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Electronic Labels Move At The Speed Of Retail Promotion

The U.S. retail department store sector is highly competitive, relying heavily on a multi-channel go-to -market strategy.  While it continues to attract shoppers through targeted mailings, on-line offers and social media, most successful department store retailers depend on frequent in-store promotions across most products and categories to drive sales.

But the sheer number of price changes within a store makes price accuracy and the timely update of store signage increasingly difficult.  The costs associated with personnel who have to replace paper signage along with ongoing sign production costs can diminish a retailer’s profits.

With U.S. retailers faced with the high cost of implementing ever-increasing promotion frequency, and with less time and staff to allocate to price and promotional sign changes on the sales floor, the time has arrived for graphical displays to replace a decades-old paper technology.

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The Paradigm Has Shifted

The sheer magnitude of paper sign printing and promotional staging to ensure that every product in the store has the right price at the right time, has set the stage for the need to deploy electronic signage.

The U.S. department store sector executes, on average, more than 100 price change events per item annually.  And these price changes are not just limited to the start of a trading day.  Prices can change throughout the day, with department store retailers driving early morning shoppers to their stores by offering limited-inventory or limited-timed promotions.  

Also, It is not unusual for these promotions to run for only a few hours into the sales day, with the price changing again for another promotional period within the same trading day (the potential for the same item to change price three to four times within a 24-hour period is particularly evident during Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year kicking off holiday season shopping in the U.S.).

With department store promotional practices sure to continue their relentless growth, especially given the competition of on-line retailers like Amazon, which are aggressively trying to undercut prices offered by bricks-and-mortar retailers, graphical displays make more sense than ever before. 

In leaving the decades-old paper sign technology behind, innovative retailers stand to reap the benefits that come with fully graphical displays, including:

  • More timely implementation of price and promotional changes on the sales floor
  • Seamless execution of time-of-day promotional events
  • The ability to increase the number of promotional events
  • The capability to provide more information to customers though additional timely messaging at the point of purchase
  • Greater in-store staff efficiency
  • The opportunity for retailers to target promotions to specific consumer groups or individuals using interactivity with the display

For too long, retailers have focused simply on the increased productivity that would come from eliminating manual price changes and cutting the production costs associated with printing the signs themselves.

In today’s growing promotional environment, an electronic display solution offers department store retailers much more:  simplifying in-store price execution strategies, expanding their capability to manage a promotion-intensive environment while maintaining a high level of price accuracy, and the ability to  reward customers with buying incentives that will ultimately increase the amount each shopper is spending at the store.

Tony Pusateri is the U.S. Vice President of Business Development for ZBD Displays, Ltd. For more information, visit www.zbdsolutions.com.

 

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