Before the digital age, I worked with an ad man who had a long career in sales, followed by a long career in advertising. He had remarkable success in both disciplines and I was privileged to learn the art of closing the sale from him. I learned that it is one thing to understand that you have to close, but quite another to know how to close. One of the tricks that he shared was getting the product into the customer’s hands.
An obvious example of this technique is the “test drive” in auto sales. The salesperson doesn’t drive the car, the customer does. The customer not only feels the car compared to his or her existing rambling wreck, but also experiences a reassuring sense of control over the entire transaction. The customer is transformed from a passive observer to an active participant.
Similarly, in modern mass-retail environments, the sooner you can provide customers a personal sense of control and investment in their retail-discovery adventure, the more likely you are to achieve a satisfying outcome. That same ad man had a favorite story about a haberdasher who learned that he moved more sales items by piling them en masse on a table than by neatly dividing them by style and size. Shoppers who dug through the random “50% off” piles searching for “something in their size” were likely to feel a possessive sense of investment in anything they discovered there.
These lessons came back to me recently as I considered the roles of digital signage in retail environments. Before digital signage delivered multimedia messages, shoppers were treated to static signs, usually print placards. By comparison, the dynamic sights and sounds of digital signage are inherently engaging, thus much harder to ignore. But your customer’s engagement with standard signage, whether static print or dynamic digital multimedia, remains passive – it’s one-way, lacking the element of hands-on personal discovery that adds those positive senses of control and investment.
Enter interactive digital signage. A prime example is found in a case study of a recent shopping mall installation of Advantech’s multi-touch DSD-3032 displays powered by its ARK-DS520 Graphics Digital Signage Platforms. The 32-inch industrial-grade high-definition (1920 x 1080) displays are large enough and have a wide enough viewing angle (178 degrees) to accommodate interaction with multiple shopping partners and are bright enough (350 nits) to remain comfortably readable in the brightest shopping areas. They’re also fanless for quiet, unobtrusive operation.
The combination of Advantech’s DSD-3032 displays and ARK-DS520 digital signage platforms provide an interactive customer experience that delivers those key elements of hands-on control and personal investment. Shoppers are transformed from passive observers of your messages into active participants in the personal discovery of the information that has the greatest relevance to them. Hands-on control plus active participation? That’s a winning combination my old ad-man friend would recognize, even in this thoroughly digital age.