High-tech for low and medium tech

Walk into any store and you may not immediately notice it, but signage is everywhere. It entices, informs, and convinces, all while maintaining consistent branding. Home Depot’s signage may look handwritten, but we all know it isn’t. It’s purposely designed and delivered to the consumer in a consistent way that informs about the product while supporting a friendly brand image. From supermarkets to local boutiques, you might not notice when it’s right, but you will notice when it’s wrong. Imagine walking into a supermarket and seeing shelf pricing handwritten on scraps of paper. You’d leave well before purchasing any items, regardless of the actual quality. You just never got past the bad signage.

For the marketing team, maintaining consistent signage across multiple locations isn’t easy. Add video displays to the mix and the effort of managing and deploying consistent signage becomes a complex problem. That’s where vendors such as ECS Global (ecsglobalinc.com) come in. Nucleus found their customers gained in two areas that delivered ROI. First, ECS Global customers were able to simplify the management of their signage effort, allowing them to spend more time managing the strategy than the process.

The other, more significant benefit, was the capability given to Marketing to quickly react to opportunities. Snow shovels priced appropriately on the shelf before a snowstorm might be an obvious example, but coordinating that with electronic signage highlighting the more profitable brands is simply not possible without a centralized management tool. Most electronic signage vendors have production tools for managing video content, but integrating that content with the other signage in the store becomes a manual chasm across multiple applications. It’s easy to see how that perceptible barrier limits marketing and sales opportunities.

It might not be high-tech, but signage has a big impact on sales. Managing it in a consistent and coordinated way can make a real difference to a retailers often slim bottom line.