Tag Archives: retail

How To Help Reps Help You – Part 4

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This is Part 4 of a four-part series on this topic about how manufacturers can create a win-win situation between themselves and their reps by providing them with helpful tools. We would love to hear your thoughts, feedback or stories in the comments below.

So far in this series about creating tools for your sales reps, we’ve covered brand story training, merchandise guidelines and sales presentations. This last installment of Help Reps Help You brings us to the ever-important issue of keeping your brand top-of-mind with your retailers.

Think about the gap that exists for retailers between ordering your product and receiving it… There’s a whole lotta missed opportunity for your brand to stay on their radar.

HELPFUL ITEM 4: The “Radar” Piece

These pieces are especially helpful for small- and medium-sized brands because they not only build anticipation for your shipment, but they let the customer know you’re alive, excited to serve them and available for questions and/or support.

Radar pieces are simple communications that can take the form of branded email or snail mail (think: postcard), and are an inexpensive way to stay in touch.

Content and visuals should always follow your seasonal or yearly marketing campaign so that messaging is consistent.

Create these items in advance of your selling season and provide the materials to your reps so they have them at the ready. Remember, the goal is to make it easier for your sales team to do their job. With prepared communications in the hopper, they’ll be able to make regular contact with customers by hitting send or stopping at the mailbox.

The bottom line? Closing the sale-to-shipment gap with simple, branded communications is an easy way to remain on retailers’ radar throughout the year.

How To Help Reps Help You – Part 3

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This is Part 3 of a four-part series on this topic about how manufacturers can create a win-win situation between themselves and their reps by providing them with helpful tools. We would love to hear your thoughts, feedback or stories in the comments below.

By this third post of four on How To Help Reps Help You, I think we’ve all agreed that small- and medium-sized manufacturers can be challenged in the sales tools area. (If you’re not on board, read Part 1 about Brand Story Training and Part 2 covering Merchandise Presentation Guidelines.)

The overarching idea to ensure successful relationships with your reps and retailers alike, is to make it easy for them to sell your products.

HELPFUL ITEM 3: Electronic Sales Presentations

Rather than throwing a stack of catalogs and brochures at your reps and sending them on their way, provide them with an electronic presentation. If you want to be sure your brand message is clear to your retail partners, this is the way to go. This is especially important when your reps have limited touches with retailers throughout the year – you have to make an impact while you have retailers’ ears and eyes.

The presentation can take on a few forms, depending on your reps’ capabilities:

  • Mobile (optimized for iPads/tablets) – Tablets, particularly the iPad, are hugely popular with reps. Optimize your presentation to be accessible on these devices, and reps will always be prepared.
  • Web-based – Accessible anywhere there’s an internet connection, this format also allows for embedded video and interactivity.
  • PDF – These files can be shared via email and are also easily updated at home base.

Each of these options are totally portable and very manageable (no stacks of printed material sliding around in trunks!). An added bonus is that they can be shared across the web after a sales call as a great follow-up tool.

The bottom line? When reps have an arsenal of tools available to sell your stuff, they can’t help but be successful!

How to Help Reps Help You – Part 2

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This is Part 2 of a four-part series on this topic about how manufacturers can create a win-win situation between themselves and their reps by providing them with helpful tools. We would love to hear your thoughts, feedback or stories in the comments below.

In Part 1 of this series we talked about the importance of Brand Story Training for your rep force — a way to help reps learn about your brand so they can convey your story and get retailers excited to stock your products.

Once you’ve “prepped your reps” don’t leave them guessing when it comes to merchandising your products at retail.

HELPFUL ITEM 2: Merchandising Presentation Guidelines

Merchandise presentation guidelines are very simple documents (could be as small as one page, depending on the size of your line) that illustrate how to arrange your products for retail display. These guidelines are not full-on planograms, but they do contain diagrams highlighting which of your products should be folded or hung and suggestions for organizing by type, style and/or color. Merchandise presentation guidelines can also show placement of branded signage.

Depending on the territory they’re covering, many reps have limited time to spend visiting their accounts. Merchandising guidelines help them maximize their time by providing a display recipe to convey to retailers. Eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel for each store’s display leaves reps more time to talk about your brand and product line. An added bonus is that reps can leave the guidelines with their retailers so that staff can easily do floor sets and restock displays.

Merchandise presentation plays a huge part in how well your brand is represented at retail. The goal is to provide the consumer with a seamless brand experience, from seeing your ad and website to finding your product in the store. Remember, we’re trying to make reps’ jobs easier to ensure your success, so having clear guidelines for how your products are arranged and your signage is placed will do that. Your brand likely has one chance to convey its desired presentation to retailers — when the rep is making their visit. Seize that opportunity!

The bottom line? Don’t leave room for guesswork. Prepare your reps (and retailers) with this simple tool that makes displaying your merchandise foolproof.

