How to Build an Impactful and Market-Proof Retail Signage Program

On this episode of The Whole Idea Podcast by DCG ONE, senior account executive Ryan Carns joins host Greg Oberst for an in-depth look at the trials and tribulations of retail signage programs. Hear Ryan’s sage advice for procuring high-performance signage kit solutions that are seamless and impactful even under extreme market conditions. 

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Transcript

The Whole Idea Podcast by DCG ONE

Season 2, Episode 6: 

How to Build an Impactful and Market-Proof Retail Signage Program

Guest: Ryan Carns, senior account executive, DCG ONE

Greg: 

Here's a medium that's been around since the dawn of literacy. Today, well, it seems societies can't live without it. Hello everyone and welcome to the Whole Idea podcast by DCG One. On this episode we're talking about signs, and with me in the studio today is retail signage expert DCG One's own Ryan Carnes, senior account executive. 

Ryan: 

Hey Greg, thanks for having me. 

Greg:

Yeah. Despite the technological advances in the last 5000 years, which is about how long we humans have been literate, signs keep on keeping on. Why is that, Ryan? 

Ryan: 

So the core purpose of signage has remained the same throughout those 5000 years. Yeah, you're trying to tell somebody something or you're trying to lead them somewhere. Wayfinding signage and retail locations are essential to help customers find what they need. It's super accessible. It doesn't require anything more than a pair of eyes. 

Greg: 

Quite low tech, but that's changing though in the last couple of decades. What's driving that change? 

Ryan: 

Well, there's a great many things driving change. Technology. As technology expands and increases in capabilities, stores are looking how to leverage new technologies into their signage. 

Greg: 

It's kind of an interesting loop or cycle too. Technology is driving changes in consumer behavior and consumer behavior is feeding that change in technology. 

Ryan: 

Yeah, it's a feedback loop. As 11 thing changes, the other changes, and they just build on each other over time. 

Greg: 

Well, let's dive into the sector that's That relies heavily on signage the sector that you spend a lot of time in, signage retail or retail signage, and in particular, in-store signage. And this may be as a challenging time in the history of retail as any. What are some of the pain points that in-store retailers are facing today? 

Ryan: 

Well, some of the pain points that the customers I work with experience regularly is managing their brand, the brand colors, the signage, the fonts. Brands spend a lot of time and money and effort evolving their brand, and if they're working with multiple vendors, managing that brand color, that brand consistency across all their stores, across all their vendors, is very time consuming and often in vain. Different production houses, for signage all have different color standards, different production equipment, and managing that brand color is, is, although critical, very, very difficult…

Greg: 

…Can get pretty tricky. 

Ryan: 

Well, yeah, and it takes away time from a retailer trying to be strategic and making strategic decisions, and now they're spending their time managing, managing the brand. 

Greg: 

What else is causing pain points in the, in the sector today? 

Ryan: 

Lean staffing. That's everywhere. That's not unique to retail sign management, but lean staffing and trying to do more with less really has made it difficult for the companies I work with to execute quickly.  They often have competing initiatives, and that makes it difficult to get signs and updates out to their stores in a reasonable time. 

Greg: 

Yeah, I wonder if people realize that when they go into a store and you see a staffer there working the shelves or stocking, these are the same people who are also during non-store hours, putting up the signs, putting up the little labels on the price tags and shelf signs and wayfinding signs as well. 

Ryan: 

Yeah, absolutely. The execution of the signs once they become, once they arrive at the stores, needs to be easy to easy to accomplish. 

Greg: 

When you have multiple stores, the other thing that complicates things for store managers is that not every store is the same. 

Ryan: 

That's a rabbit hole that can go deep. Store fixtures over time evolve, you know, stores that have been around for a couple of decades have fixtures that maybe the newer stores don't have. There's complexities with, you know, window signage. Certain properties don't allow window graphics or in-window signage. 

Greg: 

Some stores are more modernized than others within the same chains. 

Ryan: 

Yeah, and the store footprint, the square footage a given store has varies wildly across a platform of maybe 300 stores. So, the same amount or quantity of signs needed for one location is going to be inadequate for others. So, trying to manage all of the nuances of this store fixturing, or their footprint, or their climate. Or there maybe it's a, a positioning in that particular market. Is that a more price conscious market so they're going to, you know, advertise more price conscious products or is it, you know, downtown LA, where maybe it's, a different set of considerations. 

Greg: 

Retailers are also reacting to the environment, and it seems like these days there's so much to react to, from, from an economy or economic standpoint. 

