Article created for the December digital issue of
The right lighting can enhance the in-store experience, boost sales and spur loyalty. Cameron Cloeter, founder and president of Lighting for Impact, has seen the addition of shelf lighting increase sales by anywhere from 3% to 40% because it entices customers to shop and draws their attention to the products.
“We know there is a correlation between time in the store and purchases. When you can extend the shopper’s time in the store or increase trips, you can increase your sales,” Cloeter said.
Cloeter is an expert in impulse marketing and spent years focused on consumer behavior at the point of purchase. “We were doing so many checkouts in supermarkets, and the coolers were lit but the candy was not. I came up with this idea of lighting the candy and snacks,” he said.
Today, NATSO Allied member Lighting for Impact has its lighting solutions in about 60,000 stores throughout the U.S., including grocery, convenience, drug and liquor stores. Stop Watch sat down with Cloeter to learn more about using lighting to build a brand, encourage repeat visits and drive purchases.
Q. How is lighting changing?
A. If you look at lighting from a historical basis, the way we used to illuminate stores was to put lights on the ceiling and push lumens down. That was the technology. It is expensive to buy the fixtures that go on the ceiling, and you’re wasting a lot of kilowatt hours pushing light downward.
In our opinion, the stores of the future will have less lighting coming down from the ceiling and more soft lighting. Today, if you’re designing or remodeling a store, you can reduce your investment on the ceiling and shine more of the light on the products.
Q. Why is shelf lighting so powerful?
A. As human beings, our eyes go to light. When you illuminate a product on a shelf or inside a cooler, you accentuate the packaging manufacturers spent billions of dollars designing and producing. The packaging starts to jump out at you. The product looks cleaner. It looks fresher. The human psyche takes over. There is a correlation between a product looking attractive and increased purchases.
Q. Can you tell us more about the sales increases you’ve seen from adding lighting?
If you light an entire store, you might get a 3% to 5% bump. Let’s say you just want to feature specific departments; then those departments will see a more significant lift. To some degree, if you light the whole store, everything looks similar.
Many of our customers are lighting the entire store given the impact on the instore experience and fast ROI. It is a way to enhance the store and have your products look cleaner and fresher. Quite frankly, if your store looks better, people want to stop there. It builds loyalty and it increases visits.
Q. When is the ideal time to install the lighting?
A. The most significant requirement is getting power where you need it. When we work with retailers, most of them are doing this with new builds or when they do a remodel because they’re putting the power into the floor. It is very cost-effective to do that before you pour the cement. In a remodel, you can also drop power from the ceiling. The power poles aren’t that big—an inch and a half to two inches—and we can do them in any color.
As we move forward, there are going to be a lot more calls for low-voltage power, whether it is for electronic shelf labels, lighting or the next great thing to come along, which will probably require power. The reality is that once that is installed, if you come back later and want to put a video monitor in or put a cooler on an end cap, you can. It makes sense to get power to those gondolas so you can do what you want to do in the future.
Q. Can you retrofit existing locations even if it isn’t part of a remodel?
A. The biggest challenge in a retrofit store is the availability of power, which you have to have. It is a low-voltage system, but even with a big battery in a gondola, you’d maybe get a day or two out of it before you had to charge it. It just isn’t practical.
Q. What other benefits have you seen from installing new lighting?
A. We have had retailers tell us that they believe there is a reduction in shrink when they light the shelves.
I’ve also been in older stores that we’ve illuminated, and customers will say to the manager, ‘This looks amazing. You remodeled the whole store.’ But, in reality, the store added shelf lighting. The only thing they see is that it looks cleaner, brighter or fresher. They don’t necessarily know what aspect changed. They just know it feels better. We know women especially like that cleaner, brighter experience. It goes along with having clean restrooms.
Q. What concerns do you hear from potential customers?
A. Retailers sometimes ask if it will make shelving look dirty. It is actually the opposite. When you accentuate the packaging, your eyes to go the packaging. When the store is lit with ambient lighting, the dust stands out a lot more.
Q. Do you create custom solutions for each location you work with on lighting?
A. We sit down with the retailer and look at their whole store, get their CAD drawings and then we come up with the lighting options that would be best for them. It is not one-size-fits-all, but in our bag of tricks we have all different ways to illuminate shelves.
Lighting for Impact will be in booth #117 at NATSO Connect. Be sure to visit their booth to learn more.
// This article was created for Stop Watch magazine, the magazine of the NATSO Foundation. The NATSO Foundation is the research, education and public outreach subsidiary of NATSO, Inc. The NATSO Foundation provides programs and products to strengthen travel plazas’ ability to meet the traveling public's needs through improved operational performance and business planning. Visit www.natsofoundation.org for more information. (Donate to the NATSO Foundation here.)
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