2 Space-Saving Solutions that Support Your Brand at Retail

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We all know that space is at a premium in the retail environment. Most shops don’t have extra room to hang bulky POP or store stacks of dealer materials.

Wouldn’t it make your life easier if you could supply your retailers with solutions that saved space for them, and allowed your brand to maintain impact?

Thought so! Enter two very cool products I came across this past weekend that will help you do just that.

Pegboard Skinz
Pegboard Skinz from Panel

image courtesy panel.com

Panel has released Pegboard Skinz, which can be printed in full-color and applied to existing pegboard panels. They’re ordered as fully or partially “holed” sheets, and can be easily removed and replaced.

When I saw these, my mind ran away with ideas for their use. Imagine being able to cover a portion of a wall with your brand’s campaign theme, while taking up no extra space. Much better than sending free-hanging/-standing signage, hoping the retailer uses it.

Z-Cards
Z-Card Sample

image courtesy zcardna.com

Z-Card North America prints pieces with a map-like fold that have a hard cover on each end. They’re durable enough to be mailed on their own and can withstand more abuse than the average printed matter. You can probably guess that these set me off, too.

What if, instead of creating heavy, sizable dealer workbooks and catalogs, Z-Cards were used? The unique way they unfold presents a perfect solution for dividing information into categories – there are 46 “panels” to use. I can picture a very portable (think trade shows) and manageable (think behind the retail counter) workbook solution coming in this format. Not to mention, this is a memorable way to present your brand that will save you a ton on mailing costs.

For our clients’ brands, I am all about space-saving, cost-cutting ways that are long on impact. Making life easier for your retailers in the process ain’t going to hurt you, either!

Do you think these are solutions your brand would implement? Tell me in the comments below!

POP Signage with QR Codes & Mobile – Done Right

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Recently, Sue and I were out on what we call Retail Reconnaissance at Bass Pro, and spent some time studying the Columbia display. Nerdy? Yes. Waste of time? Definitely not – it helps us help you!

What we found really impressed me because it was executed so well. It also inspired me to imagine the strategic thinking that went into planning such a seamless consumer experience.

I first saw the main piece of POP atop a rack of clothing, which serves to explain the many fabrics the manufacturer uses. Instead of relying on hang-tags on individual garments, this sign (with well-designed infographics, I might add) accomplishes three things:

  1. Draws attention to the fixture from a distance.
  2. Shows the diverse selection to the shopper at a glance.
  3. Familiarizes the shopper with the unique icons assigned to each fabric (which also appear on hang-tags).

Columbia Rack Topper

As I walked to the front of another fixture, a sign specific to a single fabric caught my eye. It wasn’t incredibly detailed – because it contained a QR code.

Columbia Table Sign

I scanned it with my smart phone, of course (because I’m curious like that), and was delighted to see that they had used the code perfectly. In my experience, brands fall short with QR code use 80% of the time. If a consumer scans your code, take them somewhere useful, unexpected, or rewarding – don’t send them to your home page.

Columbia’s code sent me to a mobile-optimized landing page containing a list of the icons for the fabrics, each linking to their own descriptive pages with video demos.

Columbia Mobile Fabric Site

Some important end-user take aways:

  • Columbia gave an exemplary brand experience, even though I was shopping in a box retailer.
  • I was inspired to purchase their apparel because it’s obvious that they want to connect with their users.
  • The brand took care to educate me on their products, instead of relying on the retailer’s sales staff.

So tell me in the comments below:

How can/does your brand uplevel the in-store experience for customers?

Why Paper Planograms (and Workbooks) Will Never Go Out of Style

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This is a much-discussed topic in our circle here at Studio 22. Brands and sales reps often feel mired in the stacks they have to ship out or carry with them, not to mention the printing and mailing costs associated with these materials.

What I hear a lot is, “It uses so much paper. Can’t we put it on the web?” Of course, we’re biased toward printed pieces – it’s our nature. But we are also always in favor of cutting waste – it’s our duty.

I’m here to make the case for keeping these printed pieces (and their associated mailing costs) in your budget. In the instance of Planograms, particularly, it’s important to look at the situation from the retailer’s eyes. There are benefits to you, the manufacturer, wrapped neatly in here, too.

The purpose of creating a planogram is to ensure that your brand is represented properly at retail via signage and product display. If you rely on the retailer to do your floor or wall set (rather than a brand rep), sending a planogram is a necessity.

