INSIGHT
Five retail design strategies: how to stand out from the crowd
The paradox of standing out whilst fitting in
Given the sea of sameness that exists in retail store design and experiences, there is a huge opportunity for brands to be bolder, more inventive and creative to ensure stand out and brand visibility. There are simply too many concepts that look too similar, that seem to possess the same aesthetic playbook. Playing it safe has never been more popular. It seems that while brands themselves see clear distinctions between their concept and those of their competitors, however in the eyes of customers, these distinctions count for little. Often it is too subtle or vague, making choice harder, and brand differentiation more challenging.
We often get briefs where our clients want to be different but not too radical, distinctive but still fitting into a safe space. This is the key challenge, the paradox facing a lot of brands, how to stand out and win new brand fans without alienating your existing base, and how to tell compelling brand stories in ways that are accessible and memorable.
1. Developing a distinctive design strategy
One of our guiding principles has always been brand strategy. Read in more detail here. The best, most powerful store concepts and experiences are those which involves understanding your target audience and their needs as the starting point to shape the brief.
Understanding your target audience in a way that is rich with insight is key to creating a space that not only meets, but exceeds their expectations.
Mining these insights in an intuitive way is vital to establishing a firm foundation for success. It is no longer sufficient to simply gather quantitative data, but to explore the qualitative data, the insights, attitudes, and emotional drivers of your audience to not only understanding their current needs, but also increase your ability to anticipate those desires that they have not yet articulated, in order to embrace genuine innovation, delight and surprise and also, vitally, leapfrog your competition and provide customers with a compelling reason to engage with your brand.
2. Designing for emotional connections
Once the foundation has been laid with a clear strategy, a critical part of our working process, alongside with encouraging footfall and visitors and inspiring return visitors to increase life time value, is increasing dwell time in store.
We have outlined a number of case studies which demonstrate various strategies where increased dwell time increases not only basket size and sales but also enhanced emotional brand engagement and immersion.
The home of Aspinal of London
In creating the Aspinal flagship experience, a perfect example of a departure from a sea of sameness, we consciously created a journey of discovery, where, capitalising on the idea of the ultimate 'home of the brand' we created different rooms, each with their own distinct identity, atmosphere and design, emulating a home experience. Devoting generous space to comfortable seating areas led to extended dwell time. Introducing key destination points led to the status of the store as being one of the top 6 instagrammed stores in the world. This was the direct result of the space and experience being distinctively and identifiably different, it feels as if it belonged exclusively to the Aspinal brand, and was a true and authentic expression of the brand essence.
Aspinal of London, Regent Street store, comfortable seating to stop and discover
3. Harnessing unique store design features to tell your brand stories
Attracting new customers and cost effective customer acquisition is one of the elements that is inspiring many previously pure play retailers to embrace physical retail. The halo effect is the measure whereby a physical store has been proven to increase web traffic in the area by 40%.
Physical stores provides a highly effective means to drive more traffic to the brand, and achieve richer brand engagement.
Through customer communication, through visual merchandising, show stopping window displays, third windows, and brand storytelling the business maximises the opportunity to create a destination, and get closer to their customers.
In our experience, this is something that is often stripped out of the final concept and seen as less important after getting as much product out as possible in front of customers. This is a missed opportunity, as customers have returned to physical retail, and have new and heightened expectations. They seek novelty, they want to be inspired, enchanted and enjoy the power of transformative experiences.
Fairfax and Favor - destinations to visit
In the case of Fairfax and Favor, now close to opening their ninth store in 2 years, where previously they were an online brand, they have a clear strategy to generate sales through experiences that feel distinctive, with concepts that are shaped by the location and architectural style of the building. Visitors to the stores know that they are gong to have a special experience which is unique to that individual store. We have ensured that we utilise a sufficient number of brand design elements to fuel and aid brand recognition, balanced by bespoke, site specific features to ensure that each store feels special. The result is that their brand community are inspired to visit each store in anticipate of discovering something unique, memorable and distinctive. We develop a VIP area in each store which increases dwell time, but also contributes to 40% of sales in store.
Again, the concept feels unique, and ownable to the brand, implementing clear differentiation in a sea of sameness.
Fairfax and Favor, distinctive stores with hugely successful VIP areas
4. Supportive design
One of our key strategies is that of Stop, Engage and Land, where each touchpoint can be designed to meet the shopper triggers and barriers at that specific moment, to support and shorten their path to purchase, with or without staff.
Stop is all about attracting the customers attention, to be visually disruptive to create impact. Stop is also about standing out, on the street and especially against competitive businesses. It is also about signalling that you are there to meet the customers needs.
Engage is focused on building perceived relevance for customers and shoppers and retain interest, and to fuel emotional engagement and involvement. The engage phase also involves a clear demonstration of the superior qualities of the product and its unique strengths and benefits, and communicating the truth of these claims to customers in order to enhance perceived value. Vitally the engage phase is about connecting the brand/product benefit to the customer mindset.
Finally, land, the conversion phase is about motivating the customer to buy/act with the strongest value perception. This could involve supporting price messaging with reinforcing product attributes, and benefits to customer mindset and mission. There is also a powerful role for social support, recommendations, together with creating a sense of immediacy with exclusives and time limits.
Birds Bakery: delivering supportive customer service
Adding value to the customer experience should include integrating services and elements that create a positive and comfortable customer experience to build trust and rapport with clients, and focus on engaging customers with the brand in new ways, such as introducing hospitality elements, seating areas to optimise increased dwell time.
For example with Birds Bakery, the introduction of comfortable seating into the shopping experience, has not only increased dwell time, but also created more of a destination status for the bakery and led to increased sales through increasing frequency of visitors, and increased basket size. Customers have a greater opportunity to engage with brand stories and brand communication in store, thereby elevating the perception of quality and therefore value for money. It has also created a sense of a stronger brand community.
Birds Bakery: integrating excellent customer services with a supportive experience easing the customer journey and elevating the brand community
5. Future proofing your store designs
Staying up-to-date with design trends can help you stay competitive in the industry, but businesses need to do more in the current competitive climate. Staying ahead when customers have higher expectations than ever before is more challenging.
It is obviously far easier and cost effective to roll out the same design and the same stories but in this fast paced world where stories can be reduced to 30 second soundbites, standing still will feel like walking backwards.
This does not mean a brand new concept for every store but small agile adaptations to changing consumer behaviours or location tailoring, can help you better serve your clients. We provide an ongoing service after every store design by evaluating what works and what could be improved thereby creating new opportunities to exceed your customers’ expectations in new and inventive ways.
Gina Shoes: crafted and innovative design
Customers want to engage with bold, confident brands that inspire reassurance, businesses that are positively energised by telling their brand story in new and engaging ways that capture imaginations, enchant, and provide new memories and experiences. We have worked with Gina for over 15 years and have adapted their store design to tell brand story from their heritage legacy to a contemporary forward thinking brand without loosing their original creative approach.
Gina Shoes in London, translating soon to a new store experience in Bahrain
Turning challenges into successful opportunities
One of our favourite challenges is to identify hidden opportunities within the constraints that we are presented with and work it into an advantage. Looking beyond the merely visual, great experiences are fully sensorial and immersive, employing all the senses, touch, sound, and scent to amplify and reinforce the brand universe. At the outset of every collaboration, we spend time with our clients to understand their goals, objectives and challenges - contact us below to how we can help you stand out.