In-Store

Don’t miss the Sceptre Awards this year on the 21st June 2016 at its long standing venue The Dorchester Hotel in London.

We are proud to be sponsoring Marketing Manager of the Year again, and wish all the nominees good luck for the night. If you didn’t already know the Sceptre Awards recognise the best people and practices in the Shopping Centre industry. Every year we recognise the hard work, efforts, ingenuity and excellence produced by centre management teams, retailers and suppliers that make shopping centres the great places they are.

At OnBrand, we’re all about experience, and a live event is no different.

What you might not know is that we also work behind the scenes, and provide the sound, lighting and AV for the night too. Our work starts weeks before and involves the set design, build and installation on the night. We’ll be there from early am, setting up the stage, set, lighting, screens – all of course on-brand for 55 North, the team behind not just the Sceptre Awards but the highly acclaimed industry title Shopping Centre.

We pre-record the voice of god and prepare all music for the evening – from the soft tones of dinner, to the walk up stings for award winners, and post dinner chart hits to keep you in the mood. The pics below also show how even simple lighting can change the mood and ambience of the room too.

So, if you’re hosting an awards event, looking for a great experience, AV production partner, or simply some great ambience, then please get in touch. We use, audio, language, technology and AV to create great brand and customer experiences.

Hope to see you on the night, and If not don’t forget to follow all the action on Twitter.

We pre-record the voice of god and prepare all music for the evening – from the soft tones of dinner, to the walk up stings for award winners, and post dinner chart hits to keep you in the mood. The pics below also show how even simple lighting can change the mood and ambience of the room too.

So, if you’re hosting an awards event, looking for a great experience, AV production partner, or simply some great ambience, then please get in touch. We use, audio, language, technology and AV to create great brand and customer experiences.Hope to see you on the night, and If not don’t forget to follow all the action on Twitter.

A one-stop drop that will really let shoppers shop

A happy shopper is one who has the freedom to glide between stores at will, taking their time to try things on and discuss new purchases with friends – but how often do we see restless children and concerned dads nagging away because they’re hungry, or because they’re missing the game?

There is a solution – a crèche, or a “man crèche,” if you will. A dedicated space for anti-shoppers to watch the latest game at the Euros or Wimbledon while those more interested in shopping can do just that.

If your shopping centre is wise enough to build such a facility, make sure your customers know about it by offering advanced messaging. It will ensure your mall is equally as popular during match time and also give the real shoppers the time and freedom to do what they do best – spend money!

Now that Easter is behind us and British summer time has officially begun, it’s the perfect time to prepare new music playlists for the glorious months ahead. Here, we look at the top 5 benefits of introducing a shiny new playlist to your mall in time for the summer.

1. Lighten the mood

There’s a whole lot of psychology that goes into making people happy, and as happy people stay out longer, spend more, and associate their happiness with positive experiences, it will definitely benefit you to have as many smiles as possible travelling through your mall. With shopping and listening to music both scoring highly in a recent Telegraph article (The 33 things that will make you happy), placing the right soundtrack in your shopping centre is a key ingredient to a white-hot formula.

2. Influence customer behaviour

Music has been proven to affect the amount of time customers browse for, as well as the mood they’re in while they’re doing it. Rarely will shoppers take in the external influences around them, but we are a knowledge-led company who have led academic research projects in the customer journey, so we have countless ideas on how to influence behaviour within a shopping centre.

3. Dictate the pace

Whether you want your customers to saunter through your shops, increasing dwell time and spend, or get them heading for the door because you’re nearing closing time, your playlist can help achieve these aims whilst creating a pleasant mood for your customers. It’s all about the tempo, baby!

4. Be memorable

Much fuss can be made over visual displays and lighting, but when you consider that 50% of purchases in supermarkets are impulse buys (OgilveyAction study), and that 90% of all customers buy something that they didn’t intend to (The Integer Group study), it becomes clear that in-store music is a significant factor in the shoppers’ customer experience.

5. Be OnBrand

Throwing on an uplifting soundtrack is one thing, but playing music that fits the persona of your brand is something else entirely. Over the years we’ve created a number of playlists that suit shopping centres over a varied list of seasons and events, but we can also use our know-how and experience to create a bespoke playlist that connects you further with your customers – just like we did for Westfield and Fortnum & Mason.

