In retail, brand success is offering customers unique and appealing experiences. But often brands don’t know how to create these experiences or how to establish them. To do this, an essential tool is storytelling.
Telling a story is one of the most effective ways to connect with customers. Once they become involved with the brand, it’s much easier to attract and persuade them to make purchases, making them feel like an active participant in the story and the experience being offered.
If well-developed and communicated, storytelling can expand the brand’s reach and catch the attention of more people. When applied to retail, any experience will be much more powerful, as the buyer will connect with the brand and remember it as being part of that story they experienced.
Then how can we apply storytelling effectively to retail?Â
Here we have a few ways to help us tell our brand’s story at points of sale.
Now that we know storytelling is very relevant to retail, we have to think about how to do it in the best way possible:
· Create a story that’s consistent with the brand, its messages and its products. Doing this will make it easier to create a powerful story and one that customers see consistently.
– Focus on the story, not the products. It’s the most practical way to create emotions and connect with customers. How they relate to products will come later and, if the story has been well developed, it will become a loyal and regular relationship.
– Tell the product or brand’s story by taking advantage of technology. At HMY we provide technological products that have a greater impact on the customer, which also can be used to create a story about a product, like holographic displays, an innovative solution to display products virtually that includes 3D, music, and video to focus attention on the story we want to tell or transparent displays, which allows showing the real product while digital content can be visualized through a transparent LCD screen.
Related to this, one of the most effective trends is digital signage, which we can use to show audiovisual content that also enables customers to get more information and interact. There are many possibilities, such as synchronizing content with all the devices that show information to create a much more immersive experience for the customer, as already seen with PerfumerĂas ClapĂ©s in Ibiza.
– Help tell the story by offering relevant information about the product.  With POP displays we can show informative elements, like photos, manufacturing information, or other elements that help create a story about that product, or about its brand, strengthening the emotional connection with customers. An example is the Newcomer Wines of London winery, which uses a label next to each wine to tell you about the wine maker, with photos of the vineyard and the agricultural workers involved in the wine’s production.
– Interact with the customer. Give them the opportunity to feel truly connected to the story and the brand, through actions that allow them to give feedback or participate actively. This is something that’s essential to make the shopping experience really unique and complete. A technological solution that allows a customer to interact directly during the shopping experience is the product recommender, installed successfully at Futbol Emotion stores, a company that has been very involved in creating innovative shopping spaces, taking their superb online shopping experience to retail.
