Let’s face it; we are a society of impulse buyers. So it will come as no surprise that the majority of consumer purchasing decisions take place right in a store. In fact, according to POPAI, more than 70 percent of all purchased products are chosen inside the retail environment. This behavior usually occurs with goods on countertop displays next to the cash register or on visually appealing retail displays that stand out in a crowd. 

 

Each and every year there are literally thousands of new products hitting store shelves, racks and aisles. So it’s essential that those products be seen and get noticed. Eye-finding retail fixtures are the key to making those products a hit or miss with consumers. A countertop display offers a great opportunity to capture the nation’s impulse buying power and quickly turn it into profits for the retailer. From a spinning counter display of Christmas greeting cards in a Hallmark store to a new DVD display in a Wal-Mart to brochure holders to help promote products at a trade show, counter displays have be eye-catching, sturdy and fully supportive to get a brand’s marketing efforts across.

 

Meridian’s gravity feed display is one of their most popular products. Here is some of work they’ve done for M&M Mars. (Image courtesy Meridian Displays)

DISPLAY OPTIONS

There are a host of countertop display materials available for sign shops to purchase, fabricate, design and install for their clients’ signage needs. They range from printed cardboard folding displays to elaborate cardboard product-holding items, frames for printed promo material, clear acrylic sign holders, brochure holders, countertop backlit light boxes as well as moving LED displays.

 

“An effective countertop display has to be attention grabbing and the graphic has to be concise on text, yet informative enough to tell the shopper why they need the product and need it now.  This all has to happen in about five seconds or they’re off to another product,” says Michelle Lee, director of marketing at Meridian Display in St. Paul, Minn. “Merchandise such as candy bars and snacks are big ticket impulse items. According to one of our clients (M&M Mars’) recent internet study, 41 percent of candy shoppers said in-store countertop promotions greatly influenced their purchases.”

 

Adam J. Larson, Marketing-Inter-mediate Products and Inks/Warranties, 3M Commercial Graphics, St. Paul, Minn., adds that in-store advertising is more important than ever before.  

 

“As brands look to stand out from the competition, today retail countertop space is at a premium and using it more effectively is becoming more important,” he says. “Countertop displays serve as a great advertising vehicle to deliver advertising impressions to the consumer at the point of purchase.”

 

3M’s IJ61 film is a clear 3-mil vinyl can be used to create retail displays on glass countertops and other transparent surfaces such as this retail flower display. (Image courtesy 3M Commercial Graphics)

GLASS COUNTERTOP APPLICATION

Larson says that two new products 3M rolled out at SGIA 2011 are going to help transfer the benefits of window graphics to retail countertops. “With these two new products, the retailer can offer some neat graphics right on a glass countertop.”

 

3M’s IJ61 is a clear 3-mil vinyl film that is said to give retailers a product to implement creative ideas combined with functional purposes on vertical, transparent substrates such as windows and countertops. 

 

“IJ61 is a changeable window graphic film that goes on and comes off easy,” Larson says. “This film accepts solvent, latex or UV inkjet inks brilliantly, while unprinted areas remain relatively optically clear, all without the need for an overlaminate. This short-term film is an idea for convenience stores with short promotion cycles.”

 

For the higher-end retailer, 3M offers IJ8150 Clear View Graphic Film. 

 

“It’s a truly optically clear product that you can’t even see unless you’ve printed on it,” Larson says. “It’s a 2-mil cast vinyl film and a perfect fit for the high end retailer. It will give them that real clear glass look. It is designed for longer campaigns and it really makes the graphics pop.”

 

ILLUMINATED COUNTERTOP DISPLAY

Illuminated light boxes are another growing product area for the countertop market. They are designed to float advertisements and promotions between two super thin acrylic panels. Many of these countertop displays use long lasting, edge-lit technology to illuminate pictures and signs. Light is spread evenly throughout the surface of each acrylic sign frame and will pass through any paper print or photo. One of the leading companies in this category is Art Tech Corp., a manufacturer and distributor of super-thin light boxes, LED scrolling message signs and other customize signs. 

 

Laser engraving equipment maker Universal Laser Systems says its systems are ideally suited for the construction of countertop P.O.P. displays, such as this illuminated countertop display made from laser cut acrylic. (Image courtesy Universal Laser Systems)

“You can find our products at department and retail stores, corporate headquarters, trade show exhibitions, restaurant and fast food chains, sports areas and shopping mall floor plans,” says Robert Chu, president at Art Tech Corp in El Monte, Calif.

 

COUNTERTOP LIGHT BOX

The company’s Super-Slim Light box is one of the most popular products in their countertop line-up. It offers a slim, aesthetic design; low power consumption and the graphics are easy to switch out. “The light boxes are 1.5 inches thick and give any advertisement a nice modern look. We can custom design products according to your required size provided there is sizable volume to do so. With this new edge-lit technology to replace the traditional backlit light boxes, we have reached near perfect illumination across the entire surface. It also accepts most types of graphic transparencies,” Chu says.

