARK has stepped in to help brands that are struggling to keep up with the multi-faceted elements required to keep these displays operating effectively. The organisation now has a specialist team that consists of staff who are 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 to maximise sales.
“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,” says Di Francesco. “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.”
