Visual Arts in Retail Management

Retail management and visual arts are two key fields that have been correlated for a long time now. Visual arts are art forms such as painting, ceramics, printmaking, drawing, photography, crafts, and filmmaking whereas retail management is the process of improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales by understanding the behaviors of the consumers. This article will focus on the relationship between visual arts and retail management. And I will explain how visual arts has greatly influenced operations in the retail management sector. Moreover, we will use the artwork Salvador Dali as an example to describe the connection between these two fields.

Every retailer’s main objective is to sell as much merchandise as possible, and most of them have devised a lot of ways to do so. However, there is one technique that has become essential in helping them achieve their goals, and that is the visual merchandising.  This is the process where the retailers visually display their merchandise to entice the shoppers (Banks, 2014). Salvador Dali was one of the pioneers of this process in the 20th century, and his idea was to develop window displays together unique products particularly for the visual merchandising purpose. According to Davis (2015), following his success, other retail business started commissioning several artists to help them develop window displays, interior floor display, and interior space and flow design.

Salvador Dali believed that visual merchandising was a necessary retail strategy that promotes the aesthetics of a commodity with the objective to maximize sales. Successful implementation of this technique broadens a retailer’s market and at the same time improves brand loyalty. However, there are a lot of elements that go into the success of this process. Some of the factors that should be considered include Shapes, colors, and several textures, uniform and presentation, and lighting. If you closely evaluate these components, you will notice that a strong command of visual arts knowledge is required to develop a highly effective visual merchandising process (Dollard, 2015).

 Based on Sparks (2016) findings, the visual elements that the retailer chooses to surround and advertise his products will greatly influence the behavior of his customers when buying the products.   Most artists sell their artworks to retailers, wholesalers, department stores, and galleries. Retailers use these artworks to give a visual identity to their stores (Weiner, 2015). In fact, nowadays most retailers have turned to visual merchandising to help them maintain a good brand reputation. They believe that using relevant visual arts and effective graphics will bolster their sales and most importantly increase foot traffic into their stores. From this development, we realize that visual arts are essential in retail management since it helps retailers boost their sales.

Salvador Dali was not only an artist but a rich businessman. He spearheaded the ideology that artistic capability can be used in many fields. He paved the way for artists to see themselves as brands (Moulin, 2013). Through Dali’s way of conducting business, retailers were able to see that window display was one of the best ways of executing visual merchandising.  This window display enables new customers together with the existing clients to see the best-selling products, the newly arrived commodities, and even enhances the brand’s image. From Dali’s success as a businessman and using visual art as a tool to promote his brand, we notice that there exist an important association between the visual arts and retail management.

In conclusion, we realize that there is a strong relationship between visual arts and retail management. This is because from Salvador’s success and the initiation of visual merchandising technique we see that skillful use of visual arts is required to increase customer sales in the retail industry.

Works Cited

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