Reimagining physical stores

Friday was excellent at Babson College for the conference on Reimagining the Physical Store, organized by Journal of Retailing editor Katrijn Gielens, Dhruv Grewal and Dinesh Gauri. This newsletter reviews the first 4 presentations:

1) groundedness via place, people & past (Stijn Van Osselaer & friends)

2) developing a glocal retailscape (Hope Jensen Schau?& friends)

3) leveraging sensory senses (Courtney Szocs & friends)

4) consumer immersion via convenience & interest (Henrik Hagtvedt?& friends)

Dhruv Grewal set the stage with the five customer benefits of retail: experience, social, curation, frictionless, and fulfillment. To satisfy these benefits, a physical store needs customers excellence, product excellence, locational excellence and operational excellence.

Next, Stijn van Osselaer discussed groundedness on three fronts: people, place, and past. The past is not nostalgia for 'the good old times', but a sense of continuity that can come from connecting to the past of the consumers, the brands and/or the employees. ?As to people, retailers can facilitate connection

1) to other customers (e.g. seating in a book store, coffee bar in a bike store),

2) to employees (the chat with the cashier checkout lane or 'kletskassa' in Dutch),

3) to producers in-store (e.g. open kitchen, tasting within the winery).

Finally, place is often sensory, as in using authentic local wood in the physical store, or naming products to represent a place - like Eataly. In Belgium, Hoogstraten strawberries have a QR code linking you to the family that grew them, and you can send them messages.

A recurring question for Stijn's talk was that the need for groundedness differs among customers, and it is hard to customize in a physical store. Indeed, my reflection was that online retail allows you to customize the groundedness much more: some customers want to see link to place, others to people, still others to past. How can and should website be personalized to this effect?

Marketing prof and avid surfer Hope Jensen schau presented on the structure of common difference, as applied to surf shops, but with implications for financial services and mask-wearing. The outside of a surf shop always focuses on global image brands, often without relation to products, while the inside features both global and local brands. Because surfers are few (about 35M), surf shops mainly sell to non-surfers and have to maintain interest in the industry, which they enhance by working together and offering multiple brands. In contrast, Harley-Davidson went the other way, over-focusing on their own product, of which they can only produce so much. Often, motorcycle enthusiasts have to wait so long that they start riding competing brands, and sometimes stick with those. ?

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Having worked for H&M before joining academia, Courtney Szocs focused on customizing the physical store. We can translate shopper facial expressions into visual imagery, have robots adapt to customer demographics, and change scent by department. In the future, screens and holograms will appear as consumers enter an area. As to gustation, her own research showed that consumers buy more on impulse when on caffeine. The future will see a more strategic use of different beverages, such as sweet or spicy, warm or cold. Smart mirrors in fitting rooms will make it comfortable for you, show how you look in that outfit in different settings, such as a party or a beach, and recommend the product and accessories in different colors and configurations. With such technology as an enhancement tool, retailers can provide valuable human interactions and pleasurable in-store experiences.

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Hendrik Hagveldt elaborated on the concept of immersion, which combines interest with convenience. I loved his 2x2 typology of these dimensions, showing that many retail actions are both uninteresting and inconvenient (which disrupts immersion), while others can be interesting but inconvenient, such as retail on top of a skyscraper, or convenient but no longer interesting, such as topping a credit card.

True immersion often comes from interior design, architecture, and location. The questions focused on how to customize immersion, as some customers truly desire fast convenience, while others want to treasure hunt. Sabine Benoit mentioned the middle aisle of hard discounters Aldi and Lidl. Already as a student, I preferred Aldi for its fast route, using only the side aisles. But the middle aisle is where the interesting seasonal products and 'special buys' reside:

Overall, the conference demonstrated that physical stores can provide both inspiration and convenience for consumers, and that understanding consumer motivations and in-store behavior is crucial to this end:

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