Next Store: A Brand-New Tool Kit

Just five short years ago, store designers had it easy when it came to technology as a part of their design tool kit. The IT department would specify the size of the point-of-sale terminals, perhaps a big blocky kiosk unit replacing a well-designed endcap, or maybe marketing would add a clunky TV over an aisle to show paid ads from brands carried in the store. Simple concepts that didn’t challenge the basic premises of traffic flow, visual merchandising, layout and design.

But fast-forward to 2011, where shoppers armed with smartphones roam store aisles checking prices and searching Facebook for shopping advice from friends; where iPads have (literally) put the always-on power of e-commerce into the hands of shoppers in the stores; and where multiple HD televisions throughout the home have become the norm rather than the centerpiece of an expensive “media room.” The reality is that consumers – especially shoppers – have rapidly adopted new technologies in their daily lives.

Retail stores, on the other hand, have lingered back in the “stone age” of the 1990s. Consider that p-o-s systems and kiosks still dominate the technology footprint of stores, and shoppers looking for product information are more apt to Google it on their mobile phones than find a sales associate to ask. Despite a huge hype in the mid-2000s around the “store of the future,” most of the innovation has been on the back end.

Technology prices have come dramatically down over the years, shoppers are clamoring for new experiences and retail management teams strive to differentiate from the competition by any and all means. So why has it been so hard for next-generation shopping technology to get into the stores?

Over the years, retail has adopted a strategy of embracing “multichannel retail,” separating the shopping experience into channels and assigning organizational responsibility over each channel. This worked well for the past decade, as retailers accepted a certain loss of control over the shopping experience on the Web (where competitors and information about prices and products were only a click away) while retaining control of the shopping experience inside their stores.

Unfortunately, shoppers didn’t stay in the neat little channel lines retailers laid down for them. The cracks in the dam started subtly: A shopper walks into a Best Buy store carrying a printout from bestbuy.com, asking why the price is different on the web site than the signage in the store. Grocery cashiers are handed coupons printed off the Internet that seem too good to be true, yet ring up correctly. Then suddenly, that same shopper is waving a cell phone, demanding price matching for a competitor that the retailer didn’t even know existed. The dam has burst and technology is now racing into stores like a floodwater. But it’s being controlled by the shopper.
It’s this phenomenon – technology change driven by the shopper, not by the IT department – that presents both the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity to store designers.

The Challenge
The biggest problem retailers face today is organizational apathy. The boundary lines around responsibility for the shopper have been drawn too strongly. IT sees its role to support, not to innovate; e-commerce/multichannel departments take care of online shopping, but end their vision with store finders and product locators; marketing manages Facebook pages and Twitter streams, but doesn’t touch the shopper in the store; and store designers pick up the shopper at the store entrance.

Few retailers have anyone who thinks about the end-to-end shopping experience from the customer’s point of view – other than perhaps the ceo.

This begs the question: Which discipline will take the lead in crafting the next-generation shopping experience using new technologies? For store designers, this sea-change in technology opens up a whole world of opportunity to redefine their role in the retail enterprise. Retail executives must master not only the science of the technology (the bits and bytes), but, more importantly, the art of understanding how these technologies are used by shoppers to create a more compelling and effective shopping experience. Out of all the possible leaders within the retail enterprise, only store design has the blending of art and science necessary to embrace these new technologies.

The recent NRF Big Show expo in New York illustrated this perfectly: The show floor was chock full of innovative technology, but without a guide, store designers were forced to wander through a bewildering array of booths filled with buzzwords rather than leveragable solutions.

The Path Forward
Over the course of the next year, we will use this column to explore many of the technologies creating the biggest impact on the next-generation shopping experience, not from the IT-centric point of view, but rather how they become tools for the store designer to create artful experiences. For many of these, a deep technical understanding is far less important than a conceptual understanding of how shoppers actually use them.

Armed with this knowledge, designers need to shift their thinking around their role from “store design” to “experience design,” encompassing all the various touchpoints with a shopper: at home, on-the-go and in the store. By transforming the discipline into a single perspective on the shopper as she moves through the shopping process, today’s store designers will become tomorrow’s creators of the unified shopping experience.

Where to Begin
Rather than diving into the specifics of smartphone market share or application development strategy, store designers need to start by grounding themselves in the three key areas of shopper-centric technology.

1) Mobile Retailing. Shoppers are armed with smartphones that offer high-definition touchscreen interaction, location-awareness, camera interfaces and an “always on” Internet connection. Couple this with the easy download of apps, making it simple for anyone to add new programs to their phone, and shoppers have a powerful tool in their hands to check prices, read reviews, locate products, manage lists and just about any other shopping feature imaginable.
Retailers need to look at how the mobile device fits into the store experience, and store designers need to seize the opportunity to begin incorporating smartphones into the ways they see shoppers interacting in stores.

2) Social Retailing. Facebook has been a near-unstoppable force, skyrocketing to over a half-billion users around the world in less than five years. It’s making a huge impact on the world of e-commerce, but it’s poised to impact retailing even more directly: 200 million Facebook users access the service on their phones, and those who do so spend about twice as much time as other users on Facebook. Whether it’s posting a review of a product, “checking in” at stores and restaurants or asking friends in real-time for information and recommendations on products and services, shoppers are increasingly blurring the lines and using Facebook in stores.

3) New In-Store Technologies. Today, radical new technologies make the in-store experience even more immersive. From HD projectors that can light up entire buildings to interfaces that actually read what a shopper is doing and respond without a mouse or touchscreen, the possibilities for shoppers to engage with immersive touchpoints in the store have grown exponentially over the past five years.

By approaching these new technology paradigms with a new set of eyes and looking to pull them into the disciple of store design along art, architecture and materials science, store designers can create powerful new experiences that delight shoppers. This will make experience design more profitable for the retail enterprise and strategically more relevant and important than ever before.

Jim Crawford is executive director of the Global Retail Executive Council (grec), an international association, and a principal at Taberna Retail, a global retail shopping experience consulting company. He will share his knowledge on developing in-store technologies and trends in a bi-monthly column for VMSD. You can reach him at http://about.me/jimcrawford.