Rethinking Retail Experience

As people are increasingly shifting to online shopping, the relevance of physical retail spaces decreases as they become less significant for the shop visitor and less cost effective for the retailer to maintain. It is estimated that by 2013, 10% of shopping will be conducted on-line (Datamonitor, 2009). Will brands have to let go of physical touchpoints, or is there room to evolve the types of experiences offered within a department store, in order for them to retain relevance in a future world, both for the brand and the visitor?


SYNOPSIS
As people are increasingly shifting to online shopping, the relevance of physical retail spaces decreases as they become less significant for the shop visitor and less cost effective for the retailer to maintain.It is estimated that by 2013, 10% of shopping will be conducted on-line (Datamonitor, 2009).Will brands have to let go of physical touchpoints, or is there room to evolve the types of experiences offered within a department store, in order for them to retain relevance in a future world, both for the brand and the visitor?
Coming from a fascination with the individual and collective meaning surrounding things -objects and places -and our experience of them, this project started by posing questions like "why is it that a retail environment, with its richness of things, only being used for shopping?";"Is there not a potential to do more with the space and its content?"; "If museums are looking at ways to improve sales in the museum shop, what if retailers were to look at ways to improve the cultural experience surrounding things in the store?".
Retail Brands have much to gain from rethinking retail experience to achieve visitor take-out that could be richer, more memorable, more rewarding and which can enhance the respect and trust of the consumer-visitor.This project set out to explore the potential for new types of experiences in retail environmentsmultilayered experiences that do not necessarily entail financial transactions; experiences that could pay off long term as brands strengthen customer relations and loyalty.Is there potential to reconceive the retail environment as a space where people go not just for shopping?Perhaps a recreation space, a playground for fun activities or a learning environment.
The currently prevailing Retail Theatre paradigm was reviewed and evaluated with focus on the levels of agency afforded to customers.
The final outcome of this exploration was the development of a concept for a smartphone app that facilitates a new genre of multilayered experiences at Selfridges, a department store in London.The app is a product-based, characterdriven emergent narrative system, through which shop visitors would be able to follow the trail of a celebrity/style-icon or curate their own trail, which would be shared with other app users, and with friends on popular social networks.It combines traditional visitor experiences with contemporary online social network features, blended with a touch of practical features that shoppers would expect from such an app.

FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
While this project was designed for a retail environment, it can quite comfortably be ported to a museum environment, since while it facilitates character-based narratives, the events of the story are based around things suspended in space, both artefacts and places.This suggests that any interpretative environment could benefit from the concept, be it an historical building or a whole city.For example, A visitor to London curating their own trail, in the shoes of Queen Elizabeth the 1 st , Jack the Ripper or David Beckham.The unique opportunity lies in the thematic framework: usergenerated, character-driven experience, as opposed to top-down taxonomies and content.
Interesting applications of this location based service could emerge over time, as people's spaceuse characteristics are recorded and become available for analysis by site-owners.A newfound understanding of audiences can be used to determine the placement of things in an environment and its scenography to enrich and diversify visitors' mixed-reality experiences.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Narrative framework behind the Selfridges Trails app