The Ultimate Guide to Visual Merchandising in Your Cannabis Dispensary
This means that when merchandising cannabis in your dispensary, the way you decorate your store will influence your customer’s purchasing decisions. Due to regulations and the inability to show open cannabis products, the visual appearance and enticement of cannabis itself can be tricky. This means you have to get creative on how to keep your customers fascinated and engaged with your products. So, how do you keep your customers fascinated and engaged? The answer lies in visual merchandising.
What is Visual Merchandising?
Visual merchandising is the design of your in-store displays that capture your customers' attention to increase sales. A good visual merchandising strategy involves several approaches, whether it be in your display cases, on your dispensary menus, or at the point of sale. In this blog post, we will go through everything you need to know about visual merchandising: different techniques, tips, and provide you with fun examples to try in your store.
Visual Merchandising Techniques
Use Interactive Displays
Utilizing interactive displays is a fantastic way to grab the attention of your customers who otherwise may just pass by your products. Interactive displays can incorporate tech experiences; if your cannabis dispensary uses digital menus, here’s your chance to use them to your advantage.
According to Ombori, using interactive digital signage results in a 46% increase in customer satisfaction and raises the average purchasing amount by 29.5%.
Here is an example of an interactive retail display, done by one of our customers, Farmer Jane Cannabis Co. made for Valentine’s Day. The Valentine’s Day menu background chosen showed hearts that danced around their digital screen. When customers walked into the store their attention went straight to the moving menus.
Create an Immersive Retail Display
An immersive retail display is one that lets your customers tie your products to an experience. The goal is to get your customers to envision themselves consuming your products while living this experience. This visual merchandising strategy creates an impactful and resonating interaction between your customer and your products.
With BudSense, there are several ways in which you can add visuals to your digital menu screens that immerse your customers into an experience. Visual images can be added on Product Menus, Spotlight Menus, and Marketing Menus on the Looping Content Menus, Drive-Thru Menus, Featured Categories Menus, and Featured Product Menus. All menu options have several ways to place images and use colours to impact your customer’s in-store experience.
Take your customers to the mountains for a relaxing evening under the stars 🌠
Keep this example in mind for your next display. Recognize that you don’t necessarily have to build something fancy. If you have a strong theme and ensure that all the components of your display are in line with the story you want to tell, you can create a compelling and immersive experience using just a few simple products and fixtures.
Create a memorable experience for your customers 🎶
Use Cross Merchandising
Cross merchandising is a strategy that boosts sales by placing complementary items alongside one another in your dispensary. A simple example of cross-merchandising seen in a grocery store would be, putting ketchup and mustard next to hamburger buns. In cannabis dispensaries, we often see cross-merchandising done with accessories and cannabis products such as flower or bulk flower or vape accessories next to vape cartridges. By using cross-merchandising, you can encourage your, customers, to visualize themselves using the combination of both products together which results in them purchasing them together.
Boosts sales with cross-merchandising
Use POP Displays
POP displays which stand for “point-of-purchase”, capitalize on the impulses of customers to increase sales. This visual merchandising strategy is based on the location at which cannabis products are purchased by a consumer. This doesn’t necessarily have to be at the point of sale - where transactions occur, it can account for the entire store. Some common POP displays include shelf-talkers, free-standing displays or display cases.
Point-of-purchase (POP) merchandise such as rolling papers and cones, grinders, lighters, matches, and storage containers are all products that can be added to your customer’s basket to enhance their smoking or consuming experience.
According to Repsly, “Impulse purchases makeup 46% to 70% of total purchases in-store”
Visual Merchandising Tip
The Rule of Three
Last but not least, we’d like to leave you with a visual merchandising tip that can be applied to all merchandising techniques. We call this The Rule of Three.
Three is the magic number when grouping products in a display. Not only does it engage the customer, but it also makes the product display more memorable for the customer. According to eye movement tracking studies, three groups encourage the eye to move about and take in more detail. If you’re grouping your cannabis products by package size, have small, medium, and bulk packaging together. If you truly want to capture the attention of price-conscious customers, arrange items in order from good, better, and best value to the customer.
Since the rule of three works to engage your visitors and to increase interest, it is a good rule to use in your visual merchandising.
The Rule of Three with Tweed.
Visual Merchandising Winning Ideas
When dreaming up your next visual merchandising campaign, it can be hard to come up with a cannabis retail merchandising-winning idea off the top of your head. We hope these examples, tips, and different techniques inspire you to get creative with your in-store visual merchandising.
If you’re looking for help with taking your visual merchandising from good to great contact us any time. We are happy to brainstorm ideas with you. Book a demo today to learn more about how BudSense makes selling weed easy.
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