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Appearance Matters: Include a Business Strategy That Keeps Your Facility Looking Good

Hey, good looking! While you might expect people to love your business for what you do, the appearance of your property can have an impact on public perception and will ultimately impact your business growth. You need to synchronize your internal workings and your external appearance to help customers understand who you are and to draw them into your business. Keeping up appearances can be a smart business strategy.

Sprucing Up a Business Environment: Factors to Consider

When you’re designing a storefront or a store interior, there’s much more to consider than landscaping and paint colors. According to the Association for Consumer Research, “the ambient factor refers to background characteristics, such as temperature, lighting, noise, music and ambient scent(and) the design factor includes stimuli that exist at the forefront of our awareness, such as architecture, color and materials.” With this list, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. That’s why it’s important to consider how your new image will connect with your business brand and your everyday life at your business. This is a really key thing that you need to do, as branding is important to the success of your business!

Your Appearance Is Part of Your Brand

When you’re trying to attract customers into your store, you only have seconds to make a visual impression. Your storefront not only needs to be clean and well-kept, it needs to give your prospective customers a strong feeling about your brand. You need to make sure that your customers are impacted by your store straight away, and it is equally as important to make sure that they remember it when they walk out. If you are selling goods and products, then deciding to have something like these printed paper bags that are visually appealing, could help you to market your brand without realizing. Appearance could be everything to your success. If you’re trying to market a relaxing urban spa experience to potential clients, you would go for natural, fresh, and muted tones rather than loud red, black, and gold. You’d add plants in the front and a nature-inspired stone or wooden walkway to guide people in.
According to All Business, “a good brand does more than just catch your eye: it delivers a clear message, confirms the credibility of a company or product, and connects emotionally with target clientele.” If you don’t that your brand can do this, then you need to change it asap. Admittedly, it would be better to make sure your brand is perfect from the start, but this doesn’t always happen. However, to help you perfect your brand, have you considered making use of companies like Polkadot communications to help you do this? Sometimes its a lot easier to hire a professional to help you make sure you get it right from the start, but the decision is up to you.

Move From Pathway to Doorway

While the interior of your store or office is important, street appeal is key to developing a successful storefront. Keep your windows, doors, and pathways clean. Make seasonal changes to your storefront and displays and add color such as new planting according to the season. Make sure you don’t have a run-down mailbox that brings down the energy of the building and instead look at mailboxes for your business that will be more suitable. Well-lit storefronts and easily-accessible pathways make your store or office inviting to customers.

Layouts Can Move People

When customers enter your building, what do they see? According to Retail Doc, “in North America, people walk into a business and turn to the right, then walk counter-clockwise through a store.” Make sure that whatever greets your customers on the right-hand side is clean, uncluttered, and visually appealing. In fact, your entire retail environment should be unified. Draw the eye with specific unified colors, and highlight a few products in a display rather than stacking product upon product. Walk through your store and think like a customer: where should everything go? Where would you need to move next? Observe your customers’ traffic patterns and connections with displays or service desks and adjust them so that it’s as easy as possible for customers to connect with your products and services.

Your Work Environment Impacts Your Employees

Developing a unified, clutter-free, and updated work environment can set the same expectations for your employees. In a retail or other customer service environment, your employees are part of your landscape. They need to be actively engaged in helping customers and ready to connect with new customers when they enter the building. A friendly, professional employee who’s ready to support a customer’s needs makes an excellent impact on potential customers and acts as an essential part of your work environment.