One near-universal law of psychology is habituation, which means that we stop noticing things we see or hear many times. This applies to company signage too, and as we come out of COVID lockdown we need to refresh the signage which we use to promote our business and to educate staff, partners and customers.
Research by the University of Cincinnati showed tangible improvements in business due to signage upgrades by upto 10%. This means that to gain attention we need to keep our signage fresh to avoid habituation, but that the costs should pay for themselves.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairmanof the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgansports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
One near-universal law of psychology is habituation, which means that we stop noticing things we see or hear many times. This applies to company signage too, and as we come out of COVID lockdown we need to refresh the signage which we use to promote our business and to educate staff, partners and customers.
Research by the University of Cincinnati showed tangible improvements in business due to signage upgrades by upto 10%. This means that to gain attention we need to keep our signage fresh to avoid habituation, but that the costs should pay for themselves.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairmanof the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgansports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
I've been seeing signs about the government's approach to COVID and the one near my house, which I drive past everyday, says "Drive safely and save the NHS." I realized that that sign has been up for months now, but I don't remember it changing, and I don't really remember when it first was put up there. It got me thinking that as business owners and entrepreneurs, we need to revisit and refresh our own signage. In fact, I've gone to my own website and deleted a strap line I had put on the website months ago that said,"We can help you communicate during COVID times," because while it seems like we will be living like this for a while thanks to COVID, we've also got to move on to "the new normal." As the theory of habituation states, we can basically become immune to the things that we see everyday, and it's actually a function of how the brain manages to store so many things. It's a form of compression. In compression technology, the computer only remembers what changes. It doesn't remember what stays the same. This is also what our brain is doing. It's telling us that if this piece of information stays the same, we don't need to remember it. We just remember it as it was. It'll be a memory, but it won't be something that we need to take on board everyday to refresh our view on it. The point is that there is the need for us to refresh what we are saying about our companies, or in the case of the government and the local government, our signage about how we behave during these COVID times. There was a study conducted by the University of Cincinnati on The Economic Value of On-Premise Signage, and it found that on-premise signs and regulations significantly impact the performance of businesses. I think we probably would take that for granted. But actually, the findings of this study are quite important, because the on-premise signage directly does influence the vitality of that business in terms of giving similar uplift to the way that the business carries on both in terms of transactions and recruitment. They discovered that 60% of businesses which upgraded their signage reported increases averaging 10%. Definitely, legibility is the most important characteristic of signage. That goes without saying. They also found that sign changes on a building, around a building, and leading to a company could increase hiring, that once nearly a quarter of the companies they surveyed had refreshed and improved their signage, they hired more people, presumably because their business was going on better. So, business logos and the size and location of the signs, according to this survey, were more important for companies with more establishments. Branding, therefore, is important. However, the national lodging chain, which was a case study, found that the use of digital electronic signage to display pricing was associated with an increased average occupancy rate. In other words, because the display was in the same location, but the contents, message, or pricing were different, it actually impacted occupancy rates positively, probably because it was a digital sign, and it was an active sign rather than a printed one, so it stood out and people paid attention to it. There was a case where a specialty small business chain demonstrated the need for signage to reaffirm the value of the company offered by the niche retailer. This resonated to me, because I was driving my daughter and her friend to go to town, and we came across a new whole foods shop here in Bath called Scoop. Mimi, my elder daughter's friend, commented that whole foods in bulk meant that it was expensive, because that was their experience of whole foods stores in London. And if it was in bulk, it meant it wasn't packaged, and they got you to buy more. On the contrary, that's the very opposite in terms of the mission of Scoop and these whole foods stores. Their goal is to reduce waste and to focus on the basics. With Scoop, because we're not buying the packaging and we can choose how much we want, it's actually more cost-effective. We should note, however, that the signage in stores like Scoop needs to be reassuring young people like Mimi who have heard their parents discounting the value of this merchant model. There's also a case in the Cincinnati University report where a car dealership found that the addition of a video signboard was associated with a large increase both in the service department revenue and the number of customers. They also found apparently that there was a goodwill and reputational gain associated with posting community-related public services messages on the video board; in other words, using their signage in the dealerships for communicating what was going on in and around the community and not just for direct sales. Marketing messages and public relations messages, in my definition, are not confined just to the press. I like to think of public relations as really touching on all the touch