Visual Communications Strategies

Gaining competitive advantage by ensuring your message is received clearly and understood perfectly

Great communicators have the ability to inspire, to get what they want, to make people expend more effort to reach a common goal. Without face to face contact, we have to rely on clear visual messages to convey our ideas and concepts.

This can be especially difficult when concepts are challenging preconceived ideas, when you are looking to introduce newness into existing areas or when you are trying to motivate staff in difficult times.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension have a series of strategies to allow you to inspire staff, illustrate the benefits of new launches, range reviews and refits, increase in-store compliance, maximize the impact of your seasonal displays and communicate Best Practice principles to ensure your team is operating as efficiently as possible.

Visual Communications Strategies

Getting things right in store is absolutely vital to ensuring that your message is meeting its audience and that the customer’s shopping experience is as perfect as it can be. Empowering your staff with VM knowledge ensures that they own the responsibility of keeping a VM presence that matches your brand values and providing your stores with the edge over your competitors.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension will help you implement a VM guidance campaign, using brochures, movies, interactive games and handy-to-carry reference documents to ensure VM is implemented accurately and swiftly.

All Visual Merchandising can be targeted, from window displays, linear shelving, and POP materials to mannequins, clothing displays and tables, and unique bespoke fixturing.

Benefits

• Smarter stores in less time
• Reduce staff costs by having more effective staff
• Greater compliance when dressing stock and installing POS materials
• Communicate store mechanics such as eyelines and hot spots to increase staff understanding

Seasonal Planning

Seasonal Events are the most important sales periods of the year, and one of the most difficult to get right. Correct implementation requires many things: the correct in store theatre, the co-ordination of many departments, getting the right offer, understanding stock and replenishment levels, and ultimately creating real excitement and interest to drive the sales.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension will guide you through your Events planning, helping you to shape your theatre policies and designs, getting sign off internally and communicating these to store through movies and brochures,

Benefits

• Faster design timescales
• Better implementation
• Greater compliance
• Cost effective process

Compliance Strategies

Compliance is the hot issue in stores, a discipline which can always be improved upon.  Without stores correctly implementing your display layouts or VM principles, all your data and analysis will be worthless.  How do you ensure that your store staff have clear instructions, in a language they can understand and are motivated to keep your store fixtures dressed and ready?

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension has a track record of proven success in implementing processes to raise your compliance levels.  We will work with you to devise a tailored process that fits in with your workflow. 

Using a variety of techniques, including fixture guidance brochures (implemented by some of Britain’s biggest retailers), best practice movies, training sessions, interactive games, and in store poster communications, we can improve your compliance, staff effectiveness and efficiency to ensure that your VM principles are fully implemented where it counts – in the store.

Benefits

• Cost savings through improved compliance levels
• Less time spent dressing fixtures
• Better inventory control
• More motivated staff
• Gaining best in class status
• Smarter store appearance

Product and Brand - Launches and Relaunches

Relaunching a brand is one of the pivotal moments in its lifecycle.  An unsuccessful launch could mean ultimate failure for the brand itself, whereas successful launches can rebuild brand value, grow loyalty and revenue and lead to a renewed strength in your retailer partnerships.

Fifth Dimension Visual Communications have provided the material for the introduction and relaunches of many brands, providing bespoke presentations for your retailer meetings, and creating interactive media showing the features and benefits of your brand relaunch, and offering clear guidance to the retailer and the store on how it is to be launched, with all the associated POP and promotional materials. 

The whole package ensures your brand meets your customer expectations, wins its place on shelf, is implemented correctly instore and sells products – all the factors required for a successful launch.

Benefits

• Improving your brand relaunch presentation to maximize the chances of a successful launch.
• Creating a sophisticated and exciting buzz for your launch within your key immediate, target customer – the retailer
• Detailing the processes you have gone through to create the launch, showing your commitment and investment in the brand.
• Gaining greater compliance in store for the implementation of instore relaunch promotional materials

Range Reviews, Category Visions and Segmentation Guidance

Gaining and maintaining category captaincy is vital to cementing your relationship with the retailer, and the range review is the key time to show your worth in this competitive market.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension will create a customized presentation highlighting your proposed recommendations, and a supporting segmentation movie shows the mechanics of how your new fixture works and makes your client more revenue.  Sub category breakdowns can be shown clearly and new planograms and POS are shown exactly as they will look in real life across a variety of plans and store types.

This is one of our most popular services, effectively conveying the financial benefit of your range review, and underlining your competitive edge to your customer.

Benefits

• Clear communication of your segmentation breakdown
• Ability to demonstrate your category vision and show your mastery of the category
• Greater acceptance of your proposals

Fixture and POS Visualisation

Attracting attention to your products and making them standout on display is a key driver to success, especially when launching new products or creating a promotion.  The growth of aisle management as a discipline has been significant, and communicating your vision for the possible layout and theatre surrounding the fixture marks out the smart category captain.  Those with good relationships with retailers will also be asked to look at seasonal and event aisles, requiring good segmentation, attractive branding, clear navigation and the right theatre for the right retailer.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension will help you to shape out your vision for fixturisation, in the exact location where it will be seen, turning artist’s impressions into photorealistic implementations. Taking existing concept artwork or creating bespoke concept fixture and POS designs, we will help your vision come alive with freshness and verve. These designs can be animated to introduce all the components and activity strategies clearly and effectively.  Tying this in with bespoke planograms from Fifth Dimension Consultancy will allow you to convey your total design solution: eye-catching, impactful, and financially effective.

