Window and Wall Murals for Retail Stores, Part 1 – Impact and Results

Window and Wall Murals for Retail Stores, Part 1 – Impact and Results

If you are a retailer, retail signage is a must, and, one type in particularly — wall murals — can make a huge difference to your brand recognition and sales, especially in highly competitive environments such as malls.

Why Window and Wall Murals?

If you are Vancouver retailer, being noticed if half the battle. The next time you stroll down a mall corridor amidst the din of crowd chatter and rows of retail stores, become aware of just how much information your senses have to absorb. It’s overload! Each retailer has the same ultimate goal — get customers into their store. This one goal is paramount above all others. In a mall, with so many competing visual signals, how do you stand out? When most stores use similar retail signage, such as storefront window lettering or a banner or two typically placed at the top of the storefront, they tend to blend into a blur of competing retail signage. While this type of signage is also vital to retailers, it lacks distinction.

If customers must walk up close to your retail signage to read the print or see the images clearly, you’re doing your business a disservice. That type of sign works for customers who know your brand, or have visited your location many times, but you need to get them to your doorway in the first place. This is where window and wall murals help.

View a gallery of window and wall murals.

Window and Wall Murals  – The Billboard Analogy

Window and wall murals can be thought of as retail storefront billboards. Their scale is much larger than traditional retail signage, there is much more room for impactful (and large) graphics and messaging that will be seen from a distance (perfect for mall retailers), and, most importantly, they get attention.

While there aren’t statistics on the impact of wall murals, there is a lot of information about the impact of billboards on consumers. The 2009 (most recent) Arbitron National In-Car Study (PDF) – “a detailed examination of America’s in-car media audience and its exposure to outdoor advertising” — the writer’s published significant findings that are applicable to “indoor billboards” (which window and wall murals certainly are). Here’s what the study found:

  • “Seventy-one percent of travelers often look at the messages on roadside billboards and more than one-third (37%) report looking at an outdoor ad each or most of the time they pass one.”Billboards get noticed. It isn’t a stretch to suggest that the impact of scale has something to do with it!
  • “Nearly one-quarter of billboard viewers say they were motivated to visit a particular store that day because of an outdoor ad message and nearly one-third visited a retailer they saw on a billboard later that week.”Again, the impact of large-scale graphics and messaging cannot be ignored and is certainly applicable to large scale wall murals and retail signage. People remember differences, and large-scale retail murals are different!
  • “Nearly three-quarters of billboard viewers shop on their way home from work; more than two-thirds make their shopping decisions while in the car and more than one-third make the decision to stop at the store while on their way home — all times when billboard advertising has the opportunity to be influential.”Retail murals (and other large scale wall and window graphics) can have the same “opportunity to be influential”. Consider that if your retail store is facing a street, vehicle and pedestrian traffic may pass the same way every day! In malls, employees in nearby office buildings and other retail stores, will also pass the same way each day, and will notice your wall murals the same way they notice billboards they pass on their daily commute home.

Read part 2 of this article.

Questions About Murals for Vancouver Retail Stores?

If you have questions about murals for your Vancouver retail store, contact Sandbox Signs for a free consultation. We’ll help you find the right choice of retail signage.