points that a company has with their potential customers, or partners, or their staff, or what I call the three audience groups within the SPEAK|pr methodology that we have here at EastWest PR. When we start to think about habituation and we look at our own companies, how much signage do we have that is pre-COVID that may now talk to, for instance, the sanitary needs or sterilization, and are we actually addressing any of the other aspects of our business that might have changed as a result of the new world we're living in? I define COVID PR as Compassionate, Optimistic, Values-based, Informative, and Digital. When we look at the signage that is supporting our own businesses, how has that moved on? Because if our signage and the messaging on the signage hasn't moved on, our three audience groups may be suffering from habituation. They may not recognize that we've come back as different businesses. Certainly going downtown these days in Bath, it's pretty disappointing and sad. There is a sense of resignation and depression in the shops. So, I would say that as business owners, now is the time that we've got to almost think about VE Day or Virus in Europe Day, taking off from the old victory in Europe day from the Second World War. While we're getting our businesses, our customers, and our staff back, we've got to
ask ourselves:
is our signage representing the positive outlook that we've got for the months ahead of us? As leaders of organizations, that's what we need to do. We've got to be the inspiration, the people that can look even just one day ahead for our teams and for our customers, because as business leaders, ultimately, that is what we do. We lead, which means we must look ahead, and our signage needs to reflect this optimism and this sense that we understand what we're going to do with our business to make it profitable, to make it add value, to make it sustainable, and to communicate that, because habituation means that people like me that are seeing the same sign asking us to drive safe and save the NHS, or to wear a mask to save the NHS. These messages, quite often, are taken for granted by the human brain, which is just trying to look for the most important thing to look for next. Remember, our brains forget what they seek frequently. Part of it as a logo and a brand may create a good baseline of information and feeling in our brains and in our hearts and in our minds, but that's different to getting people to take action. That's what signage can create. With the Cincinnati University study in mind, where we can see that there was a direct correlation between upgrading and refreshing signage with business performance, I've been looking at how I can do that for my own business, and maybe this is useful for you as well. There are three different ways to look at this. One is, does the visual marketing target the demographic that you want to reach out to? Does this coordinate with your brand? Are you building signage? Do you have flashing signs, static signs, neon signs, running signs, ticker tape signs? Are they coordinating with the messages that you are sharing with your team, customers, and partners? The second aspect is, will they make or break your reputation? There are many shops and buildings at the moment with igns that are looking outdated. One of the jobs that I did when I first came out of university was to install new signage for a company that was owned by Siemens. One of the places that I put new signage was in all the car parks and all the fencing of the car parks, because I felt as though this was the first time potential customers and staff would enter the premises. The signage and the reputation of our business starts as soon as someone approaches the building, and it should follow throug out, for example, indicati g directions in the building, iving people instructions, tell ng people where emergency exit are, and so on. So, how do e make sure that our signage eflects the optimism that e have? Even if the sign is i poor repair, it shouldn't b dirty. In Beijing, when I w s running the Morgan car busi ess, every spring, I would have eople wash the signage, be ause the winter in Beijing broug t a lot of dustfrom Mongolia, so we had to make sure that he signage looked clean and dist nguishable. The third part of signage is that it illustrates your relevance. Is your sign really showing that it is somehow attached to that business? I say that, because I've seen an electronics components supplier driving a van around, but there is no indication from their logo or the signage on the van that they're involved in electronics. It could be a delivery for any kind of company. So, no matter what your business is, the logo should reflect that. But also, the signage that you then have on your building, on uniforms, on your business card should also reflect the nature of your business. If it doesn't, then what kind of impression is that giving to your potential customers, partners, and staff? If your marketing messages are older and not yielding the same kind of results that they did before, it may be because you're still promoting the signage in the same places and in the same way, but the people seeing that are suffering from habituation. That doesn't necessarily mean we have to change the logo, but we could refresh it. It doesn't mean to say we need to abandon the signage we've got, but maybe we need to put new content on the signs. Keeping our signage fresh, relevant, and optimistic is a key part of the public relations program that we need to deploy. Paul Hourihane of ReMark Asia Pacific said that we need to make sure that our actions are greater than the advertising, and I think it's also so true that our actions need to be greater than our signage. If the signage is poor, old, dirty, worn out, or faded and it's not relevant to the business that we're running, then we're letting the potential customers, staff, and partners believe that we don't really care about the business, that we're not really investing our energy. It's called signage for a reason. It's a sign of how we want to address the business, how we're running the business. So, let's make signage a big part of our public relations. Look, once again, at the signage that you've got, and think about the psychological lure of habituation. Are people taking you and your business fo granted? And if they are, thin about how signage could chang that