How Would Alfred Hitchcock Design a Retail Store?

The 5 principles we use when helping retailers make the scene

Many film buffs consider Alfred Hitchcock to be one of the greatest movie directors of all time. Hitchcock was undoubtedly a master of the craft of filmmaking, but there are so many other useful things to learn from him about how to attract and engage audiences.

One of his most significant contributions to the art of filmmaking was Hitchock’s skill at eliciting specific emotions out of viewers by carefully crafting each scene.

Image by skeeze from Pixabay.jpg

Hitchcock believed that the secret of human emotions is “in the shot,” And by shot, he meant what the viewers see with their eyes and feel with their senses and emotions.

If Hitchcock were to help design a retail store today, he would probably not talk in terms of departments, zones, or merchandising plans but would instead break the store down into a series of distinct scenes.

He would craft each scene to elicit an intentional, predetermined emotion or feeling out of the customer about what they are seeing and sensing in the shot. These feelings would not be random, but instead, they would be intimately related to a particular value he wanted you to not only think about but feel in your gut in that specific moment.

Even though movies are not real life, Hitchcock could make your body want to jump out of your seat or scream involuntarily.

Hitchcock movies involved a physical experience of feeling your way through each of the scenes.

Customers can experience a store very similar to how they experience a movie. The issues of frame, shot, aperture, story, quest, actors, sets, scene-building, props, etc. are all effective ways of thinking about and designing the store experience.

The fascinating thing about movies is that they don’t try to transmit ideas through our intellect or rational logic; they instead try to communicate ideas through our emotions, which is what so many retail stores today miss.

Research tells us that good movies exert considerable control over our brain activity and eye movements.

This insight offers great wisdom to retail design because if you can grab the mind and influence the customer’s eye, you are much closer to increasing your customer engagement and building an exceptional store experience.

How to Make the Scene

My colleagues and I are required to use floor plans, merchandising plans, and fixture plans as a normal part of the retail store design process. However, we try not to lose sight of how consumers will physically encounter the space and get engaged with the product solutions the store offers.

Instead of fixating on floor plans, we prefer to focus our best creative talents on scene development. There is both an art and a science to making a convincing scene in retail, and listed below are the five principles we use when helping retailers make the scene in their stores.

#1. A good retail scene has a beginning, middle, and end

Most retail stores don’t have scenes but instead are comprised of a mishmash of aisles, departments, and zones that collide and overlap into each other. While these various components may have made orderly sense in the floor plan view, they rarely make sense to the way the human body senses an area or the way a consumer’s mind interprets their surroundings.

Worse yet, most of the stores we tour often get the first scene, or what we call the arrival scene, wrong. By wrong, I mean the opening scene is not framed up in a way that grabs your eye, pulls you into the store and tells you something vitally important about the brand, or what you are about to experience by shopping at this place.

As most of you would agree, the very first scene of a movie, or the first sentence and paragraph of a book, is very critical to setting the stage and getting you to turn the next page. If that opening scene is not right, we often lose the audience’s commitment to take the next step.

Well, retail stores are not all that different.

Humans beings tend to remember how something starts, as well as how it finishes the most.

They also tend to remember their best, peak experience in the store (such as the pizza-making station at a Wegman’s grocery store) and their worst experience in the store (such as long lines at checkout, or the parking lot).

These highly memorable situations can be improved and enhanced by crafting the scene in just the right manner, but this requires designing the store using the framework of scene development, not floor plan layouts or merchandising planograms.

My recommendation to retail clients is to think of the store as a series of distinct scenes. These scenes need to work and connect in a coordinated sequence of events, no different than the scenes of a movie.

And not unlike a movie, if the customer isn’t sure what scene they are in and where it falls in the overall story, they tend to get confused about what’s going on, how they should feel, and what they should take away from this part of the store.

The way to prevent this confusion and get your customer in the right frame of mind is to define a clear beginning, middle, and end of each scene.

Having this kind of clarity of the scope of the scene helps your customers get into the scene and engrossed in a way they can become an active participant in the story of the brand.

#2. A good retail scene has a mini-climax inside of it

Not unlike a movie, something distinctive, revealing, or highly memorable should happen inside each scene of the retail store.

We call this critical part of the scene the mini-climax.

