How should I promote my retail business?

Well, you can do a number of things - markdowns, intriguing window displays with beautiful graphics, advertising, leveraging social media especially Instagram to highlight products, creating an e-commerce version of your brick and mortar store, hold events, send press releases to online PR newswires such as CISION, just to name a few.

Whenever I blog I like to keep it authentic and share my observations within the design / marketing / branding world.  So here is my story today. I will subtitle it as,

Being mysterious and seductive is good when opening store BUT....

So a new store is about to open down the street from my office. It is going through construction and it is boarded up with a photo of a woman whose face is cradled by what seems to be a man's hand. See below.

 

So far so good right? The logotype is not bad, they kept it simple, the font used in "launching soon" could be different, but overall not too offensive. So what's my beef with this? Why am I even bringing this up? Well, we have no idea what this business is about. And I get it, a certain mystery is always important, I always say to my clients you must seduce your customers and intrigue them to find out more about your brand. As long as you have something to back it up...
So I was curious to find out what KOVA is all about. From this imagery I see, I would think it has to do with fashion possibly? I mean what would you surmise from looking at this?
So the first thing I do, is type in KOVA in Google search. Just to see what comes up. Again they did a great job of making me dig deeper to find out more. If these guys are really well known, (since they don't put their website on their billboard)  then their company should pop up immediately in the number one position, right?

Well see below.. So I click on KOVA - LA Showroom (obvious choice right) but it takes me to a wholesale LAshowroom.com website which carries various brands and this specific KOVA is about a company selling hats etc.
Could this be the KOVA launching soon? Anybody's guess.

Let me ask you this.. Does this logo below have any remote semblance to the branding that we saw on their "billboard"?  This is assuming this is the same company we are talking about. This KOVA on the site sell hats. It quite possibly could be, but at this point no one knows except the owners and the people that work for them. There is no reference to any hats on the billboard. On purpose?..the mystery deepens... 

So what lesson can be learned from all this. Well, if you want to be mysterious, be mysterious but make sure you have the digital footprint to back it up. KOVA is a very common name across all industries.. when naming your company make an effort to be original so there is no confusion. If you want to make a splash and an entrance then do it, just make sure people can find out easily what you are about. 

Here is an example of what I am talking about. Let's take my company for example, Flat 6 Concepts. I am happy to say that if I was opening a design studio and just put my logo and saying launching soon, people can go online and type in Flat 6 Concepts (without having the faintest idea of what Flat 6 Concepts does), and will immediately find out what we are all about. Go ahead, try it for yourself. You don't even have to complete the full query, Google populates it immediately... see 

below:  

Moral of the story... when launching your new retail location and no one knows about you...be mysterious, but have the goods to back it up. 

A little advice for this "KOVA" hats or not... place your website URL somewhere discreetly and put a social handle of where people can find you. Develop a seductive tagline that can hint to the business or products you are selling. The retail landscape is cutthroat as it is. Give your store a head start. 

And next time be a little more creative in your naming. 

Christos Joannides is the creative director of Flat 6 Concepts, luxury branding agency based in Beverly Hills, California. You can follow him @flat6concepts on linked-in, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.