Photo courtesy Roland DGA
Recent economic studies published by the Signage Foundation have shown how on-premise signs that brand a business can provide a boost for sales, employment and the community’s base of tax revenues.
Changing signage, in particular, can have a positive influence on sales. The Signage Foundation surveyed Pier 1 Imports furniture stores and found a new building sign, pole sign or free-standing multi-tenant sign added between five and 15 per cent to a given location’s sales returns. The chain’s lower-performing stores benefited the most from additional signs. And some of the greatest increases in sales came when the retailer added a new sign to a side of a building that previously had none.
As a result, sign changes were also shown to lead to small, positive impacts on employment. Nearly a quarter of respondents in another Signage Foundation survey reported they hired additional staff based on the boost in business they had experienced due to new signage.
Similarly, stronger business leads to the delivery of more taxes to local communities. This was exemplified in a recent Signage Foundation case study, which considered an extended-stay hotel that had been prevented by zoning restrictions from featuring pricing on its signage.
After three years of operating this way, the hotel’s owner and the city’s zoning department reached a compromise that would allow prices to be displayed on a multi-tenant sign. In the first nine months after the new pricing signage was installed, the lodging facility’s occupancy rate was 19 per cent higher than the same period in any of the previous two years. As the business became consistently profitable, even in traditionally slower months, it generated an additional $30,000 per year in hotel tax revenues for the city.
The Signage Foundation, a not-for-profit and non-partisan organization, continues to add to the growing body of peer-related research and information about the economic value and effects of signs. Many of its findings are presented at the annual National Signage Research and Education Conference (NSREC).
The next edition of NRSEC will take place in October in Cincinnati, Ohio. Complete studies and additional scientific research are available at www.thesignagefoundation.org.