Ryan: 

Yes, the turbulent tariff economy that we’ve been experiencing over the past several months has really, really made it difficult for, retailers to appropriately price their merchandise. They're often receiving multiple letters per day from all of their different vendors with price changes. This is up, this is down, this is up. 

Greg:

Tying to keep signage up to date in stores over the past several months has been a very difficult challenge for, for retailers in a sector that's already challenging. Now you throw in a wacky economy, yeah, and there's a lot of people scratching their heads to keep up with all of it. So, Ryan, what are some of the ways you partner with our clients to help bring some relief to all of these pain points retailers face? 

Ryan: 

One thing the retail customers that I work with really appreciate about DCG one is that we have so many capabilities under one roof, yeah, and having, you know, a single, a single vendor that can manage their entire portfolio of signage really frees them up to pitch it over the fence like I need this thing and it needs to be done and we can pick that up and whatever it is, we can execute on that. OK, all right, streamline production, kitting and fulfillment. Using a single vendor allows all their signage to arrive in one box and it's on brand, and it really offers time and enables, you know, additional marketing opportunities. A brand spends a lot of energy developing their brand and keeping everything on brand within a store is critical. 

Another thing that that streamlining does is it enables a better brand experience for the customer in stores. It's consistent not only within the store but across multiple stores. The experience the customer receives when they walk into a retail location, should be seamless between different locations. 

Greg: 

And that streamlining speaks to the pain point of staffing. You're helping, mitigate the problems from labor shortages. 

Ryan: 

That's correct. With signage arriving from multiple vendors in different boxes at different times, it really creates a lot of confusion. The stores have an execution date, and they need to get that signage out on the on that execution date. And if they have multiple boxes, maybe one was misplaced, maybe one was delayed in shipping, maybe they had a different type of label, and now that store employee is talking to their manager who's talking to the regional manager, who's now talking to their corporate sign team and all of all of this is one store, you know, looking for a box if you have 300 locations. There's an awful lot of unnecessary communication taking time away from, from, you know, multiple levels, from the store employee to managers to corporate sign teams. 

Greg: 

So Ryan, as much as technology is driving change in retail signage, how is it also part of the solution? 

Ryan: 

That's a great question. What we saw a lot of during the COVID pandemic when everything was shutting down or and then beginning to reopen was QR codes were everywhere. They were a little obscure and then overnight they became…

Greg: 

Everybody thought the QR code was dead and then here it comes again. 

Ryan: 

And then there it is. So, so that that technology, in the QR code is now baked into everybody's phone. It's baked into your life and it's a piece of technology that can drive a digital experience from a physical sign. You can have that QR code drive you to a landing page for your loyalty program or gifting ideas. And what's really great about that is that QR code can be redirected on the, on the back-end systems. So if they, if something changes in the market, or how they're positioning or retailer might be positioning themselves, they can just redirect that QR code and, and give the now the sign stays the same, but the experience that the consumer has is different or new or refreshed. 

Greg: 

Now you've got a more engaged customer. 

Ryan: 

Oh, absolutely, and a more recent evolution of that QR code is, NFC tags, near field communication tags. It's the same technology that we're becoming well accustomed to with like tap to pay. What that technology allows is with a simple touch of your phone to assign. It can drive a frictionless digital experience. You don't have to get into your camera, and focus on that QR code, tap some extra buttons.  Although it's QR codes are simple, there is some friction there. 

Greg: 

Yeah. 

Ryan: 

With NFC, you can simply tap your phone on the on the sign, and it will drive you directly to the experience the retailer had in mind. 

Greg: 

Tap and connect. 

Ryan:

We also have a wonderful demonstration of NFC and how it can be implemented here at what we call our DCG one lab. It's where we're developing some of our cutting edge technology platforms, AR and VR experiences and environments and how that can, integrate with, you know, helping sign teams visualize their, their signage in a virtual reality environment. 

Greg:  

We're calling that pre-visualization… 

Ryan: 

That's right, pre-vis for short, yeah, it's kind of a mouthful, but. But yeah, the, the technology is really great at it, you know, as a retailer might want to open a new store, we can. Develop a virtual reality or an augmented reality environment and you know, help them arrange their store, allow them to walk through a store and see the lines of sight. Where do they need to have wayfinding signage? Where should they put this fixture so it's not blocking lines of sight.

Greg:

The whole idea being to get that picture before they actually produce any signage so that you can see what you need to produce and be accurate and spot on and Avoid placement mistakes, for example, or sizing mistakes that you only realize once you get into the store. 

Ryan: 

Yeah, that that's exactly the case for new store environments. Another way that it's being leveraged is for campaigns. Like a holiday campaign, for example, for a retailer, the holiday season is huge, and having the right signage at the right place can make an enormous difference in in their revenue, in stores. So what we've also been able to do is plug in all the different color ways. Do we use red and green? Is it pink and purple? What, what are the colors that they want to try and use for their holiday campaign? And then go inside this virtual store and swap out the colors, see what looks good with each other, and you can do all of this in real time. Like one of our customers might be on a headset. 

We can be in the background swapping out signage that they're experiencing in real time. 

Greg: 

Oh, fix it on the spot.

Ryan:

Fix it on the spot, and it saves an enormous amount of time and effort over what they had been doing in the past, which was producing a sign kit in all these different color ways. And then actually going to a store before it opens, changing out all of their signage in the store, looking at it, determining what works, what doesn't, and then having to put it back and then do that like 2 or 3 times while they evolve the campaign. 

And now we can do all of that in a virtual environment. 

Greg: 

Do it virtually, save a lot of time, save a lot of money, get it right, right out of the gate. 

Ryan: 

This allows the customer to be strategic.

Greg:

And a little bit creative too. 

Ryan: 

Oh, absolutely. 

Greg: 

We should note that Privis is something else retailers and marketers can demo here in the DCG ONE lab. 

Ryan: 

Yeah 

Greg: 

Ryan, we've also seen how digital technology can help retailers react to price changes and, an economy that just doesn't seem to want to give people a breath. 

Ryan: 

Digital technology can help people react quickly. Right now, it's all about pricing. How do you react to pricing changes and update your pricing in stores to the accurate costs. At DCG ONE, we have an ordering portal, a front end system that allows all of our retail customers at the store level, the regional level, all the way up through the corporate sign team to log in, develop a sign, and deploy that sign in stores through a downloadable on-brand templated PDF in very short order, five minutes and you can have an updated price sign for your store. 

One of our customers produces a monthly sign kit. And with the pricing changing so quickly, coming from their vendors, they needed a solution right now on how they can allow the stores to keep their signage up to date, using a templated online tool to allow them to download a PDF, print it in store, and put it up until the next sign kit arrives. So it kind of solves the interim, you know. 

Greg: 

And we've also seen actual digital displays. Monitors with content. 

Ryan:

Yeah, definitely see that more in the technology sector. 

You know, at DCG one, we have a whole creative agency that can help support a solution like that, whether it's deploying that solution, developing the content. We have the capabilities to, to assist. 

Greg:

OK, Ryan, there's so much to be said about consolidating services as we were talking about earlier. What's the significance of pricing and budgeting within that advantage? 

Ryan: 

Yeah, it's big. Pricing and budgeting is difficult when you're working with multiple vendors. And it's not just about the cost of the sign, it's also the cost of the retailers' time spent managing multiple vendors, managing that brand across multiple vendors. When you're working with a, a single solution that can provide most or all of your signage needs, you have a single point of contact. There's transparency in costs and pricing. There's the time that you get back in your day because you have this trusted relationship with a single vendor that you know they know your brand, you know the costs, everything is transparent. 

Greg: 

Yeah, you make a good point about pricing and budgeting, not just being about the hard cost. 

Ryan: 

For example, we have a customer, Nordstrom Rack. You've probably heard of them. A couple of years ago, they wanted to rebrand with new colors, new materials, new fonts, a total reimagining of the Nordstrom Rack brand, and with nearly 300 stores, this is no small feat. They wanted everything rebranded up in stores before the holiday season. And they came to us in June. So this required the production of 1.3 million signs over their 300 stores to be produced and, packaged and kitted uniquely for every store due to different fixturing needs. And, store square footage like the size of the store. 

Greg: 

If you've ever been to two or three Nordstrom Racks, you know, no two are the same in terms of layout. 

Ryan: 

Exactly, so with all of this complexity, all of these signs and the, large number of stores, a budget that is was tight and a time frame that was short, it seemed like an impossible feat. But having that single source for all of your signage. We were able to produce all the signs, kit it, and actually delivered a, a, a pallet, a crate of new signs to every single store, you know, on budget and ahead of time and, and accurately to their, individual store needs. It was a, it was quite a project. 

Greg: 

So, no two kits were the same then? 

