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Client Success Story · Symbol Retail
Digital menu boards over the deli counter and high-brightness sun-readable displays in the windows, across Centra and SuperValu stores in Northern Ireland — networked, dayparted, weather-triggered, and running since 2017.
Symbol group stores, independently run, trading under one brand — and a food-to-go offer that has to compete with everything else on the street.
The installation
What went in, and how the content behaves once it is there.
Years running
Screen formats
Dayparts on the boards
Ways content changes itself
The brief
A convenience store sells a great many things at a very thin margin. Food to go is not one of them.
The hot counter, the sandwich bar and the coffee machine are the part of a Centra or a SuperValu that behaves like a restaurant rather than a shop, and they are the part competing directly with the chipper, the café and whatever has just opened across the road. Somebody standing at that counter at half twelve is a decision waiting to be influenced.
What was influencing it, historically, was a printed board that took a week to change and was therefore always slightly behind — last month’s deal, a price that had moved, a breakfast menu still up at two in the afternoon. That is not a small problem in a room where the offer is the product.
And because these are symbol group stores, independently owned and run, it could not be solved by sending one instruction to one head office. It had to work store by store while still looking like the brand in every one of them.
What went in
One brings people through the door. The other sells to them once they are standing at the counter.
Above and along the deli counter in HD — the full menu on some screens, a single product doing the selling on others, laid out to read from the back of a lunchtime queue.
High-brightness screens facing the street, built to stay readable through glass in daylight where an ordinary display is washed out by mid-morning.
Content that changes itself
The boards are right at half seven in the morning and right again at four in the afternoon, without anybody being asked to do anything.
Everything is networked back to a locally hosted CMS, so a change goes out once rather than store by store. On top of that the content is scheduled rather than posted, which is what keeps a deli board accurate through a trading day that changes shape three times.
The detail
The specification, for anyone weighing up the same job in their own store.
Across the deli and hot counter. HD resolution throughout, with some screens carrying the full menu and others giving a single product the whole frame.
Street-facing, high brightness. Sun-readable so the offer still lands on a bright afternoon rather than disappearing into reflection.
Every screen on the network. Control and content managed centrally through a locally hosted CMS rather than a player per screen.
Breakfast, lunch and beyond. The menu changes with the trading day on a schedule, so nothing is left up past the hour it applies to.
Automatic, by conditions. Cold days push hot drinks up the running order; warm days do the same for ice cream. No one has to notice the forecast.
End-user training, then a long-term package. Store staff run the daily specials themselves, with maintenance and warranty behind the hardware.
On site
Photographs from Centra and SuperValu stores across Northern Ireland.
Symbol retail
Independently run stores under a shared brand are a different deployment to a company-owned estate.
Each store is somebody’s business. The counter is laid out the way it is for reasons that made sense to the person who built it, the trading pattern differs from the town twenty miles away, and nobody is going to close on a Saturday because a rollout schedule says so.
So the work is done store by store, on the store’s terms, while the thing a customer ends up looking at — the brand, the layout, the quality of the image — is held to the same standard everywhere. That balance is the actual skill in symbol group work.
The result
The boards are current, the specials are right, and the estate has kept growing since 2017.
What makes that last is not the hardware. It is that changing a price takes a minute, the schedule does the rest of the work on its own, and store staff were trained properly enough to trust it.
A digital menu board that nobody updates is a printed one that cost more. These do not have that problem.
“A short line from a store owner or the symbol group about the boards.”
Name, role — Centra / SuperValuMore like this
Same queue, different shop.
Tell us how the offer changes through the day and how many stores you have. We will show you what a scheduled board looks like at breakfast, at lunch and on a hot afternoon.