Article

GlobalShop: Reinventing retail design in a multichannel world

Retail's future will be "flexible, personal and intensely linked," and digital signage can help make it happen.

March 29, 2011 by Kim Williams — Reporter, NetWorld Alliance

In a recent session at GlobalShop: The Retail Solutions Event in Las Vegas, the CEO of a retail branding firm predicted the future of retail will be "smaller, flexible, personal and intensely linked."

"One thing we know about retail shoppers is they are 'always on' and their expectations are always different," Interbrand Design Forum CEO Scott Jeffrey said during the session. "Today's customer doesn't perceive all these channels the way they used to and the brands that have a full complement of different types of touchpoints are certainly going to be the ones, in the future, we'll always talk about."

There isn't a single way of doing things anymore, he said, and retailers must understand that the customer's full brand experience matters more now than ever before. From the consumer's perspective, the lines between brick-and-mortar and online shopping of a particular brand are blurred, and these aspects will continue to meld together, he said.

"Forty-two percent of all shoppers spend time researching online before they ever step foot in your store," Jeffrey said. "If you're a car dealership, that should scare you to death because most of the folks coming in know more about the cars than your sales folks do."

Jeffrey used his 15-year-old son, Nathan, as an example of the emerging smartphone consumer. With a limited monthly entertainment budget in the form of an allowance, Nathan will only purchase a $60 video game after researching it online and reading user-penned product reviews, Jeffrey said.

"I think this is another aspect of the future of retail," he said. "Wouldn't it be terrific if the shelves could tell the story of what other people thought about the product that's on them?"

And that's just one way digital signage could come into play.

Dominick Ponti, senior vice president of design, construction and facilities for Lord & Taylor, discussed his theory that the future of retail design will integrate technology into the brick-and-mortar stores seamlessly and elegantly.

Lord & Taylor recently added video monitors throughout its Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York City as part of a larger redesign effort. The monitors display content from vendors, such as Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana, to increase shopper touchpoints, Ponti said.

"We rent them out monthly or weekly, and they have more than doubled their net worth in less than six months," he said.

Additionally, Ponti said Lord & Taylor has created seating and fitting rooms in its Fifth Avenue store to resemble loft style apartments, also equipped with video monitors that feature sports and lifestyle content, to deliver a more personal, intimate shopping experience.

John Puterbaugh, founder and CEO of Nellymoser Inc., a company that specializes in mobile computing, talked about engaging customers through scannable 2D barcodes, within stores and print media.

After scanning the QR code, using a mobile device's camera, customers can instantly receive a variety of information, such as coupons, video, product information and more.

"We recently did a study, and 60 percent of the top 100 magazines have these codes in them," said Puterbaugh. "And the response rate from users is higher in the women's magazines than in the tech magazines."

(There also have been numerous recent digital signage deployments making use of QR codes to engage consumers, including the display of a QR code on the huge video scoreboard in Dallas Cowboys Stadium during this year's Super Bowl.)

When users scan the codes and opt-in, retailers receive information about shopper demographics, so the media used to display them becomes not only interactive but also measurable, according to Puterbaugh. He cited Whole Foods Market, Best Buy, Target, JC Penney, Jones New York and White House Black Market as some of the retailers currently using QR codes.

"Integrated marketing is happening now through mobile phones," he said.