Ryan: 

No two kits were the same. And so by being their single source provider for all of their signage allowed us to Execute quickly, be on budget on really early, not on time, we were, we finished early, which they were appreciative of, and all their signs arrived in one shipment. Oh, another thing that we were able to assist with, because we were the single provider and we were sending a large crate of signs to every store. If we were to send that out via LTL freight individually to every store, the freight bill would have been enormous, hundreds of thousands of dollars. What we suggested and were able to execute on was sending full truckloads, 40 ft containers to the Nordstrom Rack distribution centers. And from their distribution centers, they have trucks going out to all of their stores regularly. So they were able to do the last mile, so to speak, delivery from the distribution centers to the actual store locations and we're able to help them save more than $100,000 in freight. 

Greg:

Getting creative and showing some flexibility and agility on the freight front of it on the shipping front is not something some of us think about very often, but if you're a retailer, that's probably paramount on your mind too. 

Ryan: 

Freight is often an afterthought, like I have this sign need, I need a price. I have a campaign. What's it going to cost? The actual distribution to 300 stores and how it's actually packed and how it'll arrive in stores, can make a huge impact on a budget. 

Greg:

So Ryan, lots to think about if you're a retailer. What advice do you have for store operators who are feeling the heat of this uncertain retail economy today? 

Ryan: 

One piece of advice would be to simplify your supply chain wherever possible. 

Work with fewer, more capable vendors. Don't always look for the low cost provider. A complex supply chain builds on itself and becomes very difficult to manage, and which ultimately becomes a cost. 

Greg:

OK. 

Ryan:

Another would be to embrace print on demand tools that allow you to stay agile. 

The pace of change in retail, especially right now, is crazy, especially with the tariffs right now. So use technology to your advantage. Tools like customizable templates for in-store print ready PDFs allow the teams to make immediate updates while ensuring brand consistency. This bridges a gap between urgency and professional execution, and it frees up your creative team to focus on more strategic things and allows your stores, updates to pricing or, or whatever that might be, whatever the, the immediate need is to be executed quickly. 

Greg:

You know, that seems like an important one in a fast-changing economy. 

Ryan:

Next up, Partner with a vendor who understands, you know, scale and complexity, our customers are being asked to do more with less, especially when rolling out large initiatives like rebrands, aligning with a signage partner who can manage massive variable print volumes and who understands how to build efficient kitting, distribution and replenishment processes, it's critical. The right partner will help you not only execute but save time and money in that process. 

Greg: 

OK, those are three good ones, Ryan. What else do you have there? 

Ryan:

Another would be to invest in flexible signage systems, whether it's due to shifting promotions, updated pricing, or direction changes from leadership. The ability to react quickly is critical. Prioritize signage systems that are modular, adaptable, easy for store staff to update, and definitely consider a digital hybrid solution where it's appropriate. Something like a QR code or an NSC tag can be tagged to a, dynamic back end. We can really stretch that signage, useful life as, as store direction or pricing might change. 

Greg: 

Good stuff. 

Ryan: 

Another is to use data to guide signage strategy. 

Greg: 

We haven't talked about data much yet, but that's a big one. 

Ryan: 

Yeah, you know, not all signs carry equal weight. 

Maybe California stores need a lot of extra Tommy Bahama signs and maybe be proactive and more cost effectively roll out different sign needs across different regions, climates, times of year. So using the data to your advantage can really help set your stores up to be signed well for their needs. 

And last would be the plan for store level variation, not around it. We talked about it earlier, inconsistent fixtures and differing store footprints used to be seen as very big logistical hurdles, but they can be managed proactively and with the right planning and systems. Whether it's customizing kits by location, offering modular sign components, deploying portals that let stores self-serve, retailers can really take control of this variability instead of being overwhelmed by it. 

Greg:

That's all great advice. We'll finish with that. Ryan, so good to have you in the studio today. Thanks so much for bringing your insight and understanding to the whole idea of podcast. 

Ryan: 

Thanks very much, Greg. It was a pleasure. 

Greg: 

Here are my key takeaways: 

• Modern retail operations are increasingly complicated, with shifting consumer habits, technological advances, supply chain, and labor issues, not to mention whiplash, price changes, retail signage programs are especially challenged today, all of which speaks to the need to. 
• Simplify and consolidate signage vendors to streamline execution and meet the requirements of ever tightening budgets. 
• And while you're at it, think beyond the price tag. Create signage packages that foster brand experiences, integrate digital channels, deepen engagement, and strike a competitive edge. 

My thanks again to Ryan Carnes, senior account executive at DCG ONE. 

If you have questions for Ryan or want to talk further about developing a more impactful and engaging retail signage program for your stores, feel free to drop us a line at podcast@dcgone.com. 

Thanks very much for listening. Kelsey Brewer is the whole idea podcast producer. I'm Greg Oberst. Watch this channel for our next podcast and more expertise, insight and inspiration for whole idea marketing. 

Take care.