Our Solution to Visual Merchandising and the Future of Retail Analytics

Discussion with Mihoko on VMD Marketing Strategies and the Future of VMD+ in an Evolving Retail Industry

What is your role at Flow Solutions?

Mihoko is a customer success director.

“Customer Success Director at Flow Solutions”

What roles and responsibilities does your position entail?

As a customer success director, the main focus is to ensure the client maximizes the benefit from our products. Mihoko strives to ensure that all employees operating our systems fully understand the relationship between the KPIs and how they can be analysed to develop a comprehensive action plan.

Is this an area with which you have previous experience?

Mihoko boasts over ten years experience in the retail industry. In particular, she has been involved in store design, refurbishment and devising VMD marketing strategies for a number of department stores in Tokyo.

What is VMD?

VMD or visual merchandising, is part of a marketing tool that uses attractive sales displays and manipulation of retail floor plans to engage customers and increase sales. It is a technique that helps stores communicate the most desirable features of a product to the forefront of the customers attention.

How do stores currently benefit from using VMD in their market strategy?

A store may make infrastructural changes or strategically manoeuvre displays around the shop. For example, a store displaying expensive products in a prime store area may replace them during a sale with lower value items as the customer will likely want to spend less per product.

What is VMD+?

Our VMD+ software breaks down the layout of the store into a grid format, which can accurately represent store features such as displays, furniture and POS locations. The programme measures the number of customers that pass by, stop and their dwell time in each grid area, giving a detailed numerical account of customer response to existing marketing strategies. This information can then be collated into a clear and concise format with most clients using our area heat map solution.

How do stores further benefit from using our VMD+ solution?

Unfortunately, stores employing conventional VMD methods are unable to accurately correlate their actions to a change in store performance. However, using our VMD+ technology, stores can conduct controlled assessments, such as the A/B test, to design a bespoke marketing action plan that can more precisely target objective milestones.

How do you see VMD+ developing in the future?

There is huge potential for further development of VMD+, such as being able to track products and their popularity with customers, for example, which clothes customers tried on and if they bought them. This would give retailers a better idea of which products are more successful and if they could be retailed better in a different area of the store.

Why should businesses choose our software over our competitors?

The difference between Flow Solutions and our competitors is the quality of service we provide following implementation of the programme. Store managers may understand the meaning of the data but we are committed to ensuring they understand how to effectively combine the KPIs to create a comprehensive action plan.

What is your idea of the future of retail data analytics and how do you think VMD, in particular VMD+ fits into that vision?

In the current market, retailers have insufficient data, so measure performance from a business perspective using sales. However, due to the transition towards online retail, stores have been forced to invest more resources into the customers’ experience. Therefore, technology monitoring conversion rates and traffic will become more prominent, as companies try to further understand and manipulate consumer decisions.