People, Place and Time . . .
Quinine’s approach to defining retail experiences is to start by dividing them into smaller, more tangible components. This means organising all thoughts, insights and considerations around a given brand into the simple yet powerful concept of ‘People, Place and Time’. We believe it is these three core components that interlink, overlap and combine to set the foundations of all types of experiences within retail environments. And it is this three components that can finally answer the question: “What is Experiential Retail?”
Time
Time has the potential to be highly subjective, which makes it hard to define. It is also fluid, moving deftly between the past, present, and the future. Time by its very nature is indefinite and continuous. Because of its complexity we don’t dwell on time too much, but we do pin it down to a certain extent: we think about the when — like a period in the day, a point of the week or a season of the year when an experience happens. Equally, we focus on the how long — the length of time a consumer is willing to commit to it. And lastly, we consider the frequency of the experience — how many times the consumer engages with it.
Place
We break ‘place’ down further than the four walls of a retail space and look at the component parts of the physical environment. Using an in-store customer journey construct, we attribute each of the stages of the in-store experience to physical locations such as zones or fixtures in store. An example might be starting with a digital façade that attracts shoppers across the threshold and into an attractive space where they gain a sense of welcome from the brand. It then moves into a discovery stage where customers are encouraged to touch and try new products and services. The consumer then progresses through the stages of select and consult before the transact stage, the after-sales stage and, lastly, the goodbye. Although we have described these stages sequentially, the consumer usually meanders through them, up and down, back and forth through their own buy cycle. Considering the retail environment through the lens of these eight stages helps break apart that overarching brand space into smaller, definable components, each with a capacity for emotional connection.
People
At Quinine we carefully consider the reasons people engage with retail environments. We believe that there are five reasons that customers go into store: they want to be Entertained, to be Educated, to Escape, to be Social or simply to complete a Functional task. We characterise these reasons or missions as ‘experience realms’. It is important to acknowledge that these missions are not exclusive of each other and they more than likely overlap. Frequently, a shopper begins with a particular purpose in mind — is in a given experience realm — but initiates others as they progress through the store environment.
Within the realm of Entertain, the shopper’s primary purpose is to have fun and enjoy. Someone in the Educate realm wants to learn something, gaining knowledge to stretch the mind or the body. Those going into store in the Escape realm want to lose themselves. Those in the Social realm want to connect with people. The Functional realm is where a consumer sets out to achieve a particular goal. A shopper may go into store with an 80% focus on a given realm and allow themselves a 20% focus on something else. It is typically that ‘something else’ that makes retail experiences more meaningful. Businesses will find the more of the experience realms they include within retail environments, the more engaged consumers are and the more impactful that encounter can be.
