Enhancing your Brand Image through Customer Experience
Retail stores are an important tool for marketing a retail brand to consumers. From the outside in, consumers need to be attracted to a retail store in order to effectively experience that will resonate with consumers and entice them to purchase more goods, and become more loyal to the brand as a whole. The design of retail stores for a brand to tie to the overall brand story while also incorporating important needs.
Key Goals of Retail Design
Retail design starts with a concept that achieves key goals for the brand. While the specific goals vary for brands, there are four key design goals that should be keep in mind of retailers which include:
– Brand Story
– Attractive retail window displays
– Retail experience
– Technology integration
When combined into retail design, achievement enables retailers to successfully increase brand awareness and sales.
Building Strong Connections to Consumers = Stronger Brand Loyalty
Retail experience for consumers helps to build a stronger brand loyalty for brand. The experience of the consumers has a big impact as to whether they will continue shopping with the brand. If they have a negative experience they are highly unlikely to shop with the brand again. If they have a good and memorable experience, they are more likely to continue shopping with the brand.
A great example of this is the French luxury retailer, Hermes. This brand has a strong loyalty worldwide. A big reason for this is the experience and design of their 310 retail stores throughout the world.
Image Source: Pinterest
The key part of Hermes that makes their brand so unique is their long driven history and relation to heritage and integrity of their brand. With over 130 years of history, the brand constantly relates their focus on quality, integrity and heritage back to the core of their experience for consumers who are interested in the brand. Along with this, they continually adapt their experience based on the different markets they operate in.
Starting from their foundation, France, the experience of their retail stores primarily focus on the traditional elements of the brand. Their various retail stores in France are tailored to meet the needs and expectations of consumers who come both locally and globally to experience the traditional elements of the brand.
Image Source:Pinterest
Their flagship store in Paris, only allows entrance to those who have scheduled an appointment months in advance. Window displays, convey the traditional elements of the brand, related to their founding in the horse industry. Apart from the limited amount of products on hand, to reinforce the exclusivity and special quality of the brand, they even have an exclusive rooftop access point that allows guests a unique view of the city featuring a memento of their heritage with a figurine of a horse racer on the roof top.
In New York City, the brand brought experience to a whole new level during the holiday season by featuring an advent calendar experience for guests. Each day featured a new and different product that allowed guests to experience different elements of their brand throughout the holiday season in a memorable way.
Image Source: Pinterest
Their branch store located in the Meatpacking District of New York City, focuses on providing a unique experience to new and young shoppers of the brand by incorporating interactive displays tailored to the interests of this target demographic that features, music, skateboarding and other sports like cycling. To create a more welcoming and friendly experience for the young guests, the service employees are dressed in more casual products, such as, Hermes sneakers and casual silks. The store also adds unique services, like a free coffee and champagne bar and lower range products starting at only $100.
Image Source: Forbes
In Asia, and China in particular, the brand has found great success in creating unique experiences for their consumers. In the Chinese market, Hermes has been able to incorporate more features that enable the brand to connect with the consumer through different sales channels including WeChat. For the Chinese market, the main part of creating unique and personal experiences for consumers stems through the design of their pop-up stores, which, drives consumers to the actual retail locations and build stronger connections to their target consumers through WeChat.
Image Source: Pinterest
Their flagship store location in Shanghai is one of their three “mansion” locations in Asia. This location features multiple stories that feature the product and show rooms that allow the brand to feature certain products depending on events. These events tend to be highly exclusive and only grant access to VIP guests, thus enforcing the exclusivity and unique experience of the brand.
Image Source: Pinterest
Last year Beijing’s famous shopping district, Sanlitun, featured a pop-up store location that tied the unique and fashionable designs of their silk products to different music albums. As guests went through the pop-up store they listened to music of their favorite albums and saw covers that incorporated the latest designs of their products. Guests could also scan QR codes to learn more about the products through the company WeChat page.
Image Source: JingDaily
The Purpose of Experience
The global execution of Hermes to incorporate unique retail experiences through their design help to create a stronger reliance and loyalty of the brand. The unique experience of the various retail locations throughout the world, overall, reinforces the exclusivity of the brand while also tying to the strong brand story that is Hermes. Providing unique experiences to consumers in the retail design of stores is just one element that helps to achieve the design goals of a retail store. The strategic role of incorporating retail experience into design is to grow consumer’s overall brand loyalty and reliance to the brand’s identity. Thoughtful planning and design feeds the consumer’s desire and interest of the brand, thus enhancing the overall retail strategy that ultimately helps to increase sales.
This blog post was originally published by Melchers’ Retail Partner 5 Star Plus Retail Design, an interior design company specializing in the branded design of retail stores and restaurants. The original post can be found here.
