Retail stores & marketplace are good options to sell your innovation. But no matter what option you chose, to perform good sales your product have to be VISIBLE.
Congratulations! A wholesaler promise an order of thousands units, retailers made a PO to you or you had a chance to test your product in stores with a shelf for you. Now the game start and you cannot miss the official launch of your product on this new market. You have to support your stakeholders and partners for the success of your brand. Operational marketing and pushing are essential because, without any effort, you will miss the window of nationwide market distribution.
Displays are a type of incentive tools that could help you to be visible in retail stores. They increase engagement by 5 thanks to an average of engagement duration of 25 seconds instead of less 3 seconds online.
As you can see in the video, Rowrite is a good example of a display that helps a lot for brand equity. It's a way to make the differentiation with competitors that are already in the market, create a customer experience with emotion and let people dream with futuristic stuff. For this kind of display, you have to invest between 200 € to 500 € per display if you invest one per one. The prices increase because of the screen or quality of raw materials if you need to represent a premium brand equity. But some displays are closed to 100 € with huge quantities(+100).
Some rules you should keep in mind if you start creating your display :
- Do not personalize your display by adding the logo of the stores where it is sent. You never know where your product will be distributed tomorrow and a display should be usable for any retailers or events.
- Add a text that explains features and benefits. Not only for consumers but for in-store vendors that have to train themselves to understand your product
- Make it possible for customers to touch your demo product even if it doesn't fully works. It shows a part of the quality of the materials used.
- Create displays that are easy to set up. Without any app to download for vendors or any difficulties that could have a setting for a salesperson. Just one plug to switch on your display.
- Set up the display yourself to choose the shelves and ranges that you prefer with the team in stores
- A video is a good option to attract people and show the use of the product
- Be careful about the size of the display. You have to respect the dimension of the shelf and not taking too much space.
- Plan demos in stores to train vendors and improve brand equity to inform people that a new product is available now.
I shared you the tips to help you to forecast your investment once you are in shelves because many of consumer electronics brands focus only on first purchase order with retailers stores without any partnership and long term vision. Displays are an investment for long term vision to promote your product and perform sales with good connection with consumers in the field.
Now, let's talk about one of our greatest success in retail stores that we love at So sample and that illustrates well this topic.
Case study: Ulo, the cutest camera in the world
We worked with ULO, an Owl Indoor Camera. The company is from Luxembourg and do not have any retail network to distribute its high-quality product with more than 1 million $ raised on Kickstarter. This company had a huge success in France at Boulanger stores during So sample's demonstrations. Anyway, no displays were available during our first demos. We asked brand ambassadors to present ULO and its benefits & features to Boulanger's customers, with the help of one product of demonstration only. While the brand ambassador was in store, people could discover, try out and buy easily ULO. But as soon as our ambassador left the store, no sales were performing, because customers could not discover, touch or even notice ULO without a proper display.
Therefore, we created some sketches for a personalized ULO display :
- It was important to us that the display should allow customers to touch the product. Not only to feel the materials and judge the high quality of ULO, but also because there is a sensitive button located on the "head" of ULO to set up the camera in demonstration mode. The customers could, therefore, interact with the owl.
- A short title describes the main benefice of the product and an additional text is located on the left of the display to list ULO's features.
- We decided to add the logo of Android and App stores to show that the product can be used with any devices. It is a crucial buying engine for undecided customers.
- The design of the display is clean, efficient and showcases the main competitive advantages of the product. It was crucial to make this information appear on the display at a glance so that ULO differentiates itself from the competition and in particular the leader of its market Netatmo which commercializes a camera with rather similar functionalities for 189 €.
Now Ulo is sold at Boulanger's stores with beautiful displays at a price of 249 €. What do you think about our contribution to that product?