Benefits

• Maximum impact of your new fixture POS designs and layouts
• Clear illustration of your planogram and POS strategies in photorealistic scenarios at the design stage
• Communication of difficult concepts clearly and effectively
• Saving time on idea acceptance and the sell in process to your customer

Customer Journey Simulations and New Store Concepts

Much research and insight exists on shopper missions, allowing the smart marketer to lay out retail environments to suit certain shopper behaviours at certain times of the day.  Equally, retailers need to be able to assess the impact of store refits and POS rebrands and also communicate the impact of new store concepts, layouts and displays to a large, geographically diverse estate of stores.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension create photorealistic animated recreations of any customer journey, from the car to actually making a purchase decision.  In doing so, we can illustrate the cues and influences encountered by a customer in making this journey.

It allows you to communicate the findings of your research in shopper behaviour, emulating how customers interact with your store and the new layout concepts within it.

This allows you to communicate new store concepts to directors, store managers, architects and staff before any refit work has commenced, allowing your message to be relayed in dozens of places at once.  These can be structural in nature or showing the effect of rebranding or resectioning your store.

Benefits

• Evaluate store designs and reformats before committing to spend
• Evaluate different layout concepts and assess suitability
• Communicate new store formats and redesigns to all stakeholders
• Shopper mission research results more effectively shown, emulating journey

Store Training and Best Practice Programs

One time ad hoc projects can only have a limited impact.  For a complete overhaul of staff performance, a program of staff in-store training and best practice communication will have a lasting and significant impact, creating a more empowered, dynamic team response. 

Our case histories show that in-store staff performance increases significantly when given clearer guidance and higher quality materials over a sustained period.  Such programmes demonstrate your commitment to achieving these higher standards, leading to higher discretionary effort, higher morale and motivation and higher standards in-store.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension will design a branded programme of communication materials, including presentations, movies, brochures, training sessions and newsletters designed to create the sustained improvement you are looking for in your staff.  This is the ideal response for unifying teams, creating a more motivated workforce and focusing on sustained success in store, especially in aggressive market conditions.

Benefits

• Sustained increase in store compliance
• More effective workforce
• Greater return on investment on staffing over sustained period
• Better implementation of new ranges
• Greater uniformity of store standards over large geographical areas – ideal for global franchises

E-Learning

Ensuring staff are trained effectively could be the difference between champions and underperformers in today’s challenging marketplace.  The costs of face to face training can be excessive, so the growth in e-learning allows companies to broaden knowledge of current staff, provide class leading inductions to new recruits and to extend the usage of their digital assets into impactful and lasting learning.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension can utilize your digital assets to create bespoke courses in learning, allowing a truly interactive, highly visual learning experience.  Whereas traditional e-learning can be little more than PowerPoint presentations, Visual Communications create visually stimulating, animated learning modules specific to retail business issues, which make learning fun, impactful and swift.

Our services allow you to get the most out of your Learning Management Systems, but also to introduce computer based training in a cost effective way if you do not have any LMS systems at present.

Benefits

• Cost savings on traditional training courses as training is computer based – savings on travel, accommodation, room hire
• Higher staff performance on compliance and business issues
• Greater enjoyment and participation on training
• Greater reach – one training module can reach your whole estate, including overseas

Presentation Design

Everyone knows how to use PowerPoint, yet everyone also knows countless stories of receiving presentations which are dull, uninteresting and without focus.  The difference is knowing how to structure your presentation to allow your story to unfold, and being innovative and clear with your illustrations so that PowerPoint supports the presentation you give, rather than working against it

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension has a dedicated team working on getting the right style and content for your presentation.  The Design team will take your PowerPoint deck, optimize your messages, provide clarity and focus, and enhance the visual impact of your messages, using contemporary design and tools such as movies and Flash. 

Benefits

• Clearer focus for your messages.
• A better relationship with your clients as your proposal has greater impact.
• More time for you as the design and enhancement is taken on by designers.

Imaging

Images drive so much in the Retail world. Packaging, point of sale materials, merchandising planograms, online shopping, range reviews, product launches, marketing promotions, presentations – the list goes on.  Getting a cost effective, reliable, flexible image provider can feed many areas of your business and a consolidated approach to source your imaging can save time and money across many departments

Supplying all the services offered by Fifth Dimension is our Imaging Team.  Our team of trained photographers and retouchers create product image and data libraries for use with space management systems.  We can even turn concept artwork into assets for use in your planograms.  Our images have been used in industry journals, all space planning systems and also used on Amazon.com.

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension also offer visual store audits, marketing product shots, food photography, model shoots and advertisement creation.

Benefits

• Clear communication of your merchandising plans and online shopping portfolio
• Time saved for your team by outsourcing database management of your product data
• Comprehensive cataloguing and creation of product marketing shots
• A one stop imaging and photography service for all your retail specific and marketing needs

Bespoke Desktop Publishing

Clear messages and communication of instruction lead to greater performance and better results.  Brochures and printed materials form part of many of the services and approaches provided by Fifth Dimension, but there is always need for ad hoc communication devices and mechanisms. 

Visual Communications from Fifth Dimension operates a bespoke Desktop Publishing service, which has a strong track record delivering a consistent program of flyer and brochure communication to the largest retailers in Britain.

From large brochures, to one page flyers, through corporate branding and information packs and cards, our design team bring the best in layout design and typography to the clients in many industries, offering cost-effective solutions for your projects, right through to delivering them to print.

Benefits

• One stop house for Desktop Publishing Services
• High level of staff communication and understanding
• Integrated Communication Programme – DTP, Web, Animation
• Greater brand identity through consistent messaging