Use Store Reimaging to Bring Out the Best In Your Brand - GSP

Does your brand come to life in store?

If you want to wow the customer, it’s critical to think about marketing and merchandise together. Your brand should be consistently represented across each category or zone. While category reimaging is a good thing, you’ll want to ensure it doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the store and make one area stand out as too different.

Think Starbucks

Starbucks shows what synchronized, in-store marketing and merchandising can look like. Look how they’ve turned coffee retailing into an art form. From the coffee cup to the carefully chosen music playing in the background and even the way a customer orders a drink, they elevate every detail to support the sale of product. Do people notice when you switch to a red cup at the holidays? Were you thinking of pumpkin-flavor anything before Starbucks?

7 tips to ensure your merchandise & merchandising complement each other

1. Reach across departments and find out if you can combine efforts for double the branding impact. Perhaps even save money, too?
2. Use similar materials and store décor across zones for a cohesive look.
3. Ensure your fixtures are consistent.
4. Don’t underestimate good lighting as a way to draw attention to your merchandise.
5. Make a critical evaluation of your signage and its placement.
6. Use wall space creatively to get more product at eye level.
7. Place like categories near each other to make the customer journey easier and improve cross-selling.

Bonus: Are you trying to fit the idea to the store or the store to the idea? Your category reimaging should be scalable (modular) so it can adapt to different store types across the enterprise.

GSP is your store remodeling and reimaging expert with 40 years of retail experience.

This post was originally published on July 17, 2017 and updated on February 5, 2018.