With the holidays season, we had a lot of display of in store marketing to promote products. For three main reasons, that turns those initiatives highly profitable:
- They are based on pricy items, like Champagne, perfumes, foie gras, among others
- There is a high traffic in store at this time of the year, which multiply the number of contacts with the marketing supports
- The holliday season and the mythology around it ease the creativity of marketers.
I just wanted to share with you a good example I found out during this period. It was in the Whiskey section, with this touchable screen display.
I remember there was a lot of hype during the web 2.0 phenomenom about the usage of such electronic devices to interract with customers in store. As a matter of fact a lot of initiatives cooled off everyone:
- The screens are expensive, lowering the return on investment
- Most of the time the content proposed a low added value to customers, which are now for most of them carrying smartphones with enriched content.
But as I have said above, it is Christmas time, so I believe that this was actually pretty accurate. Especially for a complex product like Whiskey, that for the majority of customers require information to get the proper product. The display could be found on a specific furniture at the Whiskey section.
It was proposing 3 kind of information:
- How to choose a Single Malt
- To discover what were the Single Malts about
- To get samples to try out the products.
Good initiative nicely executed.
So to sum up, the key factors of success of such an initiative:
- Relevant traffic (so place) and period of time to maximize return on investment
- Select a product category needing a lot of education
- Relevant content to create real added value and trigger the sales
- Complete it with specific merchandizing to stand the merchandise out, and boost the sales.
