7 reasons to invest in best-in-class category design… _
How can great category design help your brand at retail?
#1 To aid brand storytelling
We believe every brand has a story worth telling! A considered category design can serve as the perfect tool to tell your brand’s narrative and really get potential customers to buy into your brand and its products. Incorporating your brand’s story into the journey-to-purchase can help to nurture customer relationships and help your customers to form a deeper connection with your brand.
#2 For a stand-out aesthetic
A stand-out aesthetic does not mean using the brightest colour available, but rather it is an aesthetic that is at the forefront of design, drawing upon avant-garde colour and materiality trends. Not to mention, your category design should both embody and flaunt the best of your brand! In retailers across the board, from John Lewis to Selfridges and Walmart to Flannels, competition between brands is fierce, and so it is vital that your brand’s retail space makes an eye-catching impression on passing footfall.
#3 To support the customer journey
Through customer journey mapping, you can ensure that your customers are taken through key brand touchpoints in a way that promotes a more meaningful interaction with the retailer and brands within, thus improving the overall customer experience. Category design can help you to guide your customers through these key stages in the customer journey, from product discovery to purchase – easing the process to increase purchase confidence and subsequently increase the likelihood of a sale.
#4 For upselling and cross-selling
At a time when purchasing confidence is low due to the cost-of-living crisis, upselling and cross-selling will prove more of a challenge. Brands that invest in their category management strategy and design will be better able to influence their customers to increase basket spend!
#5 To support your brand’s community
Brands and retailers can act as a powerful platform to bring together like-minded people, and category design can serve as the perfect tool to recruit members into the community – whether through incorporating the promotion of your brand’s community page on social media or an app that provides onward product support and aftercare, into your category design. Creating a customer-base that is more reminiscent of a community can lead to longer-lasting relationships between brand and customer, and even free brand endorsement from members of the community.
#6 For an elevated customer experience
Through considered category design, you can curate a retail destination for passing footfall that supports discoverability, interactivity, and play, making your brand more entertaining, intimate, and memorable to your customers.
#7 To educate customers about your brand and its products
Similarly to brand storytelling, using category design to educate customers about your brand and its products, including its unique features and benefits, will help to increase purchasing confidence. The transparent nature of incorporating considered educational elements into your category design will influence customers to really buy into YOUR products rather than your competitors’ products which they may know very little about.
Why it matters!
The above work towards the overarching goal of increasing sales, whether it is in the ‘here and now’ or in the future. And if you are a brand that has been awarded a space within a retailer, investing in category design is perhaps the most effective way to demonstrate your commitment to driving sales – something which won’t go unnoticed by the retailer, helping you to secure your space for the future!
We know category design…
Having worked with brands across a variety of sectors, from fashion and luxury to home and beauty, to create immersive, intuitive, and innovative customer experiences, we really understand the importance of impression management through category management design.
From planning stock load, to creating decision hierarchies, to applying campaigns for eye-catching on-shelf presentation, at D4R we know how to ensure that your product appeals in its category. Our talented 3D visualisation team can provide approval visuals of displays in-situ for both internal and external vendor approval. From initial concept ideas through to implementation, our work translates brand values and personalities into physical spaces, built on real commercial and operational understanding.