Whether you’re a new customer looking for information on in-store music or an existing customer looking to maximise the potential of your playlist options, feel free to contact us today!

Shopping centres are all about the customer and the overall customer visit experience.

 
There are many ways to reach your customers for your shopping centre, but more importantly you should be reaching them every time that they visit your centre so you can strengthen the relationship you have with your customers. The most effective advertising campaigns for retail shopping centres are made through multimedia channels.

Radio marketing targets specific shoppers on different days of the week which is critical to your success and overall footfall. If you can recognise the different patterns of shopping that occurs with different types of people, then you will soon realise that consumers all like to shop differently and at different times.

Radio is an affordable medium that can reach a mass audience.

Uses of the shopping centre PA/Tannoy system

• Facilities messages e.g: Healthy & Safety, Fire Alarms, Car Parking, Lost Property
• Centre Security: CCTV, Unattended Baggage, Lost Children, Beware of Shop-lifting
• Centre Promotions: Seasonal Announcements, Centre Events & Celebrity Visits
• Retail Advertisments: Your in-store retailers promotions & offers

Radio Messaging Identified as a Powerful Broadcast Medium

As consumers are increasingly overwhelmed by the barrage of media messages delivered via traditional media, advertisers are searching for ways to more effectively reach and influence their prospective customers. The goals of an Edison Media Research study were to determine what level of recognition, retention, and response shoppers had to targeted advertising via this new delivery channel, and to examine the impact digitally-enhanced, custom programmed music had on the shoppers’ in-mall experience. The study results revealed that mall shoppers are not only aware of messages delivered through Mall Radio Network, but in fact demonstrate a high recall rate of those messages.

“Our research demonstrated that within mall properties, and over a demographically diverse sample, shoppers’ recall rates of ads played over Mall Radio Network were more than 50%, depending on the number of times they visited the mall,” said Joe Lenski, Executive Vice President of Edison Research.” In advertising, repetition and frequency often drives results, but compared to other forms of advertising, specific promotions delivered via Mall Radio Network had a greater recognition rate among consumers.”

Shopping behaviour: Netting Butterfly Shoppers.

“As far as getting shopper attention is concerned, we must consider first of all the psyche behind PA/Tannoy messages. Typically our mentality and thoughts regarding this media turn our attention to football stadiums and public locations like airports, where messages are of significant importance – most consumers’ initial reaction is to tune in, just in case the message is security or evacuation related… therefore your shoppers are already predisposed to listen to those messages and are tuned in, yet the experience itself doesn’t detract them from shopping itself. You don’t have to stop or read a poster or look at a screen, but instead we humans absorb this content as we go along – consider how we can eavesdrop on conversations so readily and tune in to different conversations at our own will…the same applies in the shopping centre, where consumers exact an active listen… ears prick up and focus in on keyword or triggers that we consider suitable or relevant to us (e.g. a “buy one get one free” promotion)…As a media, audio is very powerful. It is all encompassing, reaches everyone in the centre, but doesn’t stop us in our tracks. We know that retailers have enjoyed significant returns on using the audio media to drive consumers into their stores. Butterfly shoppers who haven’t predetermined where they’ll visit are certainly influenced by this type of media”.

Tactics Europe Edition Feature, Issue 111 2007

Done perfectly a shopping centre radio message is a one-to-one conversation with a single target prospect, written and produced so well that the prospect hears the introduction and thinks ‘It’s talking to me’.

OnBrand Radio provide your customers with music & messaging services to communicate with your customers. We professionally script and record your own in-store messages with a wide selection of professional voice over artists.

OnBrand Radio broadcast to 120million+ ears per month

Call us on 03333 22 00 22 or email sayhello@onbrand.co.uk to see how we can help your business.

Music is just music, isn’t it?

 
Let’s put a CD on at work or in our shop and it’ll be fine … We are sure no-one will mind the ‘Now Hits 2015’ CD or ‘The Best of Chill Out’ will they?

