Sunday, October 23, 2011

Digital Hangers :Social Proof in Visual Merchandising !

How many times have you walked into a retail stores by getting attracted from a dress the mannequin wore in the store display or the digital signage that advertised about a product ?
Such touch points which helps to convert a shopper to customer is what makes the field of Visual Merchandising (VM) more interesting.
Retailers have always found it challenging to measure the impact of sales performance due to VM activities. Having said that I was fascinated to look at one of the innovations piloted by one of the japanese stores.
109 Men’s department store in Shibuya has gone hi-tec with it’s shopping experience by introducing digital interactive clothes hangers to one of it’s shops. The hangers, from Japanese company Team Lab, interact with digital displays above the products, triggering certain images and videos to be played when the hangers are picked up by a shopper.

When I think about this trend it could be well extended in so many ways by using the principles of Social Proof .Social Proof is the human characteristic that people are influenced to do something by what other people do.
It could be a excellent way to validate the positioning of the products under display and also gain intelligence on the customer preferences.
My view on how this Digital Hanger could be used as powerful VM tool :

Source:http://www.japantrends.com/shopping-goes-hi-tec-with-interactive-hangers/

Labels: ,