Retailers Use Digital Blueprints to Reinvent the Physical Store Experience

Not long ago — call it two years — eCommerce and digital were being used primarily to inform consumers’ in-store journeys, but that has flipped. Now, digital is in the driver’s seat, leaving brick-and-mortar operators to learn how to complement shopping excursions that begin online.

At the core, it’s a design challenge for physical retailers that have been jumping from one foot to the other throughout the pandemic, coping with the latest variant while piloting new tech.

Molly Murphy, managing director and principal at design, architecture and planning firm Gensler, has watched events unfold and carried on discussions with clients whose physical spaces are underutilized due to lingering COVID concerns.

She told Karen Webster, “One of the common themes was that all of those who had invested in technology had a special advantage, especially when it came to eCommerce and making those connections between their physical store and their online experience.”

With the connected economy blurring and erasing the lines between physical and digital experiences, Murphy said Gensler is not just looking forward but back — to its own recent past and retail experiments that suggest directions these new trends may take.

Describing the firm’s 2019 Cadillac House Shanghai project, Murphy told Webster, “At that time, it was sort of a new thing for a store to act as a commercial and not so much [have success measured] based on how much product is sold out of that store, but more on how many media impressions the store made.”

Measuring success by media impressions rather than units sold from a retail location may sound odd, but the point wasn’t shifting units — it was making impressions.

“We are seeing a lot of our retailers now use their stores in a way [that supports] their eCommerce sales. We also see a lot of eCommerce brands coming to us to help them to find what their brick-and-mortar presence should be and how it complements their online brand.”

See also: Amazon Opening Fashion Store with Digital Fitting Rooms

Playing to Shopper Mode and Mindset

With the great digital shift commanding most of the headlines these past 21 months or so, the great physical transformation will steal some of that thunder with new ideas for 2022.

Formats are getting an overhaul, for example. “Another thing that we’re seeing is retailers have more smaller-footprint stores, and that’s because you can’t compete with the availability of product online. It’s smaller-footprint stores that are more experiential based,” Murphy said.

Gensler uses an in-house research methodology called The Experience Index to rank and rate what brings shoppers out of the house and gets them into a store.

“What we found from that survey and that index is that you really want to look at a person’s intention, a shopper’s intention, and design for that intention. For example, if I go into a store and I’m in task mode, you really have to meet [me] in that mode. But if I go into store and I’m on vacation and I want to browse, then you need to provide for that opportunity, as well.”

“It’s amazing how even that task mode point needs to be designed into the user journey,” she said, recounting a recent incident where after a great personal shopper experience in-store the busy executive was told she needed to wait on a checkout line with her items.

Plan-o-grams can’t do much about sales associates and apparent lack of mobile POS wrecking an otherwise great experience, Murphy said. But “Those are the things that we’re thinking about when we’re designing for our clients. We’re thinking about the consumer and how they walk through the store, what modes they’re thinking about, what modes they’re in and how you can meet them along every part of the journey. That’s designing for consumer experience.”

See also: Walmart Debuts Interactive Store Dubbed ‘Time Well Spent’

A Digital Blueprint With Physical Connections

With connected platforms and ecosystems bridging eCommerce and brick-and-mortar, companies have to be smart — and have smart partners — to make the most of both.

Murphy said that when retailers spend on tech to improve these connections, they’re “investing in not only hardware, software and in content that’s going to renew on a regular basis, but also the operations of all of that as well. It’s not temporary decision.”

Because technology choice has immediate and long-term implications, Gensler is using a digital-first approach to designing new retail spaces for the pandemic-as-endemic era.

She said that “because we specialize in design of physical stores, we’re often creating experience master plans for those stores with a digital blueprint overlay. That digital blueprint is really important to understanding those touchpoints in a physical space that are necessary to support the brand and make those connections to your online channels.”

To illustrate, she noted a convenience store chain Gensler is currently working with and the unique design and traffic flow considerations that are remapping what happens in-store.

“The pharmacy is now giving out vaccines, [creating] the need to be separated from other convenience store shoppers. It’s not an easy solve because there are so many departments and so many stakeholders that go into making a decision about future store layout flexibility, what the role of the pharmacy and healthcare [is] in those stores of the future, and how do they differ from location to location. How do they differ in an urban versus a suburban location?”

That joins the Cadillac House Shanghai example, and others, showing how the pandemic is triggering a design renaissance in retail that was coming on already, just more slowly.

Noting that the Cadillac project targeted a more digital-first lifestyle audience, Gensler’s work with outdoor adventure brand REI “is very broad-based, but they do have this common love for the outdoors and the environment. They want to touch and feel and try the products in store. We designed community centers in stores, working with REI, which were more about people coming together and way less digitally overt.”

“They’re using their online channels to connect people in the store,” she said.

Along with new by-appointment approaches being tried by luxury brands like Chanel and Hermes, Murphy said, “maybe that’s something that sticks, because then your operational hours are different, they’re more [tailored] to your consumer, which is I think where technology can be really helpful in the retail stores of the future.”

See also: AI Intersects with Floor Scrubbers for Robotic In-store Analytics