Grilling Season 9 Tips For Custom Retail Displays

Grilling season is coming, and the smell of backyard barbecues will soon fill the air. That means creating great custom retail displays is crucial to your brand’s success.

Your retail display is a store within a store, and a great marketing opportunity to build awareness and increase sales. Creating a digitally printed retail display is the best way to stand out.

A successful product launch can be best served by including retail displays to get your products off the shelf, and directly in high-traffic areas.

Read on to learn about upgrading your brand with an effective digitally printed custom retail display.

Contact Bennett today about a grilling season retail display

The first step to take when designing a retail display is to define your project. Carefully constructing an overall goal for your display is key to success.

Every design and logistic choice you make will revolve around this initial vision statement. Otherwise you’ll get lost in a spiral of possibilities.

Are you introducing a new product to the marketplace? Creating a new niche? Or are you simply looking to move 10% more products?

Set that goal up front and make sure you know where the ship is headed.

According to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey, red, white, and blue are one of the most popular color schemes. Grilling season typically coincides with patriotic holidays, and families are looking for something that fits in with their holidays.

Using this color scheme, or even the American flag, or even eagles or fireworks can draw in the exact customers you're looking for.

By creating a retail display that creates the environment that your target audience will be using the grilling items for, will speak directly to them.

Next, consider going in the opposite direction if your competitors have chosen a red, white, and blue scheme.

Choosing black, or even a black and another color, really emphasizes the second color choice.

This type of display, combined with the right packaging, will make your product look like a modern and sleek appliance choice.

That makes this style choice great for the homemakers out there, who are looking for a product that fits within their other lifestyle choices.

Now consider creating a display that doesn’t only speak to the meat lovers of the world. While there are plenty of customers grilling vegetables alongside their meats, the growing crowd of vegans or plant-based meat eaters has reached $760 million in 2019.

A brand like MorningStar farms has created a niche for themselves with their unique branding. They speak to the sustainable crowd, as well as the vegans.

While these brands are perfecting their products to directly compete with the meat alternatives, it means they’re creating a niche that will also like to grill. Choosing green and brown colors can create a look of a “natural” product, and one that will sell to that crowd.

Next, consider the other selling categories for grilling. While summer is one of the biggest grilling periods of the year, a recent survey found that 69% of customers say they grill eight or more months of the year.

Grilling is seen as fast and even healthy, which makes sense why it’s used almost year round. In fact, one of the biggest selling points of the grilling category is the experience.

Off-season grilling spikes around Thanksgiving, New Years, and even Super Bowl Sunday. Winter is one of the biggest grilling periods of the year, next to summer.

Finally, consider adding recipes to your branding. Incorporating specific product imagery, mixed with a recipe choice will speak to the chefs of the world directly - or to the party host.

The next design choice to consider is a strategic bundling or cross promotion. This will help broaden your selling categories, and possibly give your customers a huge reason to choose your product.

This can be through a coupon approach, a brand deal, combination packaging, or a grouping of two items in a display.

Food Combination

By packaging common grilling items together, you create a mini store for the customer who is looking for the easiest solution. If they can stop by your branding, and get their meat, bread, and more while shopping for grills and accessories, you’ll sell more products.

Rubs, Sauces, Or Condiments

Does your brand, or a strategic partner sell rubs, sauces, or condiments that your target customer would like? By combining these food accessories with your products you’ll activate their taste buds immediately.

Accessories

Finally, if your product or grilling period warrants accessories like meat thermometers, smoking stones, special spatulas, or something else, you’ll target specific customer needs. By presenting them together in a packaged appearance will allow the customer to pick and choose what they need.

Create the “ultimate grilling” display built from the ground up for customer convenience.

Next, create something that is specific, and grabs their attention. What about your offer can be unique? Is it a one-time only item? Does it tie in with a sports event? Think about that unique offering. 

And you need to keep your messaging concise. You can’t sell a laundry list of information to your customers.

You have to give them bullet points of key information to first draw them in. Then include smaller fonts with additional product information that they continue to read.

Next, your display should grab their attention. The best way to do that is to appeal to our five senses: Touch, smell, sound, taste, and of course sight.

Using a multi-sensory approach to the customer experience will give them something that they can’t get in an online store. Suddenly your display becomes something they have to engage with.

Whether you include additional items like lights, or motion-activated items, creating a display that engages with a customer, instead of being a passive experience, will lead to more sales.

Finally, think about your entire campaign. Taking an approach that encompasses a customer’s entire environment (the digital one too), has created some of the most exciting campaigns of the last decade. 

If you can create a display that ties into social media, whether sharing an image of the display, or the graphics tie into your advertising campaign, you maximize your recognizability, and increase sales. 

Giving your customers fully rounded out experiences takes your brand from plain to premium in their eyes. They’ll remember you and they’ll come back for more.

Next, is a bonus section. Creating a custom retail display and bringing it to market is now less expensive than it has ever been. Digital Printing gives you the flexibility to quickly prototype, adjust your messaging, and change with the marketplace.

Here are 6 benefits of Digital Printing that will take your brand from plain to premium.

1. Design Variations

First, let’s talk about designs. So many brands take a one-size-fits-all approach to their retail displays, and that’s because they’re using traditional methods.

Imagine creating a single dieline, but multiple graphic options. More displays + more products = more sales.

2. Tooling Costs

When you want to create a retail display, other printing methods need several weeks in lead time, and the up front costs to create printing plates. That means before you get your first display, you need an up front budget.

These are one-time costs, and can discourage many brands from creating alternate designs. Imagine if you didn’t need to factor those into your budget? Where else could that money go?

3. Cost-Effective

Finally, Digital Printing gives you the best bang for your buck. There is no minimum for it thanks to the no-tooling costs.

Make a product and attack a new niche directly. Create prototypes while you figure out the marketplace.

No matter what reason you are looking at Digital for, there’s a great reason to try it.

4. “One Time Only”

Next, create a special sales event, and print that directly on your display, maybe with an alternate header. If you put your packaging in a display, and the packaging stands out with a fresh design, that will increase sales!

Or if you are heading to a trade show, adjust your displays to match the event quickly and without any additional costs or lead time. No other method can allow you to do that.

5. Printing “On-The-Fly”  

Next, consider the speed to market that Digital Printing gives you. Deliver alternate artwork to Bennett, and get it printing on your display by the end of the day.

What other printing method can give you that?

6. Branding Opportunities

Your display is the first interaction most customers will have with your product. That means you need to bring as much creativity to the display as you do your packaging and your product. 

Adjusting your messaging with the marketplace can help you create a successful product launch with eye-catching designs.

Are you going through a brand refresh? Send the new art file.

Bennett is a premier packaging and retail displays manufacturing company striving to protect and promote our clients' products with customized corrugated solutions. When you work with us, you’re part of the family. We will partner with you every step of the way.

With our fully-integrated design-to-delivery process, we can be the single supplier source. We are an award-winning manufacturer of virtually anything corrugate. We offer everything from plain brown shipping boxes to sophisticated, high-graphic printed point-of-purchase displays, and everything in between.

Contact Bennett today about a grilling season retail display