WISE Wednesday: Visual Merchandising For A Craft Beverage Business

Welcome to WISE Academy Wednesday or #WISEwednesday!

• Service
• Branding
• Silent Selling
• Sales
• Organization
• Metrics

Visual Merchandising

What does our craft beverage business say about our brand? Whether its a tasting room, tap room, beer garden or sales floor, each is a reflection of the your company’s standards, brand, and image. Creating an environment that not only reflects this but also attracts, engages, and motivates your customer towards making a purchase is largely reliant on effective visual merchandising.

Visual merchandising utilizes displays, color, lighting, smells, sounds, digital technology and interactive elements to catch customers’ attention and persuade them to make purchases.

It’s a mix of art, inspiration, space planning and thoughtful attention to detail.

It is part of “silent selling” which, along with presentation of your craft beverage and engaging staff interaction, becomes part of your customers’ unconscious decision to buy – or walk away.

Tips That Impact Your Sales & Customers

The Power of Engagement

It’s not only about dialog with the staff and guests, it’s about engagement of guests with our products. Does your retail area enable guests to touch and pick up products and get engaged with them? If products are displayed within eye level, consumers are more likely to reach out and touch those products. In theater, a ‘vignette’ creates a setting. In the same way, tasting rooms stage small areas to showcase your products. Have you set your stage accordingly? The rule in great visual merchandising is simple: our presentation should reflect our product.

KISS – Keep It Simple, Silly!

Simplicity of displays is the key. Less is more. Do you have clear views of your products that are not distracted by other products or displays with enough space? We don’t want it to look overcrowded. Displays should be creative and flow naturally, leading your customers throughout your store (especially if you’ve created a Guest Journey Map (download a sample Journey Map here) that sets them up to walk according to your plan). Avoid a lot of surface clutter.

Embrace All The Senses

Great merchandising appeals to more than the eyes. Consider how your tasting room sounds, smells and even feels. Are all of these “messages” you’re sending with music, scents, and other environmental factors in keeping with the displays you create? With the brand image? Silent selling evokes the senses without addressing them directly, so use subtle clues to help, such as music, lighting, and colors.

Enhance The Ambiance

By adding music and dramatic lighting, we can create a good impression and match the type of ambiance with the lifestyle and culture of your target market. Color can demand a shopper’s attention, evoke emotion and influence decisions. Does your merchandising plan include colorful focal points will help draw shoppers to those key areas?

Signage Support

It’s impossible to tell them everything about your store and the products within it.Ensure customers recognize the signage opportunities as a place for them to gain valuable information. Visual indications direct our customers to roam around our sales floor and business, which often results to unplanned purchases.

Merchandising Themes

Theme merchandising is a great way to communicate seasonal activities or other information such as vignettes and mini-stories. Customers relate to these, and as a result, they are more likely to purchase.

• Group Like with Like: Cluster like-items by size and color to create appearance. Larger items have more impact than small; small items need special treatment or they can get lost or look cluttered. Objects have more impact when displayed together. Remember that scale is important. When building a product display, look for products that are natural add-ons to the main product featured.
• Incorporate Multiple Themes: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall may be popular but there are still thousands of visual merchandising themes which you can – actually, the sky’s the limit when we talk about themes. Try to employ at least six different themes in a year.
• Location, Location, Location: Superb craft products and a rock-star team are all essential elements of success, but to build an extraordinary customer experience, understanding and employing the principles of good visual merchandising makes a huge difference. As Disney says, “Everything speaks.” So think about it – what do our tasting rooms really say about our brands?

What is your brand’s Visual Marketing Strategy? Leave us your tips in the comments below, or better yet, share a photo showcasing your retail floor on Twitter and tag #WISEwednesday!

photo credit: Caliper Studio
photo credit: the justified sinner