dwell to sell retail tactics
TRANSCRIPT
One of the main drivers of retail visits in the digital age is human interactions and brand experiences.
Once you’ve enticed customers into your retail environment, the next challenge is to encourage engagement, disrupt the habitual shop, drive sales and ensure they remain immersed in your brand space.
Dwell to Sell Retail Tactics
Green Room Future Series
Time is Money StudyResponse
However, when paired with the following insight, it becomes clear how this simple proposition is not actually simple at all.
If you want your customers to dwell, they need to feel comfortable in your store environment. The average customer spends just 5 minutes in-store, with 3/4 shoppers saying they want to be “in and out as quickly as possible.” (2015 Convenience Tracking Programme).
Develop your retail environments to incorporate elements that deliberately encourage customers to dwell, give them experiences to interact and engage with, design a journey to lead them around the space and create an atmosphere of welcoming calm that makes customers feel at ease exploring. This increase in time immersed in your space will drive sales and conversion rates.
A 1% increase in positive dwell time equates to a 1.3% increase in spend.
Fact...
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What next?In exploring the opportunity presented by increasing customer dwell time, we’ve analysed and offered best case examples highlighting how to achieve this at retail. We’ve delved into the insight driving why this strategy works, and how this knowledge can be transferred to your industry.
Entertain meExtend your
welcome beyond your core customer
Nature calms, relaxes, slows us down
Enhance sociable scene setting
Enable exploration within your layout
Provide content that enables moments
of mindfulness
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Participatory initiatives quench the customer thirst for knowledge born of the information age.
Self-development initiatives complementary to a store’s product offering tap into a consumer desire for new skills. These events also create live action experiences and retail theatre, which help drive interest and foster an engaged community around the brand. Brands can sit back and bask in the halo of over-delivery.
Customers will naturally dwell longer within your brand ecosystem if engaged in a learning experience and thereby build strong relations with your brand. Events drive footfall and if timed correctly can fill the store at quieter times.
This French home improvement retailer offers a range of in-store initiatives to help the DIY enthusiast develop their expertise. They also encourage customers to try out products in their deconstructed house and garden.
Their ‘makers’ program teaches customers how to craft, upselling their clientele to more complex products and driving additional sales as well as a feel-good-factor.
Many sports brands now reap the benefits of running training programs from their stores. We’ve been involved with The North Face in the #NeverStopLondon community, integrating lockers and chalkboards into the store to facilitate the community.
Insight
Leroy Merlin Paperchase
Create edutainment
The North Face
Paperchase
1 Entertain me
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1
Positively engage with your customers via programs and installations that are relevant to your product offering and both fun and informative. This helps customers to dwell within your brand ecosystem and interact more deeply with your brand.
Suggest playful interactions
Insight
Leverage the power of play as a form of brand consumer glue by offering convivial physical venues rooted in escapism, communal buzz and interactive entertainment.
Sun & Sand Sports Nintendo WorldBobbi Brown
Their flagship in New York encourages hands-on play within the store in the company of fellow enthusiasts via demo stations and 15ft gaming screens and competition boards.
Almost all make-up brands have walk in makeover slots where you fill in a makeup card with the products most relevant to you. A great personalised takeaway from a great brand experience.
We developed three immersive trial zones for the Dubai store (football/basketball/running). Over 30,000 customers have been energised and entertained so far, with 40% opting to share on social media, amplifying reach beyond the shop floor.
Nintendo World
Entertain me
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Context within retailing is becoming a key sales method, boosted by new tech tools which provide more immersive, seamless and connected experiences, alongside the now commonplace social media content and peer reviews.
As an example, Decathlon allow customers to trial products within the store, even providing a track to ride a bike around the space.
Insight
Consumers want to understand product benefits rather than product features. To achieve this, customers want to understand how products relate to them, they need context.
To keep the context of individually crafted objects alive they place images and information about the creators next to the work, enabling their shoppers to learn more about the artists and designers behind the items.
New global concept uses context in an overt way to enable consumers to understand the function and benefit of a product without lots of technical messaging. Imagery demonstrates the product being used, and stories of athletes using the equipment bring the imagery to life.
TictailThe North Face
Provide context that enables moments of mindfulness
Opened a ‘Smart Home’ area in its London flagship on Oxford Street. The space showcases its latest IoT products in a 1,000 sq-ft domestic setting, that allows customers to observe them in a realistic, un-intimidating and relevant space.
Decathlon
John Lewis
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Brands must aspire to become the definitive hosts, with gestures of generosity adding extra shine to the shopping experience, especially when catering to those who join the customer in-store, not just the purchaser themselves.
