4 Topic Commentaries

Visual Merchandising Tips to Make Product Pop

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  Jill J. Avery, DBA

  Marketing; brand management; customer experience

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  Harvard Business School

  There’s a lot of experimentation around what a store is and what it could do. In this new worldview, a store has to create a branded experience that goes beyond the purely transactional—one that aims to build a relationship with the customer and communicate the brand in an experiential way.

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  Antonio Moreno, PhD

  Technology and operations management; retail operations

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  Harvard Business School

  People still like going to a physical store to have an experience and learn about products, but now that can be decoupled from the act of taking possession of a product because there are better and cheaper ways of doing that. Malls are going to increasingly transform into places for experiences, not just for taking inventory home. What probably will not survive are the retailers that are more like a warehouse, or just physical repositories of goods.

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  Karen Donohue, PhD

  Supply chain coordination; behavioral operations

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  Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

  Selling open-box products allows retailers to very quickly put the items out for sale again. This creates a revenue-generating mechanism, which is also good for the environment. Our research helps guide their strategy with how to best display those returned items.

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  Necati Ertekin, PhD

  Retail operations; omnichannel; returns management

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  Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

  When customers see returned products next to the new ones, they are more likely to attribute the returns to new products having low quality. Hence, their valuation for the new products goes down, deterring some customers from buying them under the side-by-side strategy. Those deterred customers already have a high tendency to return items, leaving only customers with a low tendency to return items left buying the new products, leading to lower returns under the side-by-side strategy.

  Source