Place and Customer Journey
Place and Customer Journey is crucial because they frame the entire retail experience. They drive and support all the experience ‘realms’ or missions people go into a store seeking to achieve. Brands need to ensure each of the eight steps do not work just in isolation but work together seamlessly, before layering in any more complex, emotional, immersive or interactive elements.
Sometimes a small detail that doesn’t live up to customer expectations can derail the entire retail experience: the lack of a peg to hang up your jacket when trying on a new one or labels and tags preventing you from comfortably trying on a new pair of jeans. Everything matters, everything needs to work.
Ensuring that Place and Customer Journey operates well is fundamental for connecting with the customer, delivering a frictionless retail experience and leaving them with a good impression of your brand.
Everything within the retail environment must work and each component part matters, whether big or small. By considering place through the lens of the customer journey, retailers are able to conduct a thorough examination of the eight component parts. Through a variety of techniques such as role play, props, tools and prototypes we can identify and work through all possible scenarios and ‘what ifs’. Only once these have been established and solved can we deliver that all-important frictionless retail experience.
It is only when this robust, working foundation is in place that retailers should begin to implement the more emotional and immersive activities in-store.
This article is Episode 02 of Quinine’s webinar series on the topic of ‘What is Experiential Retail?’. Subsequent webinars will take deep dives into each of the five experience ‘realms’. Details of all other titles can be found here: