Digital signage is one of the fastest growing media industries. With such fragmentation in mainstream media, this form of out of home advertising is growing rapidly with digital displays used for promotion, branding and marketing cropping up in all sorts of locations.
A common sight around shopping malls, concourses, airports, and transport hubs, now many retail stores are using digital screens for promotion, both in-store and outdoors.
Digital signage has several benefits for retailers and stores:
Branding
Branding is important for a lot of retailers, and in particular chain stores. Generating a brand can be extremely difficult, but once achieved a brand can be more important than pricing or other shopping factors. Brand building is about generating trust, an image and a reputation.
Some companies generate a huge customer base on their brand alone—think of the big brands in computing, mobile phones and fashion (such as Apple, Nike and Microsoft); many of these generate sales based on brand alone, with people confident of products before they’ve even tried or even seen it.
Generating a brand is a gradual process; the most important aspects to generating a brand are the logo, the company name, and the strap line—again think of some of the big brand names and the logos and straplines they employ.
Digital signage provides an ideal platform for generating branding. With its aesthetics and the ability to provide full motion imagery digital signage provides eye-catching, and most importantly, memorable branding.
Promotion
Promotion is an integral part of retailing. Retailers are always trying to promote new items, over-stocked items and seasonal products. In-store and outdoor promotion has traditionally been done with static signs and posters; however, static signs have several disadvantages. Not only does the printing of promotional posters cost money, it also takes time—not just to get the posters printed but also to erect them. With chain stores this can mean that some stores take longer to begin the promotions than others leading to disparities with promotions.
With digital signage, promotional content can be uploaded simultaneously across stores. And with no need of printing—and with the right content templates, promotions can be generated in-house—avoiding the need, and time delays, in using outside contractors.
Digital Signage and Branding
