This article was authored by Posterboy Printing account manager Daniel Edwards

Attention is a valuable commodity, and many marketers say that getting attention is the top challenge they face. We have more information streams available to us than ever before. New bottlenecks have joined the traditional communication channels on the information menu.

Consumers move agnostically through the different media channels as time and opportunity allow. With more options available, it is a challenge for marketers to put their promotions in front of the right people. So channel mix is the challenge because you need to find people where they are.

Amber Collins, CMO of Australia Post, says, “Media is hard now. It is hard to find people, and that’s why channel mix is so important because you have to use every opportunity you can to find these eyeballs and get them to engage with your brand.”

When considering a channel mix, print has several strengths.

Referral source

Print is excellent at sending traffic further down the buys journey.

Marketing agency SUCH AND SUCH took over Salvation Army UK marketing THIS YEAR and conducted comprehensive customer research to attribute which media channel generated the most activity. The printed element included credit card donation forms and postage-paid addressed envelopes. Despite the envelopes, they found that customers preferred to make their donations online across all age brackets, though the print element activated them.

This tendency shows that while print isn’t closing sales, it generates warm leads in other channels where the deal is closed.

Consumers will travel seamlessly between channels as best suits their needs. They were gathering information in one channel and using it in another. In the Salvation Army case, they took what they learned from print marketing and used it to complete a donation online. The same is true for bricks and mortar stores. A study by Australia Post found that 62 per cent of Australian men make special trips after viewing a catalogue.

People will take the information they gather from print marketing and travel to physical stores to make a purchase. Again, print sending warm leads to another channel where the deal is closed.

Print prompts action

How do we know that print is so good at referring traffic to other channels? To answer that question, in 2015, Canada Post conducted a neurological study into the effect of tactile print and how it related to motivation.

Researchers used EEG brain imaging and eye trackers and presented their participants with promotions in print format and digital screen format.

When discussing activation, the study says, “[Tactile prints] motivation score was 20 per cent higher than digital’s score. For motivation, we usually consider a two per cent to five per cent positive difference to be a predictive indicator of future behavioural change. If, for example, you’re choosing between two product packages and one generates a motivation response that is three per cent higher than the other, we can confidently say that choosing the package with the higher score will make a positive difference in the marketplace. And the higher the score, the more dramatic the behavioural effect. “By any standard, a 20 per cent difference in motivation response is huge.”

I could dive into the reasons behind these finds. Talk about things like comprehension and retention, trust implicit in paper, conservation of energy in memory making, or the way tactile sensations drive human responses. Instead, the takeaway from this is that print motivates people to take action and is very good at sending them further into a brand’s marketing ecosystem.

Visual merchandising

Print is more than just the tactile kind that the reader holds in their hand, like a flyer or a catalogue. There is also a lot of print that is on display only, products like posters, banners, car wraps, building wraps and pull-ups. Display only print places a vital role in shop front displays and visual merchandising. All of which are valuable tools for attracting customers in retail spaces and increasing brand awareness in the broader world.

For a retailer, the primary aim of shop front displays is to draw customers into the store. In-store visual merchandising encourages shoppers to stay in the store for extended times and motivates them to purchase. Visual merchandising displays have many elements, including the goods sold by the store, and very often, these displays rely heavily on print for backdrops or props.

Three independent studies into visual merchandising and shop front displays were conducted in India, South Africa and Lithuania. Researchers used exit surveys at a furniture store, an apparel store, and a footwear store, respectively. Despite the differences in geography and market, the results were nearly identical. The window displays caught shoppers’ attention, and the in-store merchandising brought them into the store and helped them to make purchases.

As a case study, in 2016 The Gap CEO Art Peck told analysts, “I think windows today are much less relevant than they have historically been and you will see this going forward, that we are actually ‘skinnying down’ our window treatments….If you haven’t won at the digital interface on the front end, your window in the mall store is probably not going to make a difference at the end of the day”. That year turnover for The Gap dropped 12 per cent, while other S&P 500 companies across the country rose by 23 per cent for the same period.

We can learn from the experience of The Gap that while the world has grown to include the digital space, the classic strategies of visual merchandising are just as relevant as they ever were. While print is only an element of a visual merchandising strategy, it is an essential part that retailers cannot afford to ignore.

Online activity leads to offline activity

In 2015, Price Water House Coopers conducted a global consumer survey with over 19,000 respondents in 19 territories and six continents. One finding related to a behaviour called “showrooming”, where people go into a retail store to see, touch and feel a product they later purchase online. Researchers found that this behaviour had evolved into “reverse showrooming”, where a person will research the product online and then go in-store to buy it. So increases in online traffic were driving increases in offline sales.

Showrooming and reverse showrooming highlight the value of another aspect of print in the point of sale and visual merchandising space. If a marketing campaign increases online activity, this will likely increase offline in-store activity. Once a potential customer reaches a physical store, the best time to communicate with them is when they are within reach of a product. Print is the only way to do that.

As we saw with The Gap, yes, the marketing world is different from 10 years ago, but the fundamentals still haven’t changed. What I believe we saw with showrooming becoming reverse showrooming was our new digital tool integrating into our human experience. We tried the online shopping thing because we could get better deals, but retailers have responded, and there is not such a big price difference anymore. But mostly I think people like to go shopping; they like to go out. Look at how the world has exploded out of 2 years of covid lockdown once given the opportunity. In a world where people want to go out and like to go shopping, there is a place for display print in point of sale and visual merchandising.

Within reach

As marketers drive traffic to their digital assets with print or other methods, they also drive traffic to their physical stores. And in those retail spaces, print can place a valuable role in the customer journey.

Shoppers do not make most retail buying decisions until they are in front of the product and reaching for it. Consumers may have a need in mind (I need a stapler), but they do not have a specific brand decided; they will decide in the store. Here we can see a variation of the reverse showrooming behaviour, where the shopper researches a product on their smartphone as they stand in the aisle.

Informative printed material on shelves and around a retail store will staff the store with ‘silent salesmen’, informing shoppers about goods and services through printed messages without requiring staff. Store staff are not always available to attend to these critical moments, but print can be there all the time.

Point of sale print makes brands physically present for these in aisle moments, increasing the brands’ visibility as shoppers do their research.

So there you have it, some ways that print can work to increase the traffic in other marketing channels. It may be from a catalogue read at home sending people onto an internet ecosystem or to a physical store. In a retail district, as a shopper wanders around enjoying their newfound freedom when a banner in a shop front catches their eye. In a retail shop wandering the aisles and finding what they are after but not sure which one to get, point of sale on shelf print marketing can help sway their decision towards the brand’s product. Print is particularly good at sending consumers further down their customer journey. It is relevant at many points along the way, right up to the final moment when the shoppers place the product in their trolley.

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.  

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter