Achieving effective visual display’s, whether product, service, or brand based display’s, are critical to any organisation’s marketing efforts.  Increasing the perceived value of you product, service or brand within a given target audience will directly effect what your customers are willing to pay, and ultimately your revenue’s and achievable profit margin’s.

The quality of your product & brand based display’s should form a critical aspect of your overall marketing strategy in the same way digital marketing & advertising form an essential part of any good B2C or B2B strategy.

Visual and physical product, service & brand display’s appear nearly everywhere; think not only of retail & trade outlets, but showrooms, selection centers, foyers, board rooms, conferences, trade shows, road shows and exhibitions for product or service displays.  When combined with knowledgeable and competent sales representation, and the right overall marketing strategy, the value of “touch & feel” situations in B2C and B2B buying decision making processes are still extremely high.

Brand displays can also be represented in all of the aforementioned situations, as well as including signage of all descriptions.  Every piece of signage represents your brand and its image; the quality and condition of that signage should not only catch the eye, but should also re-enforce the perceived value of your product, service or brand.  Critically, it can just as easily detract from the brands value, or simply get lost or overlooked in the crowd.

When considering product or brand strategy in relation to physical displays, remember to carefully consider the following whilst planning the display or campaign:

• What
  • exactly what is it you are wanting to achieve? e.g. grow sales of product ABC123, increase brand awareness, communicate a new product or service offer, grow profit margins on a given line of products, etc

• Target Audience
  • the who, why and how you will be targeting.  e.g. Achieve a greater share of wallet from the existing client base in a given geographical area via a new sales rep and product sample suite.

• Features vs benefits
  • what type of content should be included & how should it be presented?  e.g. your product is bright yellow and 50% smaller and lighter than the previous model are product features.  Benefits (for a given audience) could be: reduced incident downtime through improved visibility to operators; Drag and fuel consumption savings of up to 20% through size and weight reductions.  Of course, if you can cite specific testing or actual client results, benefits will stand out to prospects even more.

• Value Adding
  • how will my product/service or brand add value to my client and how do I communicate this?  This at least partially, relates to the benefits of your product, service or brand, and most commonly are additional to the core benefits.  This might include things like a quality or green certification, an industry accreditation, warranty’s, product or spare part support, training, etc.

• WIIFM (What’s in it for me)
  • Place yourself in your clients shoes and ask this question (It can be good to draw on your own buying experiences during this step as well).  This step may cause you to re-think any or all of the previous considerations.  Sometimes overlooked or under-estimated, placing yourself in your prospective clients position can be a real eye-opener during the planning process for any marketing strategy.  There are plenty of examples of organisation’s large and small who have operated in a “top-down” manner in regards to what they think customers want and need from their product or service.  Some are visionary, many others failed, or wasted significant amounts of money because they did not adequately place themselves in their customers shoes at any stage during the marketing planning process.

These are some fairly common marketing considerations, however using them effectively to achieve a higher marketing ROI can be challenging for any number of reasons.  There are way to many marketing, advertising and sales acronyms, techniques and processes around to list here, but in short and whatever acronym, technique or process you use, the more defined you can be with these considerations from the outset, the better your overall result will be.

How does this relate to your product, service or brand display?  Your overall marketing or business strategy should provide guidance on, and feed into each of your campaigns or marketing actions that include physical display’s or representations of your brand.  How you physically and visually present yourself will have an influence on the outcome and ROI of each of those campaigns or actions, whether positive or negative.  Poor presentation or poor execution will not only return a lower ROI for an individual campaign or action, but they risk damaging the overall perceived value that product or brand has in the marketplace.

Displayrite Resources are a Melbourne based provider of product and brand related display solutions to organisations small & large, as well as providing various production and installation services to marketing & advertising agency’s.