Of all modern retail trends, it is experiential retail that has become one of the most ubiquitous. In addition to redefining the customer experience of flagship stores and pop-up retail events, the personal and immersive design of experiential retail is also affecting the physical layout of stores, prompting the rethinking and redesign of furniture and shelving placements, demonstrating that, for many high street businesses, it is to be more than a passing fad.
What Is Experiential Retail?
Broadly, experiential retail is a term attributed to any retail design that seeks to prioritise the customer’s experience of a brand, service, or product. It is the engagement of a customer, as well as their impression and satisfaction, that becomes the goal.
Retail has, historically, been designed to promote sales, efficiently and to the best possible potential. Traditionally, this has steered stores to prioritise their products above all else. Imagine shop shelving filled with an extensive selection of items, each one perfectly presented and neatly aligned, showcasing its affordable pricing and appealing design. Such a store arrangement places clear value on the product, leading its design to follow suit.
Experiential retail swaps this dedication to products for experience space, exchanging abundance for catered personalisation and interactivity. For those selling mountain climbing equipment, it could be installing a climbing wall or, for mattresses, it could offering customers a place to sleep at night. If we are to reconsider Elmer Wheeler’s iconic maxim, don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle, it could, instead, become, don’t sell the steak, show them the plate.
How It Is Realised
While our mention of spending the night in a store may seem surprising, it is an actualised example taken from a real event, one held by select IKEA stores that allowed customers to experience their showrooms as a home. The mattress company, Casper, now offer this sleepover service regularly at certain stores.
House of Vans, a flagship store of international skating brand Vans, installed a concrete skate park and street course, transforming its retail space into a destination for skateboarding culture. Some retailers have gone even further, not only dedicating a portion of there store or operating hours to customer experience but their entire retail space. John Lewis and Waitrose opened their ‘experience playground’ concept store in Southampton, welcoming customers to enjoy product workshops, personalised shopping, and educational classes, such as photography and cooking.
Embracing A New Design
These high concept customer experiences are not the only method of experiential retail. In fact, there are many low-cost ways to engage customers with a product to the same effect. As part of connecting customers with a brand, physical shop design, that is the shop furniture and displays, can work to promote customer immersion. A well-designed or themed store makes a lasting impression upon customers, one that becomes associated with the product.
Stylised backdrops and captivating displays additionally work to encourage customer-generated marketing and social media sharing, leading to passive advertising.
Why It Is Effective
To those entrenched in traditional store design, dedicating such a large amount of retail shelving and furniture space to non-profit experiences may seem counterintuitive. Since experiential retail is relatively new, we are only beginning to see the potential benefits, however, to better understand experiential retail, the context of our modern high street needs to be described.
As brick and mortar stores strive to compete against e-commerce, they must reconsider their design. Attempting to directly compete with digital sales with traditional retail methods is provenly unwise. Online stores are typically able to offer a wider range of more affordable products, certainly to an extent that high street stores cannot. This is why retailers are celebrating the assets they can offer, those which digital retailers cannot.
