Offline retail: should it stay or should it go?
The future of Brand Experience
Through recent digital and physical retail projects at Truberries, we had the chance to understand from close how consumers shape their new shopping habits and standards; in the coming years, the retail physical spots will be crucial to highlight brand differentiation.
Points of brand transaction are not always and not easily brand voice substantiators.
How to design a future-oriented retail experience that promotes the voice of your brand, while staying true to emerging retail needs? It is easier to answer this question, if we take into account what shapes shoppers expectations as they jump from offline to online channels and vice versa.
In the years to come, offline retail experience will be the core big challenge.
While the online retail experience is set to continuously improve itself, the offline store experience is facing a never seen before pressure; thus, there is an emerging need that stores traced on Google map redefine themselves through a clear purposeful, traceable identity.
This will determine whether a brand’s stores will be a me-too, IoT-empowered space selling the brand’s goods or more than that, namely a real, category-dedicated, brand-focused touchpoint.
More specifically, as technology used to facilitate shopping processes becomes more impressive, hence competitive to the products it sells, there is a visible risk that it will be white-labeling the spaces in which it is hosted.
Offline retail branding experience will be more at the heart of the discussion and this is expected to happen for three reasons:
1. Lower gains, smaller chains
Offline stores tend to be an expensive part of the P&L, in which core performance metric is their volume of sales – at times that customers more and more use brick and mortar as showroom visitors, anticipating to buy their goods at a later quiet, mobile moment. This conflict in priorities between the two sides leads to the elimination of stores and quite shorter store chains, be it a Bank, a technology store chain or even a Super Market.
2. Subjects of transaction will matter more than objects of transaction
Offline-first customers, as they will more and more become collectors of improved online shopping experiences (turning into online buyers in more categories and moments), they will allocate their higher insecurity moments and their more sensitive decisions to their offline shopping visit ; hence, new commerce conditions will generate even higher deficit of humanized interaction compares to customer’s requirement: acts of care and emotionalisation of the transaction will sparkle the new service era, in which the new generation of information will come from its conversion in touchy life wisdom; subjects of transaction will matter more than objects of transaction.
3. Shopping onlife: Fusion of online with offline is a matter of physical store
Online-first customers, being even more spoilt by the facilitation of online shelves reality, they will want the sky in their (few) offline retail visits: considering excitement and speed as a given, they will be greedy for onlife interactions (being at the same time online when offline, to achieve more) and a hypercustomized shopping journey, so as to keep their comfort and self-centricism satisfied.
Online retail experience is continuously improving with AR/VR and AI, hence online users will be – by the norm- in a position to more and more be found with richer virtual experiences.
Service as a Product (SaaP) vs Service as part of the Experience (SaE)
Service productised is where new revenue streams are sought, especially in mature sectors, when product-based differentiation cannot further drive profitability. A quite different range of such products might be generated, both in physical stores and in non physical stores; each of them prioritizing on different aspects, to fit the shopping mentality.
While SaaP can acquire various expressions in online or offline retail spaces, service notion considered as part of the experience has its own native space, the offline store – at least as long as only two senses can be stimulated in the online-only world.
Brand Stores should set a clear reason why they exist in the physical space : being ambassadors of the.brand’s vision, in a way that makes sense; creating experiences that leave their trace in people’s daily life. Hosting people’s dreams and aspirations is the only way to be true home of the brand.
