Success Depends on Carrying Over Your Marketing Message to the Retail Floor

How effective are the billions spent annually on advertising, once a shopper walks into the store?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to spend a day in the yard raking up the last of my fall leaves. Not wanting to lose my belt-clipped cell phone during the process, I removed it, placed it on the counter and did my best to corral the leaves that ultimately would fill 23 yard bags.

After completing my chore, I went to retrieve my phone, but instead of finding it on the counter where I had left it, I found it submerged in the dog’s water dish at my feet. It seems that the vibrating ring tone gave my cell phone just enough mobility to walk to the edge of the counter and take the plunge into the drink.

Replacing the phone involved a sales procedure I’m sure all marketers would like to mimic, but very few can. It involved me setting an appointment with a sales consultant –who actually understood the various cell phones being offered and the service plans that were available- a 45-minute visit with the sales consultant and me walking out the door not only with a new phone and higher-priced service plan, but also an entirely new commitment to a broadband wireless Internet service via the mobile phone network.

Compare my experience to another high-tech consumer shopping experience that will be repeated over and over this holiday season: shoppers seeking an HDTV from Santa. Many walk into an electronics store after seeing an ad in the newspaper or a commercial on television convinced that they want the high-def viewing experience but fuzzy on the details. They engage in a conversation with a sales associate who may be selling HDTVs one day, computer peripherals the next and maybe even a kitchen range the next. Customers ask questions, sales associates do their best to answer, but things get murky –so much so that as many as 30 percent of HDTV owners don’t sign up to receive an HD signal via cable or satellite, according to a recent article in USA Today.

Oh how the Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung and other HDTV manufacturers must pine to create a sales experience involving their products like the one I had buying my new cell phone!

Consider this: In 2006, total spending on advertising in the United States will exceed $150 billion, according to an article from Metrics 2.0. Yet once an ad runs in a newspaper or magazine or a commercial is played back on television, the amount of control a marketer can exert on messaging, consumer education, and influencing a purchasing decision dissipates rapidly. How many marketers get a little queasy thinking about the money they’ve spent on an ad that motivates a consumer to go to a store to buy their product, only to have those shoppers redirected by a sales associate into buying a competitor’s product? Compare that to my friendly sales associate who educated and influenced my cell phone purchase in an environment that the cellular service provider controlled.

While it’s not practical for all the HDTV manufacturers –or those of other products- to offer their products in their own stores where they control the sales process as thoroughly as my cell phone salesman, it is important that marketers begin to see retail stores as a communications medium, according to a recent MediaPost.com article.

In “In-Store Media Significant Influence on Purchase Decisions,” author Jack Loechner quotes Joe Pilotta, vice president of research for BIGresearch, as saying that “the store is a medium of communications” and “media has relevance and influence on a purchase decision.”

That’s where digital signage can stand in for a knowledgeable sales consultant like the one I encountered. Digital signage can carry through the marketing message transmitted in newsprint or on TV to the point of purchase, relieving to a large degree, the nausea that strikes marketers who wonder what happens when they’re ads are no longer present to influence events.

The Bigresearch study quoted in the article found that in-store TV influenced or greatly influenced 10 percent of adults 18 years old and up in making purchasing decisions. The tie between in-store TV and digital signage is obvious. What might not be as obvious is that digital signage can play a strategic role for marketers and retailers when it comes to shelf coupons and special displays, which influenced or greatly influenced shoppers 39.5 percent and 35.5 percent of shoppers, respectively. Digital signage plays in this space –particularly in terms of shelf coupons- when set up with the right software and hardware to do double duty as an interactive kiosk.

What’s needed to pull off this carry though in marketing messages to the store floor is deep sixing old attitudes and concepts about marketing and planning ways to use digital signage strategically to re-enforce and expand upon the print and broadcast ads that currently command the biggest share of the marketing budget. Doing so may soon mean the difference between success and failure.

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The World is Flat After All

As consumers gobble up plasma and LCD TVs, the potential for digital signs and the messages they convey grow as well.

Is it just me, or does the world seem like its getting flatter each day? Everywhere I look, I’m staring at a flat screen display -whether it’s my computer screen, my television or my cell phone display.

LCD and plasma display panels are everywhere, and with the burgeoning acceptance of high definition television, that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Consider the latest statistics from research firm iSuppli. Worldwide LCD TV sales will grow 27.5 percent a year until 2010 when the value of the market will reach $84 billion, according to the researcher.

