Retail Communications
When it comes to your in-store experience, how many stones are you leaving unturned?
With the right retail communications strategy, you can ensure that you’re giving your in-store customers the right messages, at the right time, in the right place.
Your retail communications strategy covers all of your in-store messaging: your design atmospherics and wayfinding solutions, your in-store events and interactive displays.
Get it right, and you can make a simple shopping trip into an experience your customers will definitely remember, telling your brand story and giving customers a consistent cross-channel experience.
- Digital Signage
- In-store branding
The One Off's Approach to Retail Communication
Bringing together our cross-disciplinary team of retail communications experts, branding specialists, researchers, creative artists, shopper marketers and more results in tailor-made competitive gains for you. Thanks to our in-house production team, The One Off can oversee every element of your campaign, from developing your retail communications strategy through to project completion. We work with a variety of communication tools, from interactive displays to in-store events, to create tailored retail experiences that enhance customer engagement and store performance. With the right retail communications strategy in place, you can:
- Improve Customer Satisfaction
- Deepen Trust in Your Brand
- Optimise Frontline Employee Engagement
- Boost Employee Retention
- Maximise Productivity
- Increase Revenue and Reduce Costs
Key Components of a Successful Retail Communications Strategy
A good retail communications strategy comprises various elements - each of which has its own part to play in changing shopper behaviours and improving the in-store experience.
- Consumers are used to seeing digital signage everywhere, from billboards to bus stops and more. Capturing their attention can be tricky, but combining physical interactions with digital signage to create a multi-sensory in-store experience can help. What’s more likely to catch your eye: moving imagery and video, or static signage? By combining video, sound, graphics, animation and text, you can quickly and easily change your messaging and even schedule messages for different times of the day, allowing you to inform, entertain and sell with ease. A clothing store could add interactive screens to their fitting rooms, allowing shoppers to swap sizes and colours without having to leave and go back in. Digital signage by the queue for the tills could display details of your loyalty scheme or store credit card, advertising to customers and making their queuing time feel shorter.
- Do your customers see you simply as a product retailer? If so, developing your in-store branding could help to foster loyalty and trust, building genuine relationships and growing your revenue in the process. You’ve invested a great deal of time, money and energy in developing your retail branding. Incorporating it into your in-store branding will help you stand out, tell a story, better connect with your customers and improve your omnichannel presence. In-store branding can incorporate a number of design elements. It includes your outside signage and any window displays. It includes the strategic display of your logo and brand fonts and colours. It could include other sensory elements, like lighting, sound and scent. It includes your visual merchandising, your wayfinding solutions, your digital signage. Above all, it needs consistency to ensure your brand’s voice is heard and cuts through the noise of a busy store.
- How do your customers interact with you in-store? The till is the major in-store touchpoint, but focusing on this alone excludes the shoppers who simply browse and don’t buy. Think about everywhere in-store where a customer could interact with your brand. These touchpoints can include fitting rooms, interactive displays, experiential marketing events, customer service desks, team members walking the shop floor. All of these customer interaction points - and any others specific to your business - should be included in your retail communications strategy.
Case Studies
London//Manchester//Birmingham
Case Studies and Success Stories
At The One Off, we’ve helped brands of all types and sizes, in a range of sectors, to create, change or strengthen their retail communications strategies. With the UK fashion retail market evolving rapidly, we helped one major retailer to reposition their brand, telling their story in a more engaging way by developing a new in-store communication and branding strategy.
We teamed up with a major UK sporting goods retailer looking for a more confident and fashion-forward presence. This retail communications project saw us developing a strategy that worked across their stores of all shapes and sizes, creating spaces that are engaging and exciting to explore, as well as easy to navigate.
Innovations in Retail Communications
As the world becomes increasingly digitalised, we’re seeing more and more crossover between channels, transforming the in-store experience.
AI is being used to personalise experiences, predicting shopping behaviours and preferences to customise the shopper journey. Smart-shelf technology can monitor stock levels and behaviour to avoid the frustration of missing items, while immersive experiences - using augmented and virtual reality - can be used for everything from one-off in-store events to allowing customers to try on clothes virtually or see how an item would look in their own homes.
In addition, with retail footfall still declining for many brands, we continue to see trends in multipurpose spaces.
Retailers are using part of their floor space to create areas suitable for community events, learning opportunities and interactive experiences, cementing their position in their local community and offering something new and exciting to their customers.
The circular economy is also growing, with many retailers offering refurbished or recycled products, or incentivising customers to recycle their old products in-store.
By adopting some of the new developments in retail communications, you can improve the customer experience, drive additional sales, and get people talking about your brand.
Engage with our team
Looking to make your retail store experience work harder? We’re here to help. With our experienced, cross-disciplinary team beside you, we’re here to ensure that you can make the most of every opportunity.
