Retailers look to sell via visual merchandising

With the retail sector becoming popular by the day, companies are now looking at visual merchandising (VM) to better sell their products. VM is the art of presenting merchandise, putting the product into focus.

"VM is becoming a part and parcel of the retail sector. The idea is to show more in order to sell more," said Jaideep Banerjee, AGM-operations, Piramyd Mega Store. VM helps us in promoting new European trends in the Indian markets, Banerjee said. We also focuss on theme based presentations," he added.

Shibani Shourie, senior manager of planning and communications, Pantaloons said, "Though at a nascent stage, retail merchandising in the country is slowly catching on with so many malls mushrooming across the country. Some years ago only a few companies had a separate post for VM."

The company has a team of trend watchers who closely observe fashions in various parts of the country. "The idea of VM is to minimise human intervention as much as possible at the point of purchase," Shourie said.

We focus on styling and try to give a fresher and newer look, she further said. The Pantaloon group, with Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar and the larger lifestyle stores, has roped in over 150 visual merchandisers, the highest in the country. The VMs are generally selected from design schools like NID and Nift or from fine arts or other designing institutions.

The displays are usually changed every 4-6 weeks. VM is not only restricted to a presentation wall or display point but has travelled farther to ceilings and floors. Also a 2-6 week training programme is given to freshers to tap their potentials. The inadequacy reflected in poor presentation or displays can also hamper the sale of a product hence utmost care it taken to turn it into a suitable visuale presentation.

According to Manish Saksena, product head, buying and design of Lifestyle, a subsidy of the Dubai-based Paramound group, "This trend came to India 10 years ago as international brands wanted to present themselves differently from the way we did."

"It has become almost impossible for stores to exist without VM. The larger the setup the more is the requirement for visual merchandisers," Saksena said.

"Internationally there are institutes that have proper dedicated coursed for VM which is still to happen effectively in India," he added.

Recently, Retailers Association of India (RAI), and Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, (MICA) have joined hands to launch a six month Professional Programme in Visual Merchandising & Creative Communications for the first time in India.

"Although VM contributes 40-60 per cent of the total promotion in retail it is not very well studied and also lacks professionalism," said Hemant Trivedi, head-retail academic area, MICA. Currently there is a lot of outsourcing happening, he added.

Talking about employment generation Trivedi said, "As much as 10-15 per cent of total employment in retail will be from VM directly or indirectly."