Yashvee Sharad Sheth

IR3596

Heuristics, the mental shortcut used by the brain to reach a decision, guides a majority of human behaviour. This when leveraged by brands in their retail store design can subconsciously influence customer psychology and hence their behaviour. Visual merchandising and environmental graphics have the potential to become heuristic cues in the space driving customers to make impulsive shopping decisions. Hence for a designer, it is important to understand how visual merchandising and environmental graphics play this crucial role. This study thus looks into how the visual merchandising and environmental graphics strategies deployed in retail stores in a mall setup in India work as heuristic cues. It establishes how design decisions can be smartly planned as heuristic cues to guide the customer journey favouring the brand’s ideology and its end goal.