A mini-climax for a scene say in the Wegman’s grocery store example I used previously could be something like the pizza guy (actor) in his white pizza outfit and hat (costume/wardrobe) throwing the pizza dough in the air (action) while another guy takes a giant wooden paddle (prop) off the old brick wall (setting) to pull out a piping hot pizza from the wood-burning stove and shouts out “freshly baked pizza” (drama).

A grocery store can also create the same type of mini-climax in the bakery department with someone ringing a bell whenever hot bread is coming out of the oven, or even something as simple as when the fishmonger (actor) is putting ice (prop) on the fish in the seafood department.

These scene hooks not only provide contextual clues about the values of the story/brand, but they also capture the customer’s attention in highly imaginative and memorable ways in the store. More importantly, it gets the customer’s focus off the commodity issue of price and into the differentiated aspects of quality, process, care, and other added features.

Although it is much trickier, the center store of grocery stores also has many opportunities to create mini climax moments, like what our firm did for Nabisco by creating Mom’s Kitchen right in the cookie and cracker aisle. This Normal Rockwell/Martha Stewart inspired scene is intentionally designed to remind customers of the great rituals and traditions that happen around mom’s kitchen table wisdom with cookies and crackers.

Nabisco Center Store Reinvention program called “Mom’s Kitchen.” Strategy and design by Shook Kelley

The opportunities for how to define the mini-climax for each department for a retail store are limitless. That’s where the creativity and connectivity to the brand come in. These mini-climaxes should tie back to the core values of the scene and the overall story of the brand.

When done effectively, these mini-climaxes can create a peak experience for customers and leave a very lasting impression in their minds about the values of your brand and store experience.

#3. A good retail scene reinforces the overall plot, quest, and story of the brand

A successful retail store should have, on average, about 5–12 major scenes in it that make up the whole store experience.

While each of these scenes should have something unique and special to say about the departments they represent, these scenes should not be disconnected, unrelated, and incongruous to the other scenes in the store.

To create a cohesive and naturally flowing brand experience, each of the scenes of a retail store needs to contribute to the larger plot, story, moral, and quest of the brand.

But underneath each of these scenes are the deeper values of what the retail brand stands for and the processes and editing philosophy the company goes through to bring customers these particular product offerings.

Just like the protagonists in a movie, your customer should relate to, like, care about and root for your brand to overcome the odds and become victorious in their quest to succeed.

This quest needs to be a mutually shared journey and experience between the customer and the brand.

Expressing these overarching brand values in the scene is critical to making the store work as a whole.

#4. A good retail scene has carefully chosen props and cues and triggers

Whenever humans encounter a scene in a film or in a store, their brain and senses try to make sense of the space and environment in mere seconds. These few seconds are about all the time we get to pull people into a scene.

Why won’t consumers engage longer in a scene?

Because the human brain runs on a limited power source, equivalent to about a 60-watt light bulb, and it subconsciously tries not to wear itself out on things that aren’t essential to its survival or delight.

Therefore, as viewers watch a movie or consumers walk in a store, they are careful not to expend too much mental energy trying to figure out what a situation or scene is about in a movie or store.

Humans instead will quickly scan a scene for context and critical pieces of visual data or visual information blocks — what directors call props — that can say something symbolically succinct about the scene.

Strategically placed in just the right way, these props can become emotionally loaded cues and triggers that can psychologically prompt and prime the customer’s mind to start thinking about the scene in a specific way.

The specific cues and triggers that are strategically placed in Mom’s Kitchen for Nabisco—such as the cookie tins, rolling pins, tiles, patterns, and drawers—are extremely effective at getting customers into the right kind of nostalgic mindset

Strategically placed cues & triggers in Nabisco’s Mom’s Kitchen. Strategy and Design by Shook Kelley

These props can also help customers know what they can get or do in that scene from the very first second they lay eyes on it.

However, the least effective way to get customers into the scene is through the use of long words and phrases, as this requires the expenditure of mental energy, which means the customer has to work.

So many retail stores we see today have signs full of words, phrases, and sometimes paragraphs as if someone were writing copywriting them for an advertisement.

Despite what many advertising professionals think, consumers don’t digest or interpret a space or store by reading long sentences or paragraphs. There’s no time, energy, or attention span available for that kind of comprehension and communication. There is simply too much else going on in the environment to expend that kind of power.

