Moving Forward With Digital Signage

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Retailers are migrating to integrated systems to optimize management of in store signage and customer communication, rather than having multiple individual systems, says Derek Buchanan, Chief Executive Officer for global information technology solutions and services company, Episys.
  
Getting signage wrong is costly. Customers are not going to be very happy if the store is promoting products that are not available in the store or promoting products with the wrong price. Without the integration of the signage system with the retailer's back office systems, all that can be safely promoted are brands which do not give the customers enough information on a store's special promotion which might interest customers. Moreover, customers will not return if goods are not available, wrongly priced or not priced at all.
 
Integration therefore has a variety of important benefits. Integrated signage systems enable retailers to reduce costs, improve staff efficiency and increase sales.
 
Integration enables retailers to use existing data without having to enter additional data, so they can start to get benefits from day one, regardless of what systems they already have in place. Integration also enables retailers to communicate a consistent message with customers through all channels to market, whether in-store or online.
 
By integrating the signage system with their inventory system, retailers no longer waste money and resources printing signage for stores that do not stock a particular product or have no stock.
 
And by integrating the signage system with retailers’ planogram or store sequence systems, signage is automatically printed out in the right order to minimize the time taken for store associates to put up and take down signs.
 
With less time required for administration tasks in store (B&Q, the largest home and garden center retailer in Europe, reported a reduction from 16 hours to 1 hour for certain tasks), store associates can spend more time with customers and improve the customers’ shopping experience.
 
Looking forward, with an integrated signage system in place, retailers have the foundation to incorporate other media as they strive to provide more compelling promotions for customers. Large format promotional signs, typically done manually by the marketing department and printed externally with no automatic tracking of price changes or store inventory, should be incorporated into the signage system as should trials, pilots and implementations of electronic signage whether it’s shelf edge labels or multimedia plasma displays. When the retailer has management of all the stores’ media – paper signage, electronic signage, web sites, catalogs, etc. - in one system, branding and product inconsistencies including pricing errors are eradicated.
 
In the retail world we are seeing much more use of plasma TVs for in store advertising. This has an advantage over large posters because the images can be changed dynamically, so retailers can promote particular items throughout the day to adapt to different shopping patterns – busy commuters in the early morning, people doing a full shop later on and so on.
 
We are also seeing a lot of interest from retailers in electronic signage displays to replace some of their shelf edge labels or smaller promotional signs, especially where the prices of products change frequently. The big benefit here is reduced labor because store associates no longer have to put up and take down signs and have more time to spend with customers. The key though, is enabling retailers to use the most appropriate mixture of paper signs and electronic signs driven from a single system. For the foreseeable future we will see retailers using a mixture of paper signs and electronic signs until the time comes when electronic signs are as economic and as graphically appropriate as paper signs.
 
There is no doubt that there is a growing interest in electronic signage. The elimination of paper signage plays very much to a 'green strategy' for the retailer. There are other strong reasons such as the elimination of labor costs in putting up and taking down signs which frees up retailers' store associates to spend more time with their customers and thus enhance their shopping experience. Digital signage also provides the ability to instantaneously react to competitive pressures on pricing as well as have complete flexibility on promotions especially for products that are perishable and need to be discounted near their expiration date as opposed to being just thrown away.
 
All these channels, including electronic signage displays, plasma TVs showing video content plus large format promotional signs that are printed externally, must be linked to the retailer's signage system, which can then access up-to-date information on product prices and each store's inventory.
 
Retailers that optimize their signage operations to reduce costs, will improve efficiency, enhance customer service and increase sales by implementing a signage system that integrates with their back office systems to enable promotional and informative signage to be delivered automatically in the right format, in the right size, in the right quantity to the right store, in the right order on the right day and display the correct price.
  
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