Traditional marketing displays are often static, emphasizing a specific brand or product. The benefit of traditional displays has always been their cost-effectiveness and accessibility. They are relatively easy to set-up, with a low start-up cost, and have been proven to generate increased brand awareness and sales. The downside of traditional marketing displays is that they lack the ability to change dynamically as the consumer shops. Integrating technology into marketing displays can help address this issue. Specifically, through the use of LCD displays to create a dynamic marketing space, retailers and brand marketers can reach consumers in new and innovative ways. Today’s commercial LCD refrigeration displays are a cost-effective means of creating dynamic displays that closely integrate with consumer shopping patterns, allowing retailers to create an enhanced shopping experience.
New Frontiers for LCD Technology
Liquid-Crystal Displays, or LCD’s as they are commonly known, are ubiquitous in the modern world. The displays of most modern computers, televisions, tablets, and cell phones are all driven by LCD technology. In fact, consumers most commonly interact with technology today through an LCD display. Advancements in how these displays are manufactured has allowed costs to be driven down, while also resulting in more efficient displays that can be nearly any shape or size. This has allowed LCD display technology to be used in innovative ways across a variety of fields, including the creation of dynamic marketing spaces. The flexibility of LCD display technology has allowed savvy marketers and retailers to drive innovative marketing campaigns that more closely align with modern consumption patterns. These modern marketing displays have quickly outpaced stagnate traditional displays by generating greater interest in the brands and products they market, while also creating a customized and unique shopping experience.
The Power of LCD Displays for Marketing
LCD technology has enabled retailers to explore unique avenues of interaction with consumers. Of course, an LCD display can still be used to advertise a specific brand or product. However, capitalizing on the power of LCD technology requires thinking beyond this traditional marketing technique. Retailers are now using LCD displays as a dynamic interaction window between the products they carry and their consumers. In a retail environment, one of the most exciting avenues of innovation involves the integration of transparent LCD technology into glass door coolers. By embedding the thin sheets of liquid-crystals that comprise an LCD screen into the actual door of a single or double door glass cooler, engineers have turned the glass door of coolers into a dynamic marketing space that enhances both the consumer shopping experience while also maintaining the structural integrity of the cooler. For retailers, transparent LCD screens integrated into glass door coolers provide an ideal marketing space. The power of this marketing space can be further enhanced by using transparent LCD technology in conjunction with the data gathering power of an IoT based system. By combining these two technologies, retailers would be able to provide targeted promotional offers to consumers based on what they are viewing at that moment and their purchasing history. For example, if the glass door cooler contained a specific beverage that the consumer had purchased in the past, the transparent LCD embedded in the cooler door could offer a promotional discount on that product. By using transparent LCD screens in this way, retailers are able to provide their customers an enhanced shopping experience that is dynamic, unique, and offers greater value.
Using an LCD display to create a dynamic marketing space also requires leaving behind notions of a large, fixed display to draw the most attention. Rather than this approach, retailers can use a variety of displays in different sizes located at high traffic points throughout the store. Transparent LCD technology further expands the variety of ways that retailers can interact with their customers. Importantly, while transparent LCD displays create a dynamic marketing space, they do so without obscuring the product from consumers. Retailers can utilize LCD screens of varying transparency, depending on the effect they want to create in their shopping experience. This flexibility empowers retailers to use LCD technology to enhance product visibility, while still retaining the ability to provide product recommendations and targeted promotions.
By creating multiple channels through which consumers can interact with displays, retailers can increase product and brand exposure, while also creating a more refined and modern shopping experience grounded in technology integration. If a popular brand is located at one point in the store, retailers can place an LCD display at the primary point of consumer interaction with that brand, encouraging them to view the catalog of the most popular items that are currently being sold. This allows retailers to generate increased brand awareness, while also empower consumers to take control over their shopping journey and find the products they are interested in more quickly and efficiently.
LCD displays in a retail environment are also compatible with today’s retail landscape of rapidly changing trends, allowing retailers to stay on top of changing consumption patterns. Foremost among these trends is a desire by consumers to have a unique and customized shopping experience. As LCD technology is more fully integrated into the modern shopping experience, consumers will be able to interact directly with the screen to select specific products they wish to see, current promotions, and be offered accurate and targeted product recommendations. In this way, LCD displays will be able to provide consumers with the guided, unique, shopping experience that they desire. To further enhance the unique shopping experience they provide, retailers can update display programming to reflect the season’s most popular items in a given region. Retailers can also update display programming to reflect ongoing sales events or holiday themed sales, creating continuity between displays across their entire retail storefront. By doing so, retailers ensure that consumers aren’t greeted with a stagnate shopping experience when they enter the store. Rather, LCD displays will allow for a greater degree of consumer engagement with the store’s most popular products and brands.