The best way to get customers pulled into and engaged with a scene is through evocative fields of meaning, iconography, and symbology that are easy on the eyes and don’t require mental work.

However, not everything in a scene has to be visually based.

An even more effective and powerful way to pull people into a scene is by activating their other senses, such as the sense of taste, touch, hearing, feeling, and smelling. These different senses are the most powerful senses of the human body, and they are hard for customers to avoid or forget.

#5. A good retail scene has values and says something about what you and your customers care about

The form of a book is different than say the form of a movie. Whereas a book has, on average, about 60,000–100,000 words in it, a movie has to be a greatly condensed summary of the book.

So how do screenwriters go about the challenging task of turning a book into a movie?

They have to find the critical scenes in the book that impart the most important values about the protagonist’s (the brand) quest. Then they have to determine if the reader (customer) will care enough about those values and quest to stay engaged in the story and invest time into finishing the movie.

The retail store experience is not all that different.

A retail store brand should capture, communicate, and portray a set of values they believe in and a quest they are pursuing on behalf of the customers. Of course, these values and searches also need to be something customers care about or have the potential to care about in their life.

Good movies often present a topic we are not sure we will initially agree with or care about, but by telling the story in just the right way, we find ourselves drawn in and caring about something we didn’t know we could care about in our life.

Whole Foods did this for a large swath of customers in the 1990s and early 2000s. While there were loyal customers that got Whole Foods day one, there were a lot more non-customers, that didn’t understand the value of what Whole Foods offered. These non-customers — which were essential to Whole Foods’ future growth potential — didn’t know why they should pay more money for rock hard bread that had no preservatives in it or hormone-free meats that didn’t have robust flavors or biodegradable detergents that cost more.

However, the incredibly seductive theater of retail that Whole Foods created in their stores did an excellent job of converting people over to their way of thinking by getting them to care about something they didn’t yet know they could care about in their life. While many other natural and organic stores had been around long before Whole Foods, what they lacked was the ability to create compelling scenes and persuasive theater that shifted the non-customers’ view as to why these products have value.

How can retailers improve their scene development process?

My suggestion to retail leaders is to first break their existing stores down into a series of scenes, whether they’re visibly apparent or not.

Next, try to determine where each of these scenes should start and end, and where they might be interrupted by a distracting scene-disruptor.

Within each scene, ask yourself what the special moments and mini-climaxes that could or should happen inside each scene are. If you get stuck, just go back to the values and decision process you went through to select these products and ask yourself what insights you wish to impart to customers’ for this particular area of the store

Once you have your arms around the various scenes in your store, you can then create a storyboard of all the scenes (using index cards if necessary) to see how each of the individual scenes can potentially connect and relate to each other. The sum of these scenes should add up to a larger story, plot, and quest of your brand. And the whole of these scene parts is the journey you are taking your customers on through the store experience.

When we do this exercise with other retailers, we typically find a handful of areas, departments, or zones that aren’t working as clear, identifiable, or compelling scenes.

We also uncover many areas in between scenes that are what we call “gaps in the cosnumer experience.”

One of the most useful things a retailer can do to help improve their store performance is by doing a “gap analysis,” which is an exercise focused on identifying areas where the experience falls down, doesn’t work, or is ill-defined.

Just correcting these gap areas alone will make a big difference in terms of improving customer attraction, engagement, and flow.

These confusing and undefined areas of the store are usually the first scenes that need to be re-edited, cut down, or possibly taken out of the store entirely. While cutting out scenes is hard for both movie directors and store designers to do, it is essential to making the whole story of the brand and experience of the store work in an engaging and successful flow-like sequence.

Once a retailer has determined its essential scenes, the next task is to craft each scene to ensure they succeed at pulling your customers into the moment, story, and, ultimately, the values of your brand.

In essence, you want your customers to care about what your brand cares about in life.

Although Hitchcock is not around anymore, we have plenty of great directors out there today that do a fantastic job of using his principles of scene-making in their films. We can learn a wealth of knowledge from these directors by just studying how they create compelling scenes and elicit emotions out of us that have the power to attract, engage, and convene customers around a story.

That’s a wrap!