In the first of our webinars, Ian and Alex dissect the industry catchphrase of the moment, ‘Experiential Retail’. While some may feel the word ‘experiential’ is overused, it can be found at the heart of many of today’s most successful retail concepts. Acknowledging the lack of a common industry definition of ‘experiential retail’, we introduce our Retail Experience Framework, which we use with our clients to discuss, define and ultimately create retail experiences that are right for their customers and their brands. As those stores that meet customer’s expectations and needs by creating engaging interactions that are personal, relevant and unique, will strengthen their customer’s relationship with a brand, and stand to win.
As brands seek to meet the emotional and functional needs of today’s customers through experiential store environments, we explore the importance of getting the basics right first. Through our Retail Experience Framework, we share the eight key stages that must work together seamlessly in order to create a frictionless experience. Only when these foundation stones are in place can we layer in more complex and emotive ‘experiential retail design’ elements to deliver shopper’s Functional, Social, Educational, Educational and Escapist retail missions in-store.
Episode 03We take a deeper dive into ‘functional’ shopping missions, where customers visit stores with a specific objective in mind. This is where retail started, and research shows that functional missions still account for almost 50% of the reasons people visit shops.
All too often discussions around ‘retail experiences’ focus on the immersive and interactive and forgo the crucial element of the functional experience. We explore how today’s shopper mission is less linear and has developed to cover not only the things a shopper needs, but the things that they want, or think they want. We share how our Retail Experience Framework can help you identify opportunity gaps in your stores, enabling you to provide your customers with a more fulfilling retail experience.
Our fourth episode takes a look at ‘social’ customer missions and how we can create environments that feature ‘social’ elements which contribute to more meaningful and memorable shopping experiences. These experiences range from connecting with individuals at one end of the scale, through to becoming part of a community at the other.
We explore how our Retail Experience Framework can help retailers evaluate what’s working well and what isn’t, and how ‘social’ experiences can be integrated at various points of the customer journey. This episode is illustrated with lots of examples from the smallest of incidental interventions to fully immersive brand experiences, each of which is conducive to enriching the customer’s experience in-store and to creating a greater affiliation between the retailer and the customer.
In Episode 05, we tackle ‘educational’ customer missions. These are retail experiences that also offer self-improvement or learning opportunities. With the increasing demand for stores to offer customers more than just selling them ‘stuff’, we look at how educational experiences work before, during and after a purchase, and their value to retailers in forging deeper relationships with their customers. Using real-life scenarios, we will show how our Retail Experience Framework and experiential retail design can help retailers provide educational activities for customers that provide new and exciting reasons to go into store.
Episode 06‘Entertainment’ experiences can play a crucial role in developing a deeper connection with the customer in-store. In Episode 06 we examine ‘entertainment’ experiences, with the understanding that, what each customer finds ‘entertaining’, is uniquely subjective; we use our Retail Experience Framework and lots of great examples, to share how retailers can create experiences that successfully add value to the shopper’s journey. Whether they require the customer to participate or simply be an onlooker, these carefully curated events and interventions in-store create enjoyable and entertaining moments, that are not only unique and fun, but bring people closer to the brand.
Episode 07
In our final episode, we share how our Retail Experience Framework can be used to facilitate ‘escapist’ customer missions – where people shop purely for the pleasure, or just to be immersed in the retail landscape for few hours. Dependent on their mindset at a particular point in time, people like to escape in myriad ways; ranging from the calm of meditation or events familiar to them to adrenalin filled hyper-rich new experiences. It’s our belief that retailers who get the functional, social, educational and entertainment realms right for their audiences, naturally facilitate a range of immersive and escapist moments, that make it easy for their customers to escape and forget that they are actually shopping.
