A successful retailing business should always be based on a powerful image your brand has among others. In order to maintain a good image amidst the customers, you need to ensure a strong visibility and coherent marketing strategies. We can talk about an aesthetic of the “science” behind all the strategies and procedures that we apply in order to reduce the employee interference, because we want our merchandise to “sell itself”.

Visual merchandising comes in this context as a silent spokesperson for the products, helping us highlight their features and benefits. Thus, we aim at attracting and motivating customers towards purchasing goods. Visual merchandising is directed not only to products and sales, but also to the image of the store and of the brand.

For products, you can aesthetically improve their visibility by creating a story behind each item that you want to sell. You create displays, you make proper arrangements so that the process of shopping to be experienced in the most exciting way possible, for both, the customers and the staff.

Taking care of your store’s layout is the best way to make sure your clients have the best shopping experience they’ve ever had. It gives you, as a retailer or store owner, the certainty of a possible return of the satisfied customers who become good advocates afterwards.

Brand Awareness and Brand-Loyalty

The last but not least, visual merchandising is an important way to build a strong brand and by doing that we need to make it visible. People need to associate the entire process of shopping with the reputation of the brand. Brand awareness is not only meant to bring more customers, but to build a long–term prosperous business that gains its prestige and authority by providing the best products, the best marketing strategies and the best visual resources.

Nowadays, visual merchandising emerged as a new science, and is seen as probably the best promotion strategy for retailers. It doesn’t only provide a better highlight of the products, but it also helps in building the so-called “brand-loyalty”.

In order to ensure a better visibility, we don’t have to deal only with the aesthetical aspects of the products and of the displays, but we also need to understand the brand’s target market in order to be able to adjust our strategies according to our clients’ values and desires. This way we can even infer the potential clients and adjust our long-term strategies to cope with new customers.

There are some things that you need to take into consideration when trying to create an image for your store, because it will be generalized for your brand as well. The strategy for creating a brand image should start from trying to apply the retail brand vision first; we need to think in terms of adjusting things from the top to the bottom, from the general brand vision to the products’.

The design of the store must bear some in-store environmental ways to identify the business conception toward the products that are sold, to differentiate this way from other similar business and / or competitors. All the visual elements that we use in order to improve the visibility of our products must all have this connection with the general view on market, customers and so on.

Visual merchandising’s benefit in improving brand awareness

Visual merchandising’s benefit in improving brand awareness is connected to the fact that that every action that we do in terms of gaining visibility is based on the principle of communication. We communicate with customers through the elements and strategies that stimulate their desires and help them decide upon their need for goods.

The environment where the experience of shopping is undergone can influence the purchasing decisions, the overall experience being vital. Researchers have discovered that people generally show themselves more open, paying a higher price when the products is sold in a favorable environment.

Brand awareness can be built by creating an environment to further maximize the potential of the business. Visual merchandising improves the retail design by taking into account all the elements through which imagery can be created: lightning, color, management of space, product information, or interactive installations. The strategies are directed either to exterior design, or interior.

Focusing both on interior and exterior aesthetics has two major advantages: we can lure people inside and make them stay. If the window displays are enough appealing, we can transform passers-by into potential customers. The interior design is also important. Once you addressed an “invitation”, you need to ensure that your “guests” are satisfied; this has as an outcome beneficial purchase decisions.