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Often known as "configurations," "planning ideas," or "planning starters," what I call "Typicals" are one of the most powerful selling tools available to you as a manufacturer or dealer.
Lets take a look at the benefits that Typicals offer your customers.
Typical Configurations are pre-configured product arrangements that are often created for marketing materials. Typicals are also popular for AutoCAD, Revit, and SketchUp product symbols and are a key part of your symbol content strategy.
These appealing product arrangements help your customers understand how your product lines come together in a practical way in a designed space.
Typicals for Furniture manufacturers are similar to the mannequins used in the clothing industry. That pair of jeans looks a lot better when its paired with a nice shirt and a sweater.
This is why you rarely see a single piece of furniture displayed on its own at NeoCon: give your products some complimentary "friends" and watch your customers flock to your showroom display.
This Typical concept carries over to how your design customers work with your products in a virtual space.
Here are some reasons why Typicals should be a part of your symbol content strategy:
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1. Typicals give your customers a place to begin.
The majority of your customers don't have the deep understanding that you do about your products. They don't understand how product number xxxx-xxx fits with product number yyy-yy.
Symbol Typicals put your products in context and help designers see how the parts come together. From there, they can change the arrangement, as needed, by swapping out individual products.
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2. Typicals show how multiple product lines can come together.
Typicals aren't limited to one product line. You as the manufacturer can mix and match different products in your Typicals to add variety and introduce another product line to the designer.
For example: a designer may have seen an image of your chair and downloaded the Typical that contains the chair. The Typical that you offered them may also contain a table from an entirely different product line.
Now your customer has been introduced to this new table product line. Cross selling at its finest.
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3. Typicals are fast.
Whether a designer is in a dealership or an architecture firm, its understood that time is money.
Giving a designer the ability to download a pre-configured Typical right away will save them time. Don't make your potential customer sift through long lists of individual products to figure out how they come together.
Remember, they don't know the details of your products--they just want something that looks nice at the right price.
So what now?
Typicals are important to the design process--not having them could mean leaving money on the table (no furniture pun intended).
Here are some simple steps that you can take to prepare your Typicals right away:
- Build them: Use your existing Typical arrangements and reproduce them with your AutoCAD, Revit, and/or SketchUp symbols. If you can't create them all on your own, hire a service to create them for you. Also, focus on creating Typicals for your most popular product lines first, if you're unable to build them all at once.
- Create enticing Typical images: Create images for each Typical, so designers can see what they will download and eventually use in their design. Keep the images clean and place them in a white environment, so the background is not distracting. See the above images as an examples of Typical renders.
- Put them on your website: Create a web page on your site where designers can download your Typicals. Name the Typicals something like "design starters" or "planning starters."