Insight
Mothercare Envie de fraiseWhite StuffFrancois Nars
In a lovely example, this French maternity brand considered the baby on board and offered their visitors the option to sit down to pay.
Acknowledging that new Mums are often in search of a quiet place to feed their ever hungry children, they incorporate private seating areas into their designs to accommodate their target market.
Changing rooms and kids are never a great combination, but White Stuff provided a children’s play area complete with biscuits and toys right by the changing rooms allowing parents to try on items uninterrupted.
Commenting on the opening of his new cosmetics store in Covent Garden, Francois Nars offered the following advice, “there’s nothing worse than feeling rushed when you’re choosing make-up, so if you’re bringing him or her, choose a store that you know has comfy armchairs for them to relax in.”
Extend your welcome beyond your core customer
Mothercare
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Nature calms, relaxes, slows us down
Insight
Relaxed customers are more likely to take their time in your store environment, so if nature can reduce anxiety, then its inclusion in a retail environment is persuasively strong.
The design concept of “Global Presence” was featured through natural materials juxtaposed with technology bringing the brand image to a higher level. The global design concept was captured through the clever use of natural materials e.g by wood veneers representing different continents.
SEAT have adopted this inclusion of nature in their retail environments by installing trees, encouraging people to pause and take a seat beneath their alluring presence.
Anthropologie has leveraged nature within its design for years. Significant planting at VM and product level, through to multi-storey living walls, which span all of it’s flagship store floors. These living additions help create a relaxed and slower pace within the space.
Body Shop HeadquartersSeatAnthropologie
Nerve activity which occurs when we feel relaxed increases by 56% in natural surroundings, whilst stressed feelings decrease by 19.4%. (Park, 2010) Natural patterns are most likely to hold our attention and induce a relaxed response. (Hagerhall, 2008).
The Body Shop
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Brands are shifting from using their store space to present new things to buy, to inspiring in-store sociable activities.
The shift from hard sell to a fluid conversation in retail environments reflects a wider marketing move from broadcasting monologue advertising messaging to storytelling and starting conversations with consumers.
This willingness to be transparent and open to consumer collaboration has been born out of the age of social media and the accompanying power shift to vocal consumers with a loud social media reach.
Enhance sociable scene setting
Insight
VANS Samsung brand centrePro-DirectSíminn
Samsung launched a state-of-the-art flagship “store’ that will not stock products and will instead serve as a “first-of-its-kind cutural destination, digital playground and marketing centre of excellence”.
House of VANS creates a retail/social/brand space which creates talk-ability across the rest of the wider estate and online.
We worked with this clicks-to-bricks retailer to devise a small but actively social store in Carnaby Street London, which uses events to drive social engagement such as cup appearances, celebrity signings and competitions.
Icelandic telecoms brand Síminn presents gadgets in a homely Scandinavian lounge and café, a relaxed atmosphere that invites customers to pause. This also provides a context relevant cosy space for tech-related edutainment such as talks.
House of Vans
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When brands get it right at retail, shops are transformed into test venues, product playgrounds and experiential brand hubs. Mixed-purpose retail spaces that offer more than just a product location are increasingly broadening the store’s remit as a hive of activity and cultural relevance.
Enable exploration within your layout
Insight
Urban Outfitters Harvey NicholsSonos
But beware, messaging-heavy, sensory clutter confuses customers, who then deselect or ignore, as their mind-set becomes “fight-or-flight”.
The Birmingham department store champions “controlled disruption – a free-flow layout that gives the freedom to move in any direction, always finding something interesting at the end of that journey”.
US speaker brand Sonos’s NY flagship features seven private soundproofed hubs inside which guests can explore music, and the brand’s catalogue.
Created a three-storey ‘lifestyle centre’ concept store in New York where you could spend all day. Lifestyle amenities include a hairdresser, bookshop, and record store.
Vans
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Finding meaningful ways to interact with customers, via digital or analogue means, will build loyalty to the brand and encourage advocacy.
Using edutainment to differentiate your retail environment from an etail equivalent will create talk-ability and community around your brand.
Maximising the customer’s emotional journey at every touch-point will lead to a happier CX.
Think of ways to encourage your ‘click and collect’ customers to dwell. CEO Terry Lundgren at Macy’s gave an interesting insight on these customers; “We love this kind of sale, because [the customer has] already made her decision, she knows where to go in the store, and when she gets there, she almost always buys something else — spending about 125% of her intended order, and she doesn’t require a delivery fee.”
A relaxed retail experience can be the most powerful and effective way to positively change the way that people feel about your brand and your product.
Engaging consumers within a relaxed brand environment will
encourage them to be mindful of their experience, stay longer and
be open to upsell.
Key take-aways
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