Ikea wins award for in-store signage

Ok, it's not digital signage news, but it is signage news in general, and the fundamentals are the same. As this article from the Boston Herald (brought to my attention by this post at AdverLab) notes, Ikea won the highest award from the Massachusetts Association of Retailers thanks to their innovative and creative use of signage to communicate with customers:

Swedish retailer Ikea, which has a Massachusetts store in Stoughton, manages to keep the shopping experience surprisingly intimate for a store that measures 346,000 square feet.

Much of that intimacy is created through Ikea’s omnipresent signage, which starts outside in the parking garage and continues throughout the store, from the entrance to the checkout lines....

“They’re eons ahead of any other retailers in communicating with their customers via interior signage,” said Rick Segel, a retail sales consultant, association member and judge, and author of “Retail Business Kit for Dummies.” “They’re communicating in a way that’s not just a hard sell. It represents an educational point of view and an entertaining point of view.”

The retailers association’s award to Ikea marks the first time that its advertising and promotion honor was given for interior signage, according to Segel.

“It’s a different approach, and something many other retailers can learn from,” he said.

My list of "many other retailers" starts with Home Depot and Wal-Mart, where I have a hard to very hard time finding what I'm looking for a good two thirds of the time. Ikea, on the other hand, is generally quite easy to navigate, though I still have a hard time pronouncing the names of most of their products (though it's fun trying :)

Tags: Ikea, signage, retail marketing

Context makes even good ads look bad

Right after I posted an article to the WireSpring weblog about the import roles that both content and context play in making a digital signage deployment successful, one of my colleagues sent me this hilarious and illustrative evidence that the same is true for any advertising medium.


I guess it just goes to show that no matter how fantastically amazing your content is, if it isn't shown in the proper environment, your message is going to be lost, or worse, misinterpreted entirely.

Technorati Tags: out-of-home, advertising,digital, signage