The festive season is at its twilight and we’re into a brand new year. That means needing fresh ideas for your marketing and in some cases, the point-of-sale materials (POSM) for your business.

Typically seen in supermarkets and settings where visual merchandising is present, POSM displays sell products. What a product is – from its brand to its benefits and differentiated features – is advertised to shoppers through these displays.

The good news is that the Christmas season brings with it numerous creative forms of displays from brands and retailers. If you’re looking for POSM ideas to use in 2022, perhaps these would be good starting points:

Brilliant visual branding

The big idea:
Those who know Chanel typically recognize its N°5 perfume merely from the sight of the bottle. The French luxury brand decided to make a statement for the festivities by lighting up The Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, where its flagship boutique store is, with an outline of the iconic N°5. The Chanel logo can also be seen tastefully interspersed among a trailing string of stars.

What you can do:
You don’t have to be as ambitious as a brand like Chanel. But can you make it a big and highly visible sight that shoppers would be intrigued to look at? You can complement your standees and block displays with a creatively illuminated wall as a backdrop.

Captivating minimalism

The big idea:
Retailers who have the floor space tend to go big with Christmas displays, from magical winter wonderland to vintage European Christmas markets. But sometimes less is more. Case in point: the all-white North Pole themed display at de Bijenkorf department store in the Netherlands and the light painting Christmas tree window display by the Selfridges department store in London.

What you can do:
Going all white may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it makes for a gorgeous minimalist sight. Perhaps you could adapt that idea with accents of your brand’s primary colors to add more visual flair and emphasis. What other abstract ways could you use to represent a Christmas tree?

Conventional format switch-up

The big idea:
Christmas trees are typically set from the ground up. What about a massive Christmas display that does not touch the ground at all? A traditional set up, with an inverted format – that’s the idea that French upmarket department store Galeries Lafayette has made their own, with a Christmas tree suspended from the top and a floating astronaut Santa Claus to drive home the point.

What you can do:
What conventional formats can you invert for your POSM displays? Perhaps an acrylic tray that floats between two magnets? Maybe a gondola that hangs from the ceiling, or a standalone block display surrounded by a moat of water? If it forces shoppers to re-evaluate their perspectives, it’s an attention-grabber that’s probably worth considering.

More lights, more action

The big idea:
The Disney+ streaming service was launched in Hong Kong in mid-November, and the entertainment giant has wasted no time to announce its presence with a marvelous LED light show for Christmas. The Disney Winter Celebration involved more than half a dozen malls in the country to feature iconic Disney-owned characters and titles that remind us all who really runs our favourite shows.

What you can do:
Have fun with LED lights to bring attention to your brand and products. Use them to accent your displays, from table tops to gondola ends to massive block displays. But be careful with how you match colours and the environment within which they’re set up, lest they end up looking loud and tacky.

Innovative Christmas displays, the gifts that keep giving

Your existing POSM displays may tick all the right boxes, but with increasing saturation and the prevalence of new formats (e.g. augmented reality, robotics etc.), it takes more to stand out to shoppers.

Innovative displays don’t necessarily have to be high tech, they just have to attract shoppers to your products. If merely browsing your displayed items gives them a sense of fun, the battle in many cases is already half won.

Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, and it’s wonderful that great ideas show up in retail too. Do you have any fresh ideas for POSM displays going into 2022?