Merchandising includes all the methods that you employ in your store to promote products. This includes employee uniforms, stocked shelves, spotlighting, and window displays. It could also be in-store ads, free samples, and anything and everything that has images or names of your product on it.
The objective of merchandising is to direct the attention of your buyers to certain promoted products. Merchandising is most predominant in retail settings, but brands practice merchandising wherever it seems fit. Such as at events.
Merchandising is also quite effective in carrying team-building efforts to new highs. But how important is merchandising in team-building efforts? Let’s find out.
- Minimized Personal Differences
When your employees are wearing the same uniforms, handling the same products, and managing the same store, they tend to grow more compassionate towards each other. Most schools have a uniform policy for the same reason.
A uniform nullifies the ethnic, cultural, and gender differences among the group, which opens up new dimensions in the aspects of correlation and team-building.
Having wearable merchandise also helps draw the attention of the employees to the work and not dressing sense. As no personal wardrobe is being involved, the employees refrain from discriminating against others in financial and cultural fields.
- Motivating Towards a Common Goal
Merchandising plays a major role in encouraging employees to achieve a common goal. This consists of increasing sales, better customer handling, and everything else.
When your employees are surrounded with products that are strategically packed and placed to attract customers, they take the objective more personally and devote themselves to the cause.
Team-building efforts thrive when all the participants move towards the common goal. Historically, civil and ethnic wars were fought due to different common goals of different groups. Between that and your efforts, the only disparity is in the intent and application. You want your employees to work in harmony, and not kill each other.
Merchandising addresses the issue that all businesses face. The difference in interests. For an instance, the visions of your management team might not go parallel with the interests of the marketing or the operations team for a product launch event. They might hold different opinions about how the product should be promoted before or after the release.
Internal differences cannot be avoided. Your team might prefer different restaurants for team lunch. They could disagree with the location of team-building activities as well. It’s also not uncommon that they might also have differences in choosing the team color, shirts, or sports hoodie templates that will be used in team-building activities.
Although it’s not particularly a bad thing, in most cases positional hierarchy trumps individual constructive opinions.
Thorough merchandising helps different teams get on the same page more easily. With a common vision about how the brand is perceived, your team-building efforts will give much more effective results continuously.
- Better Team Coordination
Your retail requires sales teams to coordinate with visual merchandisers to achieve the best sales outcome. Merchandising is not only about promoting brands to buyers. It also helps create a surrounding that ensures that every retail employee participates in team-building efforts.
Hoodies, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and caps can be effective team-building elements, in addition to being merchandised. But how does coordination relate to team-building efforts?
With better team-building efforts, a better team is developed. With a better team that’s efficient on a personal level, better coordination is guaranteed.
The key is to provide your employees with a comfortable passage to communicate with each other. Which team-building efforts pave.
- Sense of Job Security
Job security is what most employees seek from their employers. Although it’s not always easy to provide stable jobs to your employees, your merchandising efforts can radiate a sense of job security among them.
Merchandising can be perceived as a statement of a scaling brand. And as the employees interact with it, they start to relate to the brand and its visions. Even if your employees aren’t directly on the payroll of the conglomerate, interacting with their merchandise provides a better sense of security.
Suppose you manage a warehouse for Amazon, but your employees aren’t directly fulfilled through them. But wearing a shirt with the name of Amazon on it, wearing a cap that shows the big bent arrow, can positively stimulate the essence of job security.
Job security is a driving factor in team-building efforts. If your employees aren’t secure in their job positions, they will be involved in unhealthy competition with each other by withholding information, deliberately trying to force others down, and overworking to secure their job positions.
In that case, any team-building efforts that you may employ won’t work. You would be lucky if your employees bother to join your online events and participate.
- Job Role Clarity
In small businesses, the distinction between job roles can fall into a gray zone. The absence of HR positions presents team-building hurdles that can be mitigated to some extent by merchandising efforts.
To merchandise the brands, you must employ visual merchandisers who are experienced in effective placing and promoting products throughout the store. After which, you’d need sales executives to guide the customers to the products.
You’d also need store managers, cashiers, and customer representatives to run the business. And finally, you’d need a prominent HR official to develop and supervise team-building activities. Thus, merchandising and team-building are closely associated with defined job positions.
- Empowerment
Custom merchandises are great for empowering your employees. Hoodies or shirts having the brand and their name together gives a sense of belonging to the employees. Companies sending occasional gifts and arranging competitions to satisfy employees are also examples of great team-building efforts.
An example of empowering employees through merchandising can include KFC. All the franchises that work with KFC need to follow their color schemes and require the employees to wear the same clothes and caps.
These efforts empower the employees to think that they belong to the outlet and make sure that team-building efforts are performed accordingly.
The Bottom Line
Merchandising holds a quite important role in team-building efforts. The elements that build a better team directly correlate with merchandising.
It helps keep cultural differences aside, empowers the employees, and develops better team coordination. In addition to that, merchandising also helps give a sense of job security. It also motivates employees to a common goal and much more.