 

Chu explains that their light boxes utilize CCFL technology (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp) as the light source. “CCFL in basic terms is a gas-discharge light source, which produces its output from a stimulated phosphor coating inside the glass lamp envelope. Some products on the market are using normal fluorescent lamp, which are thin, but they don’t use LCD backlight technology. Our products produce an even illumination as well as provide low power consumption,” he adds.

 

ONE-STOP SHOPPING

Meridian Display manufactures a full line of point of purchase counter displays designed to be a conveniently located counter top display for a variety of retail product display purposes. 

 

“We are a one-stop shop. Our 200,000-square-foot plant and warehouse offers everything under one roof for every type of display that’s needed,” Lee says. “We offer cardboard counter displays that are used as counter display brochure holders, CD display racks, DVD displays, key ring counter top displays, ballet boxes, suggestion boxes and peg displays. Our heavy-duty cardboard counter displays are made out of high quality and very sustainable corrugated material,” she adds.

 

She says their client base ranges from small mom and pop businesses to Fortune 500 companies and national retailers. The company offers three types of product options. 

 

“We have our Express Stock, where they can purchase plain white cartons off our website and users can take them to their own printer to print a header,” Lee says. “We also offer about 120 pre-designed displays to many of our mom and pop retail locations. Lastly, we also provide full scale custom design, print fulfillment and shipping for our major retail and Fortune 500 clients.”

 

Meridian produced these gift card countertop stands for Target. (Image courtesy Meridian Displays)

Lee points out that some of their high-end digital production is done by a strategic partner but most work that is direct print at a lower dpi is done in house. 

 

“One of the keys to our success is our Gopfert 66-inch Rotary Die Cutter.  It’s a three color press that does direct flexo printing onto large sheets of corrugated at 90 dpi,” Lee says. “We were the first company in the United States to install this machine.”

 

She says one of their most popular products is the brochure holder countertop display. 

 

“A brochure holder can elevate promotional messages and entice customers in one stop,” Lee says. “They are a great advertising tool and are small enough to fit into almost any venue. They have a very broad reach even beyond retail.”

 

COUNTERTOP PROJECT

A recent major countertop project Meridian Display did was for Bostik, a manufacturer and supplier of adhesives and sealants. The display was to hold 46 SKU’s and brochures for their grout samples. It was also to be placed into individual shippers for distribution to retail outlets.

 

“We came up two initial concepts. These concepts provided clear markings for each color of grout. The dividers were designed to keep the color segments separated into a consistent vertical pattern. We provided a full size prototype, and tested how it would ship. Upon approval, we produced 500 displays for them. We not only designed and manufactured the displays, we assembled them, added the grout color samples and an instruction booklet. We also packaged them for individual shipping.  This particular display required a lot of dividers to create 46 separate areas.  It also required precise placement of printing, because the name of each color and the item number appears above the grout sample and below the top of the horizontal divider,” she explains.

 

Meridian’s fulfillment center completed the project by packing out the displays with 460,000 grout samples, shrink wrapping the displays, placing each display into an individual shipper, enclosing the header and brochures. The entire order was then shipped to Bostik for distribution as needed. “The basic structure has been used again with new graphics to give it a different look while saving on tooling charges.”

 

She adds that last year during the holidays they designed and fulfilled a big floor display project for Nyko, who makes the remote controllers for the Wii gaming system. “That was another big project for us. We were shipping displays to Costco, Sears and a number of other major retailers all across the country to beat the holiday rush.”

 

Chu says that the Super-Slim Light boxes are 1.5 inches thick and give any advertisement a nice modern look. Art Tech also offers the Super-Slim Light box in a number of sizes. (Image courtesy of Art Tech)

PROTOTYPE DISPLAYS

Some print providers that are involved in the packaging and prototyping services also are using their expertise to offer prototype product displays to their clients. A growing number of the “one-off prototype” work is produced so retailers can test out products in sample store floor settings and the marketing people can see how the product will be seen in an actual retail environment.

 

“We do some shelve marketing work, testing products in a retail environment for some of our retail clients,” says Gina Spring, sales rep at Gahanna, Ohio-based Solar Imaging, a division of Eclipse Corp. “It’s short run printing with a very tight turn time that we have an advantage because we can do it digitally. Basically, they will give us the artwork and slugs and we create everything and they will set it up in their mock store.  With some of these campaigns, turnaround times range anywhere from two to eight hours. Where we normally would have a few days to produce it, we are given hours.”

 

She adds that clients also will run live test marketing on the products in anywhere from 25 to 150 stores to determine buying habits in different regions of the country. 

 

“If the tests run well then they roll it out in all or a large number of their stores,” Spring says. “At that point the client will take the job to either an offset or screen printer because when you are talking about printing countertop displays for 500-1,000 stores, digital can’t compete on price.”

 

She points out that their new wide-format flatbed printer is making their demanding deadlines a lot easier to meet. “We are doing most of this work on our EFI VUTEk QS3220 UV printer. Being able to print white in both directions is making everything run so much quicker and we are able to pump out more work than ever before,” she says.