Creating A Great First and Lasting Impression

The first and last impressions of your store have almost nothing to do with your products or your prices. In fact, a large part of your store’s image is formed out in the parking lot, at your entrance, and in the exit area.

So, what message is your store sending? Friendly or apathetic? Clean or cluttered? High-priced or competitive? Fun or boring? Does the message complement your marketing strategy? You have control over the image you’re sending but are you conveying your desired image?

This session will look at fabulous and fatal first and lasting store impressions and offer suggestions on how to deliver appropriate and desirable messages to your customers.

This topic will appeal to owners, retail executives, and store managers.

Length: 60 minutes – 2 hours

Creative Ways They Rip You Off

After years of our relentless focus on building sales, it might be a good idea for us to revisit the latest methods thieves are using to fleece us out of our profits.

Holding on to a bigger percentage of what we already have has always been more cost effective than trying to build new business. But do you really know what to look for at the back door? Or the front door? And now they’re using the Internet and who knows what else.

Attend this session and learn where some of the holes are in your profit bucket and effective ways to plug them.

Length: 90 minutes – 2 hours

Getting A.R.M.E.D. for Battle

Struggling to get by has never been an appealing strategic plan. Struggling to get by only buys you time and not a lot of it. In today’s competitive retail world, it is wise to get A.R.M.E.D. – which stands for:

• Affiliate with outside resources

• Renovate your fixed assets

• Motivate your people with a motivating work environment

• Educate yourself continuously

• Differentiate your business from the competitors in your marketplace

This session will show you why each letter in A.R.M.E.D. is so important in retailing today. Attendees will be presented with several ideas to use back home in order to become better A.R.M.E.D. for battle.

Length: 60 minutes – 2 hours

Promoting A More Positive Price Perception

In a period when protecting an already razor thin bottom line is crucial to survival, retailers are not as anxious to roll back prices in response to a competitive threat as in years past.

Yet, recent research suggests that price has made a dramatic rise toward top of the list of reasons why shoppers choose a particular store. How can a retailer handle this seemingly Catch-22 scenario?

In this session, we will look at numerous ways you can create a more positive low price image without lowering prices. If perception is reality, this session offers you great hope to give your customers more of what they want without giving them more of what you can’t afford.

Owners, company executives, and store managers will benefit from the concepts and ideas in this timely, thought-provoking session.

Length: 75 minutes – 2 hours

Fishin’ For Sales – Better Change Lures

Minimal inflation, myriad new competitors, and merchandisers preoccupied with ECR, ABC, and category management – or worse, downsizing or merger-mania – no wonder sales are flat with few encouraging trends in sight. Meanwhile, your customers are being subjected to a shopping environment more and more devoid of sizzle. This tendency to move toward “plain vanilla” merchandising plays right into the hands of your competitors: the category killers, niche marketers and on-line operators.

Get in-store merchandising techniques that stimulate more consumer spending and maximize sales.

Discover merchandising ideas that can be effectively implemented in 1, 10, or 100 days.

Length: 90 minutes – 2 hours

Merchandising Magic 3.0

Millions of customers enter our stores each week. Advertising, habit, and impulse bring them in, but what makes them stay? And what impacts their behavior while inside the store? In short, why do they buy what they buy and how can we get them to buy more? Can we influence shoppers to stay longer, cover more square footage and buy more?

To answer these questions, we observed over 1,000 customers in several stores across the United States.

Learn how a customer traffic study will change the way you merchandise your aisles and grow sales. We’ve discovered some significant merchandising strategies and tactics that can positively impact they way your customers move through the store and what they buy.

Length: 75 minutes – 2 hours