Alas, it’s not quite as simple as that. As an employee you are on work premises for, let’s say 40 hours a week and your ‘Now Hits best of compilation’ plays for two hours in total, this means that you’ll be hearing Ed Sheeran’s song – ‘Thinking Out Loud’ 20 times this week. Now, we all quite like Ed Sheeran here at OnBrand Music, but 20 times a week? And, there’s a good chance that we will be hearing it on the way home in the car too, or at home on the radio.

No matter how much of a die-hard fan you are of a particular artist there really is a limit on how many times you can be subjected to a song over and over again. Let’s be clear here … We are just using Ed Sheeran as an example, but it could be any track * Insert song here * that comes to mind.

The staff choice issue

Many years ago an office I worked in had a policy of letting every employee have a day each of their music choice. The kitchen had an auto-reverse cassette deck (remember those?) and we all brought in our compilation tapes to play during the working day. You can imagine … the same one hour of music repeating & repeating & repeating for eight hours!

Even I finally got fed up of my Pink Floyd cassette in the end .. and that’s saying something.

This same concept still happens today in some of the retail premises that we visit. We were told that staff kept disappearing from the shop floor to change CD’s and many of the staff even argued about the choice of music and disappeared again to skip tracks that they didn’t like. One of the downsides to using most CD or media players is the fact that once the music reaches the end of a play-list you suddenly get silence, so then, whose job is it then to restart the music?

Another issue is the choice and style of music that the staff like to play. For example: Is R&B with profanity & swearing appropriate music to be playing for your customers?

Just a point here about playing in-store music from a personal MP3 player or iPod: This music is designed for personal use only and not to be broadcast publicly. At OnBrand Music we ensure that all appropriate music licenses in the workplace are provided for.

Solutions

From previous research we have shown that 66% of employees like having music at work & many customer surveys show that playing music in a store increases the brand image. So, it’s not just a case of turning off the sound & having silence.

What is needed is a ‘brand’ profiled, fully scheduled play-list (checked for profanity & swearing of course) of around 90 tracks upwards. This will give you over six hours of music that are scheduled to play during your opening hours, limiting the amount of times you hear the same song. OnBrand Music can provide play-lists containing over 24 hours of music if required, so you will only hear the same song every third day. Our media player technology counts how many times a track plays to ensure no conscious repetition. This means less moaning and arguing from the staff about songs that they don’t like. After all, a four minute song you don’t like once or twice a week isn’t going to make you want to pull your hair out.

For further information and help in creating and audio brand for your business or workplace then call us on 03333 220022

Consumers consider themselves beyond the influence of such factors, however music psychology studies have shown that the right audio has a direct influence on many behaviours beyond conscious awareness. Research has shown that consumer behaviour is highly sensitive to background music in the shopping environment.

Studies show that customers select more expensive wine in a wine merchant when exposed to classical music as opposed to pop music. We associate classical music with sophistication and affluence; hence shoppers feel in a more ‘higher class’ frame of mind. Since music has the ability to prime certain thoughts, customers were more likely to buy more expensive wine with music that primed thoughts of affluence.

Consumers make decisions in a logical and rational way however, environmental psychology studies point out that very subtle changes in the retail environment can dramatically shape consumer behaviour. This supports evidence that the behavioural economics viewpoint of what consumers do is rather irrational, and is largely driven by the unconscious processing of the external environment.

Although people do not walk around a store evaluating the music at a conscious level, background music is able to influence emotions beyond recognition and exert a powerful unconscious influence over consumer behaviour.

Despite background music being highly controllable by a store or company, many businesses fail to optimise this in-store marketing technique for a number of reasons. Firstly, background music is usually chosen by the management. Secondly, the way in which most companies would test the influence of their retail environment on consumer behaviour is likely to be through attitudinal surveys and other traditional marketing techniques. Acquiring consumer insight in this way largely ignores the unconscious processes that drive their behaviour.

To quote music psychologist Dr Vicky Williamson: “Music positively influences consumer mood/emotional states through psycho-physiological reactions and autobiographical memory associations. It also creates a sense of auditory privacy, so valued in these days of the personal music device, thereby promoting browsing and diluting the conscious passage of time. Silence by comparison can be intrusive, as it throws unwelcome attention on the consumers’ behaviour. By extension, silence can also suggest a lack of care for the quality of consumer experiences.”

PPL music researchers also found that 86% of retailers believe that background music can help to relieve tension and awkward silences for their customers.