Consumer’s love affair with plasma display panels is no different. HDTV dominates the plasma panel market, accounting for 79 percent of the 2.8 million plasmas sold last quarter, according to recent research from DisplaySearch. That share is will reach 86 percent this quarter if the researcher’s forecast is correct.

Marketers considering digital signage to influence and inform shouldn’t overlook the obvious fact that digital signs –for the most part- look identical to LCD and plasma TVs. That’s powerful stuff for a new medium seeking its place in the marketing mix. It’s as if marketers skipped several steps in the typical development of a new medium, and landed right in the middle of near-ubiquitous consumer acceptance and total familiarity. All that’s left for them to do is craft messages to meet their stated goals and begin narrowcasting.

The growth of LCD and plasma TVs at home will continue. Soon LCD TV unit sales will overtake CRT televisions. With each new LCD and plasma sale, the world gets a little bit flatter and novelty gives way to normalcy and acceptance. That’s where the power is for the marketer –in the public’s acceptance of flat panel displays and their attraction to them.  

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Digital Signage Content May Be Closer Than You Think

Congratulations. You’ve made the commitment to improve communications around your corporate headquarters with digital signage. You’re convinced it can grab the attention of your fellow employees, inform workers of important announcements and even motivate them to attain higher levels of performance.

Now you’re faced with a hard reality: Where are you going to get the content for your corporate digital signage network? Before you panic, if you’re like most businesses in America, you have quite a few resources at your fingertips that will make providing content for the digital signage network easier than you might think.

An obvious place to start is your portfolio of marketing resources. JPGs, GIFs and TIFFs files of everything from company logos to photos of products, employees, executives, offices, production lines and even installations of your company’s products at customer sites are a good place to start.

Don’t forget your video resources. Perhaps you have commercials, footage from corporate meetings and seminars, awards ceremonies, company trips, training sessions and other events that will come in handy.

Next review your company’s customer and employee training materials for graphics that might frequently be needed. Cut-away drawings of products, illustrations of manufacturing techniques and processes, flow diagrams and pie charts are but a few of the resources that probably are available. Don’t restrict your search to printed material. Remember to review PowerPoint presentations, Flash animations and HTML pages for these content treasures.

Depending upon where you intend to display your digital signage information, another invaluable source of information can be the very spreadsheets production and sales managers use to track performance. Tools exist that allow data acquired from these sorts of applications to be automatically formatted and presented on a digital signage network.

In the hands of your in-house communications department, these existing resources can be transformed into digital signage gold. It’s not that your creative team won’t ever have to take pictures or shoot video footage. Certainly, if you intended to create and maintain a digital signage presence that’s fresh and engaging, you’ll constantly be adding new content. However, the decision to add a digital signage network at your company doesn’t have to create headaches for them, either. You and your company already possess many of the elements needed to get started. It’s just a matter of identifying existing resources and putting them to work.

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Take Control of Your Advertising

Digital signage puts marketers in charge of when and where their messages influence shopper.

At last election day is upon us and we as Americans should have a much better sense of which direction our country will be headed within the next few hours.

Day after day, the media are filled with stories of who will do what if this party or that party takes control. The headlines are filled with phrases like “seizing control” and “taking power” and stories about the ramifications of Democratic or Republican control of Congress.

“Taking control” is part of our daily lexicon, too. “He’s a take charge kind of guy.” Or, “She’s a control freak.” Everywhere you turn, life seems about controlling our words, our actions and our environment. At least it is in most spheres.

But I wonder if you were to ask 10 marketers how in control they feel about their marketing message if even half could honestly say they’re in charge. Sure they design their messages and sign off on the creative product of their advertising agencies. But from that point on they start to lose control.

Marketers cast their messages out to the public through a variety of media, like newspapers, broadcast and the Internet, without really knowing whether or not the public is fully absorbing their messages. These days it seems the public is just as likely to zap the commercials on their digital video recorder, change the radio station and turn past the newspaper and magazine ads as they are to actually acknowledge the marketer’s message and take a desired action.

That’s why when it comes to taking control of marketing messages, no other medium appears to approach digital signage. With digital signage, marketers can influence shoppers when they’re in the buying frame of mind. They can day-part their messages, appealing to stay-at-home moms during one portion of the day and school kids at another. Digital signage even allows them to control their messages on a micro-geographic level, targeting a neighborhood, ethnicity, age group, social strata or income like no other medium.

With digital signage, marketers aren’t only in control of their message but on how, where and when that message is presented to a highly targeted market audience. Digital signage elevates the control over messaging to a level all managers dream of and few currently achieve.

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