Experience Required
Is experiential retail missing the mark?
In a retail environment where brands strive to edit the “look” or “feel” of a customer’s journey both online and off, “experience” is often misinterpreted as a purely aesthetic concept. As brands continue to disrupt their own models in attempts at emulating powerhouse DTC brands like Glossier, they tend to gravitate toward changing their look, inserting technology, and investing in more employee training.
Doug Stephens, retail expert and founder of The Retail Prophet, has a theory behind why these seemingly large efforts act like a band-aid fix. Stephens asserts that the customer experience should exist as a series of carefully engineered moments that focus on unique operating strategies in a ground-up manner. While retailtainment —implementing entertainment aspects into the retail mix - is not necessarily a new concept in brick and mortar, it now lends itself to building experiences that are not ancillary aspects of the retail environment but rather the main stage.
At The Standard’s High Line location in New York, “Chanel No.5 in the Snow” is an experiential pop-up driven by Chanel’s latest perfume campaign with ice skating, hot chocolate, and a unique augmented-reality snow globe activation. In Bryant Park, PopSugar’s “Sugar Chalet” is building an offline audience through meditation, yoga, and cuisine, molding the experience of the activation with the media product. These experiences create the lasting impression that consumers carry with them long after their visit.
Sources: BoF (March 1, 2017) | Retail Dive (November 13, 2019) | WWD (December 10, 2019) | Image: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty