5 Ways to Utilize Counter Displays in Retail

For many businesses, counter displays are an easy-to-install way to show off a wide range of different types of products. They're especially valuable in situations where physical space may be limited, but you still need to highlight items at critical impulse purchase points.

Depending on the specific counter display that you're working with, it could be made of materials like corrugate, acrylic, or even PVC. They're common in places like grocery stores, convenience stores and even hardware stores for a reason—they offer high visibility and come with a small footprint at the same time.

All told, there are a number of perfect ways to utilize counter displays in retail, all of which are more than worth exploring.

1. Prioritizing Season & Trending Items

One of the best ways to use those counter displays to help empower your brand involves increasing the visibility on any seasonal or trending items that may be particularly "hot" right now. At the moment, health and beauty products are particularly engaging. During the summer, you'd have a hard time finding a store that didn't have sunscreen and other beach items on the counter. At Christmas, you'll see ornaments and gift tags.

From that perspective, counter displays become a great way to play into the topics that people are already thinking about, thus connecting your brand to something they're actively engaged with.

2. Emphasize the Impulse Purchase

Another great way to utilize a counter display in a retail store involves emphasizing your brand items that are affordable to the point where people don't have to think very long about whether they actually want to buy them. It lets you capitalize on someone's desire to make an impulse purchase right before they check out—increasing revenue for your brand and customer engagement at the same time.

You see this a lot in places like pharmacies that also sell DVDs and other home videos. They may put a counter display with a selection of $5 or $10 DVDs at the counter, allowing people to quickly realize that they'd like to watch a movie with the family soon and make a selection without venturing back into the store. Even if they never would have thought of going to a home video section, they're still intrigued—and more likely to make that specific purchase.

3. Highlight Those Affordable Items

A lot of retail brands find success using counter displays to display some of your more affordable items, too. Pharmacies do this with health and beauty aids, and other personal care products all the time—you can house less expensive products or sample items that shoppers may not have otherwise considered. It's a great way to just get people to consider your brand in more than one light, and to inform them of some of the products you offer that they might not have even been aware of.

By keeping the value of items at the register to around $5 or so, your brand can also use it as a chance to test out various price points to see which one is the most effective. Based on which items are getting the most attention at the counter, you can then use that information to inform your retail partners that they would want to make more space in their store for similar items in this price range.

4. Embrace the Opportunity to Upsell & Cross-sell

Due to their compact nature, counter displays are also a great way to promote "add-on" purchases to a lot of the more popular items from your brand that you know customers are interested in.

If your lawn and garden brand is partnering with a hardware store and spring is coming up, for example, you know that you're about to sell a lot of larger garden supplies. Think about some of the smaller items that people could use to get more out of their purchases and use a counter display to show them off.

Not only does your brand get to generate more revenue, but you also get to help improve the customer experience your retail partners are able to offer as well.

5. Change Those Counter Displays Often

Finally, one of the best ways to use counter displays for your brand has less to do with the products themselves and is more about the frequency at which you rotate them.

In retail, proper timing is everything. If your average customer comes into a store on a weekly basis, they may be excited about the selection of products on that counter display once or twice, but they'll soon start to ignore it altogether. For the best results, try to keep counter displays as fresh as possible and rotate in new items on a weekly basis. You could also use this same mentality as a way to tie in with the season or with other promotional events that your retail partners may be having.

Overall, remember that counter space is at a premium—which is part of what makes counter displays so effective in the first place. Just don't go overboard and create a counter that is too busy or cluttered, as that can give off the exact wrong impression at a critical moment.

Depending on the layout of the retail store in question, your partners may need to make certain adjustments. But that's okay, because they're an investment that really will pay off over time.