INSIGHT
What makes a great retail brand experience
Retail branding continues to have an essential importance to any retail business, whether they are a retailer brand or a brand in retail. Achieving retail branding targets significantly contributes to the brand's commercial success, essential to attract more new customers and to bring back repeat customers by strengthening brand engagement and loyalty beyond the transaction.
The growing role of stores
The changing media landscape has brought different expectations for the holistic brand experience, from customers of all demographics.
Within the full customer experience of the brand, strong brand experience in the physical retail store is increasingly important to successful branding strategies. Physical retail stores have become destinations with a trading role and far beyond. Within a retail store, the brand is experienced as part of the physical world, with sensory and experiential impact that delivers on the brand's own premium promises of quality and personalised service, and an expression of their particular brand world.
Brand identity and experience must be consistent within this constant evolution, if every interaction is to build customer recognition, competitive advantage and brand equity strength.
Retail branding strategies - personalised retail shopping experiences
At Caulder Moore, we know that to create meaningful brand expression, the store experience must feel intensely personal, helping the brand to bring reward and value to store visitors as individuals, with their own lifestyles, and as members of the local community.
Global trends and local trends both suggest that a more personalised shopping experience is a key driver of loyalty and repeat visit for modern customers. The principle is that the more personal the experience is, the more likely it is to be one which is more relevant, memorable, special, and likely to inspire customers to become powerful advocates of the brand.
With an understanding of their customers' needs and wants and their attitudes and values, a brand can deliver more personalised shopping experiences which will strengthen brand value and a clear understanding of your story in relation to this opportunity for personal customer connection. Brands that bring their purpose and values to life through their retail brand experience are brands of substance and meaning, that can develop into long term customer loyalty and enduring bonds.
People enjoy country warmth of Fairfax and Favor store together
Country cool brand Fairfax and Favor are hugely successful online, enjoying great customer loyalty. Their new omni-channel relationship is building deeper emotional connections with their brand community with their physical stores... intriguing new store concepts that fuse retail, hospitality and fun.
Retail branding strategies - distinctive brand personality
Brands in retail need a distinctive personality, attitude and experience to get noticed. It's more than what you sell - it's what you stand for. Whether you are large or small, it's essential to create a unique brand handwriting to showcase your difference across both physical and digital retail design environments.
Caulder Moore's approach to creating compelling brand experiences, brings authentic brand positioning to life in a 360 degree brand identity and experience.
Alpaso is a new shoe brand from Merkal, launched to 'own' the growing comfort footwear market in Europe, a volume proposition with considerable added value. For its new concept store opening in Madrid, Caulder Moore created the retail brand experience of joyful freedom of movement, with curved details, testing zones and an elevated customer journey. The powerful lapis blue makes a bold visual standout statement in a crowded environment to drive footfall and created a three dimensional experience of the energy of the brand, reframing comfort as stylish, aspirational and active.
Alpaso retail store uses zones to create space and movement
The retail brand experience encourages customers to come into the store, to get the most from their dwell time and to return, time and again. The store journey delivers Alpaso's joyful freedom of movement by being simple to navigate and with easy self-service; extensive brand choice is apparent without overcrowding. Plenty of comfy seating encourages try-ons and extends dwell time while bringing the brand's comfort promise to life.
The art of style and consistency in branding
One of the most important ingredients in retail branding is consistency. With so many moments of contact with customers, it's essential that every moment should build upon every other, to enable the brand to be at its strongest and most engaging and memorable.
Strong brand identity and cross-channel consistency is the way to make your retail business recognisable, memorable, and familiar. Each moment of connection is an opportunity, from the retail store through to shopping online, with social media, and from product packaging to shopping bags.
While it's important for brands to have their own distinctive and appealing style, the retail branding experience is more than just aesthetics. Style must include a distinctive way of behaving as well as a strong visual identity.
Successful brands demonstrating unified branding strategies include Sweaty Betty. In an increasingly competitive market, Sweaty Betty needed to stand out and step up from fitness multi-brand retailer to serious lifestyle performance own-brand. Their strong, distinctive, value-led identity and experience is based in reflecting and becoming part of a store's local fitness community and consistently delivered, through collaborations that resonated deeply with their brand community.
Sweaty Betty store interior with social, digital and product spaces
Caulder Moore's 360˚ brand experience
Caulder Moore takes a 360˚ approach, translating a brand identity into a compelling, holistic experience. Both the online store and the physical store have a role to play, and it's important to understand their specific roles in the customer journey.
