Dave Haynes: In retail, hardly anyone sees screens, and no wonder …

Retail design and strategy firm Miller Zell has been issuing a series of reports about in-store dynamics and the need to capture consumer attentions quickly, the latest one called The Elements Report.

Like the first two in the series, it is full of good insights into what’s happening in stores. It is also suggests digital signage is woefully ineffective, and anyone reading this report without thinking it through and getting some perspective would quickly toss out the concept of in-store digital as something even worth pursuing. It’s that bad.

As you might imagine, that’s a bit of a problem for companies trying to sell the dream into that sector.

Miller Zell and a research firm did a survey of 999 shoppers in March of this year “to determine which in-store marketing communications elements influence and inspire purchase behavior.”

The research revealed and confirmed 60 per cent of brand decisions are still made in the store, and that in-store advertising is more influential than out of store. It suggested mass merchandise stores are where people prefer to shop and convenience stores are the least favourite. And it suggests the in-store experience is incredibly important, with more than 2/3s of respondents saying the experience was a make or break factor for them in choosing where they shop.

Notice-ability sorted out what was actively noticed in stores by shoppers, and what was not. At the top, end-caps and merchandising displays, with percentage rankings in the 60s and 70s.

At the bottom, digital signage, at a woeful 10 per cent or so.

Floor graphics did better!

Digital signage did a little better when it came to purchase and brand choice influence, but not a whole bunch. It ranks 9^th of 11 choices, and just ahead of ceiling banners and overhead mobiles.

Now at this point you may have closed your laptop, had a last sip of your coffee and headed for the roof of your building. It really could seem awful and hopeless.

But let’s stop and think about this. I can pretty effectively argue that the reason the numbers are so bad is that the execution, to date, has been so bad in retail.

One of the reasons digital screens are rated right down there with ceiling banners and overhead mobiles is that they have been hanging from the ceiling or high up on a wall, just like ceiling banners and mobiles. Except they are a fraction of the size. No amount of zippy motion graphics in ads will get people looking if the screens are well above the normal field of vision and are, in relative terms, tiny in the context of the retail environment.

An HDTV that looks massive in your living room is just a speck on the horizon of a big box store, and even in smaller retailers. And it’s just a flat-panel TV, and they’re everywhere. That novelty factor is long, long gone.

Sprinkling a few screens around a big store, hoping they will get noticed and have an impact, really isn’t much more than wishful thinking, and this sort of data really drives that point home. To service the general environment of a large retail space, you need equally large displays that actually command attention and set the tone and experience that shoppers clearly want.

That technology is coming, but the other, easier route is to use what the research tells us, and get the screens in positions where they are noticed. Those are the ends of aisles, merchandise displays, department locators and at the shelf-edge in the aisles.

I have a client that has been working with a major brand on a merchandising fixture that includes a large LCD screen integrated into the fixture, with strategy and programming specifically tuned to working that fixture hard with rotating promotions and regularly changed SKUs. The fixtures where wheeled into place in stores and the results were immediate and phenomenal, with sales jumps against control stores well, well into the double figures across scores of sites. The program has been doubled in size.

Other retailers that have put screens in positions where they can’t help but be noticed, and where the content is well-executed and steadily refreshed, are seeing sustained sales increases that easily justify the effort and cost. The recently opened Microsoft store is a fabulous example of a retail design that really exploits the possibility, with full walls of tiled screens. Expensive, sure, but not all THAT expensive. Hugely impactful, though.

Miller Zell also told me (I asked) that another reason the numbers were low was critical mass. There aren’t all that many retailers yet with real screen networks.

This stuff DOES work, but getting it right takes a lot of careful consideration and use of the information available, LIKE these kinds of reports. The days of retailers and network operators “hanging and hoping” with their screens have to end, and people in the industry have to take a role by flat telling their clients, “That’s not going to work.”