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RETAIL
BRANDING
RETAIL
BRANDING
BY: CHRIS DINGCONG
by: [email protected]
CHRIS DINGCONG
[email protected]
Chris Dingcong is the founder and the
Chris
Dingcong
is the
founder and
the Creative
Creative
Director
of Springtime
Design,
a branding
and design Design,
consultancy
Director
of springtime
a branding and
based consultancy
in Hong Kong.
Chris in
has
more Kong. Chris
design
based
Hong
than
20 years
in corporate, in
has
more
than of
20 experience
years of experience
retail, environmental branding and
corporate,
retail, environmental branding,
identity system design.
and identity design system.
Brand Engagement
by Visual Merchandising
THE BRAND ENGAGEMENT
Retailing is all about your brand. And your brand
is all about who you are, your brand personality,
your product, your brand identity and the promise
you make to your customers. And in this day and
age of retailing, you will always face challenges
the way you engage with your customers and
how your customers connect with your brand.
“The secret of
change is to focus
all your energy, not
on fighting the old,
but on building the
new.” Socrates
One of these challenges is change and
ironically, change is also one of the
constants in retailing. Change is
inevitable in the retail industry and having
the ability to adapt to change makes a
successful retailer.
A major change in retail is the advent of
online shopping. It has changed the
customer’s shopping landscape, it’s
changing faster than ever before and it has
also transformed the way retailers
communicate with customers. As technologies change, so does the consumer
behaviour and expectations from brands.
THE O2O
So how does online retailing impact visual merchandising? Although we have
seen and experienced the convenience of online shopping and how it has
changed our way of buying goods, the absence of a physical product
merchandising with online shopping and the unavailability of sensory interaction
with products and brands mean that the need for visual merchandising is all the
more amplified.
For retailers, this is of course reassuring, as the brick-and-mortar store and
visual merchandising won’t be disappearing anytime soon. Both will still be
integral components of retailing.
Interestingly, as reported by business.com, 94 percent of all retail sales in the
U.S. still takes place in a physical store. This also equates to the paramount
need for visual merchandising in the brick-and-mortar environment. But,
10
retailers must be mindful that it really is
not online vs offline, but rather online to
offline as a unified engagement in
connecting the brand to the customers.
ONLINE
OFFLINE
Your physical store is the best
environment for your brand to communicate and create brand engagement
with your customers. It is your communication platform to fortify your efforts
to make your brand’s story an ongoing journey of experience for your
customers. It is central to your holistic brand dialogue and foremost
environment to immerse your target audience about your brand identity. This
is where the importance of a strategic approach in unifying the online to
offline engagement come together, where your brand story is told in a
seamless brand experience.
THE VISUAL STORY TELLING
The importance of your brand’s story determines how you connect to your
customers to build your brand engagement. Encapsulated in the
communication of your story is your visual merchandising. The visual story
telling of your brand.
Visual merchandising is a strategic approach to your brand communication. It
is your brand’s tool to set in motion a continuation of your dialogue from your
marketing campaign to your retail store environment and deliver consistent
messages and concepts to your customers. It makes your brand more
understandable and it influences your customer’s decision making to buy
your products.
To deepen the impression of your visual merchandising, it should be able to
touch the senses of your customers as they interact with your retail
environment. Your visual merchandising must also be coherent in
communicating your brand through your store design such as your space
planing, lighting, fixture and furniture, your in-store communications such as
your signage, graphics and images and your merchandise presentation such
as your window display, floor fixture display and table display. These are the
components that comprise your holistic visual merchandising communication.
With a clear brand identity and well defined branding components, your
visual merchandising can effectively express your brand and build an
emotional connection with your cust