Today customers expect to move smoothly between shopping and experience online and offline with a continuous conversation. In our experience, emerging brands who have built their business primarily online have a far greater understanding of truly delivering experiential retail, as they are not confined by 'legacy' retail thinking and have a clear eyed view on the role of physical retail in brand building, and the ability to create strong retail branding which incorporates the digital in the physical.
One inspiring example of personalised experience in the retail store is our own work with Fairfax & Favor. The team truly understood the benefits of creating social spaces within the store, together with VIP areas, to deliver a more intimate experience where customers really feel they are getting closer to the brand.
Aside from personalising and curating the product selection for customers who make appointments for the VIP experience, reinforcing the sense of ‘just for me’ the brand has taken this one step further by offering customers a visit on their birthday where they receive a special birthday gift, champagne, and cake, the ultimate in making customers feel valued on their special day.
These are the type of initiatives that make the brand so loved by their brand community and continuing to feel like a brand that is up close and personal, not a corporate, faceless entity. The fact that the Fairfax & Favor Facebook Club now totals 80,000 is further endorsement of how customers feel an intense, and personal, emotional engagement with the brand.
Dynamic brand experiences
Retail brand identity and experience has valuable physical dimensions, with immersive sensory experiences. In our partnerships with brands, we use the power of touch, scent and sound in addition to the visual, to make the strongest emotional connections in the store, which are memory-making.
Our partnership with Neom Organics is a boutique wellbeing and relaxation space evolution. We included a scent bar which is front and centre to the physical store experience, highlighting this strong aspect of the Neom brand and helping customers to navigate to their needs.
Neom scent bar helps customers to navigate the store
By introducing sensory experiences, the brand gives customers more compelling and rewarding reasons to interact with each other, with staff and with the experience of the brand.
Branding beyond borders: embracing cultural diversity and inclusivity
Retail brand experience must connect to its specific environment, and cultural branding fosters connections with diverse customer groups. Through transcreation, a retail brand identity can combine a strong and consistent core of who the brand is, with culturally and geographically relevant conversation.
Within single markets, inclusive retail brand design is made possible by connecting to the values and attitudes shared by the brand and its customers.
Caulder Moore has enjoyed partnering with many iconic brands that have successfully incorporated cultural elements into their brand expression. Our client Thameen London brings a British luxury fragrance experience to the Middle East. Previously only available at counters, a concession has opened in Selfridges and stores in Riyadh and Dubai; the start of an international rollout.
Together, we created a new retail design expression highlighting a heritage aesthetic, as a niche, luxury fragrance brand with a new retail blend of British heritage and Western refinement with Eastern opulence. Elegant, original and contemporary, each ingredient combines to create precious perfumes of high concentration. Indeed, Thameen means ‘precious’.
Thameen Dubai store entry arch both brands and welcomes
The store design reinforces the brand’s British origins – notably the arch framing the entrance. Rich midnight blue is complemented by gold; circular ceiling lights mirror the consulting tables; diaphanous curtains create a discreet and exclusive personal shopping space. This uniquely identifiable and distinctive destination mixes heritage with modern, elevating the specialness of the fragrance that sets the brand apart.
Customers learn the journey and stories behind the ingredients, and experiment with the fragrances. Whether for self-treating or gifting, Thameen London is a truly immersive and precious experience.
Localisation in retail branding
Store locations are chosen for their alignment to the brand's own world as well as customer reach, and for their ability to magnify the voice of the brand, with some like our client Fairfax and Favour opting to focus on market towns where customers visit for leisure purposes, rather than traditional high streets, where they have a different mindset of relishing the opportunity to dwell and be much more up close and personal with the brand.
Developing the retail brand experience with local relevance and identity is key to connecting with the people and communities around it, and create a far more resonant and 'adaptive', less corporate experience.
Successful retail branding connections
The retail industry is dynamic and evolving, and retail businesses have an exciting and authentic role to play. A retail brand has a unique opportunity for a role in people's lives, and a strong retail brand identity will enable a brand to be clear about this so others can recognise it, remember it and understand it, to enable an authentic connection.
Caulder Moore's strategy provides clarity and inspiration for future brand development. Success starts with a clear understanding of the brand's audience and connecting it with the brand and its purpose to understand its brand story. More personally relevant and meaningful retail branding is made possible through the brand's distinctive style, immersive sensory experiences and cultural and geographic localisation.
With these strategies, distinctive retail branding is an accelerant to a brand's commercial success and an unmatched source of competitive advantage.