Send two hard copies: one for the office (back-up) and one working copy for the sales floor. If these are the only copies the retailer has, they’ll keep track of them. You are actually helping to control waste this way. If your planograms were accessible online, they would be printed an indefinite amount of times and tossed in the waste basket after use. Additionally, colors vary from screen to screen and printer to printer, so you have no control over how color swatches are conveyed to the user if printed from the web. Not to mention…

When it’s time to do a reset of your merchandise for markdowns or a new season, the last thing a shop owner running on limited staff (you know, this economy…) wants to do is send a sales associate to the back to locate and print your planogram. An unattended sales floor = poor customer service = lost sales and/or possibility of theft. If there is one quality color document on the sales floor, you’ve saved the retailer 15 minutes. Looking at this from the retailer’s perspective is important, which brings us to…

The overarching point, which is: Make it easy and convenient for the retailer to present your merchandise. If it’s not easy and it doesn’t help them sell product, they won’t do it to your specifications and brand recognition will be lost.

Printed workbooks, when designed correctly, also offer convenience to your retailers. They become an important reference tool when quality product images (photos or renderings) are prominently displayed in the layout, reducing phone calls and sales rep visits.

We’ve been on the other side of the cash register, and have culled this expertise into creating several new service offerings aimed at connecting brands with their end-users on the retail floor. Click here to see our merchandise presentation services list, or give us a call at (240) 288-8116.

Packaging & Display Ideas for Products You Can’t Put on a Hanger

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Manufacturers of jackets and pants have it easy. They can slap a hang-tag on their products and throw them on a hanger, and they’re ready to go. But what about you – maker of knit hats or scarves, neck gaiters, headbands, messenger bags? Not so much.

When the obvious solution just won’t do, packaging and displaying your products at retail can be a real challenge. Awkward items require extra attention.

Avoiding the Bargain Bin Look
When small merchandise like scarves or gaiters are piled into a box or floor dump, it can degrade the brand’s value in the customer’s eye. Not to mention, who wants to sift through a laundry hamper to find what they’re going to pay for?

Make it a no-brainer for the retailer to coordinate your items with complementary merchandise on the floor. A branded shelf-friendly container that neatly displays folded or knotted scarves can be placed atop an outerwear floor fixture. A hang-tag at the end of each scarf completes the presentation.

Make It Easy for Your Retailers
Stand-alone fixtures with a small footprint can make it easy for retailers to comply with your branding guidelines – headwear and socks are prime examples here. After the initial investment of the floor display, you can update the rack seasonally by sending new P-O-P designs to insert into available spaces.

If a retailer is not willing to use your display, have a back-up plan in place. This could be as simple as including in your workbook a rendering of how your products can be merchandised on a table, etc.

Eliminate Sloppiness
Bags with a single strap – messenger bags and purses – can get sloppy on standard wall hook fixtures fairly quickly. A tangled mess of webbing is simply not inviting to customers, and won’t represent your brand well.

Consider alternate ways your product can be displayed. Can the strap be folded into the cavity of the bag, making table- or fixture-top display possible?

Additional Design Ideas
Want more solutions for hard-to-hang items? How about:

  • A removable (and replaceable) branded band or wrap that neatly contains a folded scarf for easy display at the cash/wrap area.
  • Hang-tags attached to hats with hook pins, rather than “I” pins, allowing them to be displayed on slatwall hooks.
  • A low-profile wall display that holds shoulder bags on shallow shelves, rather than on hooks. It works for shoes!
  • A shallow display box with dividers that can hold hats, gaiters AND scarves in orderly rows.

Please share below what has worked (and hasn’t!) for your brand when it comes to challenging retail display.

Cutting Waste & Enhancing Customer Experience with QR Codes

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I’m pretty excited that we’ll be working on a new design project that will include QR codes. (For detailed QR code information, see Larry Pluimer’s Indigitous site.) This particular project is a piece of sales literature that will need to function at times in the absence of a company representative. So, using these codes is an efficient way for this manufacturer to expose customers to additional product information without overwhelming them with a ton of text to read on the printed piece. Plus, it allows the reader to stay focused on the product visuals!

QR codes can be used in a number of ways to enhance not only business-to-business transactions, but the customer experience as well. For example:

  • Send the consumer to a landing page or micro-site showcasing component details, care instructions, or other ways to use your product.
  • Provide an offer code for a discount on their next purchase of your product.
  • Invite them to join your email list.

Another advantage of using QR codes is waste reduction. You can significantly decrease your printing expenditures and paper (and ink, and energy, and water) use by including a code on your package or hang-tag to allow consumers to:

  • download a PDF of your manual in their language of choice.
  • allow them to register their product for warranty.

You can even reduce the size of your signage if you include QR codes. Plus, it frees up one of our favorite things – white space! Imagine a sign with only a great, attention-grabbing call to action and imagery that intrigues someone to want to know more about an event you’re hosting. A QR code can be placed on the sign that leads the viewer to an event listing where they can purchase tickets/register, get calendar details and click through to a website. Here, you’ve engaged your audience before the event even starts. They’re invested in the experience with your company.

If done with purpose and process, QR codes can be very engaging. Without planning, though, they could easily fall flat. I’ll be sure to do a follow-up to this post once our new project is complete. But in the meantime, I leave you with my own QR code:

Eryn Willard contact info