Latest Thinking in Brain Research – and Just How Important it is to POS Design

Help The Brain to See

Marketing, in general, is based on getting someone’s attention. Weird stuff has a long-standing tradition in the marketing world. The reason for this is simply because it works. Silly or eccentric ads tend to stay with people and in some cases may be praised just for having a unique approach. POS displays are an element of marketing and they should attract attention. However, getting people to notice what you are doing and take in information is harder than it looks. This is a side effect to how people perceive the world in the general sense and understanding this can make your POS strategies more effective.

Sensory Overload

Think of how much you see in a day and how little of it really stays with you. That is because the part of the brain that perceives what you see has a base template of reality it works off of. Think of it like this if you take weekly walks in your town’s high street you already have a good idea of what you are going to see. This mental image allows you to enjoy your walk and take things in but you’re not really paying attention. However, if a new a store opened you suddenly start paying attention. That is because you now have new information and your mental image is updating itself.

Why Is This Important?

Because as noted above unless people have new information to take or something catches their attention they will subconsciously lean on their existing mental image and not really pay attention unless they need to. For a POS display, this is very important because the entire point is to get people to pay attention to it and look, read, or be made aware, of a good, service, or event. The worst thing for POS display is to be too consistent with the basic idea of the store it’s in and therefore blending in.

Blending In Is Bad

The worst thing you can do in any marketing pursuit is blending in. Now blending in doesn’t necessarily mean boring in this case. For example, if a store makes use of wood for its internal layout then you do not want your display to be made out of the same type of wood as every other display in the store. That’s because regular shoppers already have a mental image of the store that involves wood layouts and your POS display now blends in with the rest of the store and goes unnoticed and unremembered.

What a good POS display does is break through the pre-existing mental image and makes a customer go ‘Oh what is this?” Now, this does not require an eccentric approach if it doesn’t fit thematically. There are several ways to stand out the proper use of colours, video displays, strategic positioning, innovative design, or unique materials are all ways to get customers to pay attention.

Conclusion

Everyone has their own internal reality construct and without it, we would all suffer from sensory overload. But this can make reaching customers a challenge as you have to give them a reason to pay attention. Proper design methods make a POS break out of the background and makes the customer take notice. When designing your POS layouts there are a lot of factors to consider. Outside expert advice can help DisplayMode are experts in innovative and unique design. They have an experienced and creative staff with years of experience designing POS / POP displays worldwide that stand out no matter what the context or culture.