Promotion Decision
Retailers use any or all of the promotion tools—advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing—to reach consumers. They advertise in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and on the Internet. Advertising may be supported by newspaper inserts, catalogs, and direct mail. Personal selling requires careful training of salespeople in how to greet customers, meet their needs, and handle their complaints. Sales promotions may include in-store demonstrations, displays, contests, and visiting celebrities. Public relations activities, such as press conferences and speeches, store openings, special events, newsletters, magazines, and public service activities, are always available to retailers. Most retailers have also set up Web sites, offering customers information and other features and often selling merchandise directly.
Next time you shop, stop, look, and listen. Successful retailers like Sony Style orchestrate every aspect of the shopper store experience, down to the music, lighting, and even the smells (a subtle fragrance of vanilla and mandarin orange).
Marketing 13.2
Orchestrating the Retail Experience
The next time that you step into a retail store—whether it sells consumer electronics, hardware, or high fashion—stop and carefully consider your surroundings. Think about the store's layout and displays. Listen to the background sounds. Smell the smells. Chances are good that everything in the store, from the layout and lighting to the music and even the smells, has been carefully orchestrated to help shape your shopping experience—and to open your wallet. In most cases, you're probably being affected in ways so subtle that you don't even realize what's happening to you.
It all starts at the store entrance. According to one reporter, "what's in the entrance is the spring on the trap"—it pulls you in and puts you in the mood to buy. "The entrance is important because it hints at what's inside that you must have."
At a JCPenney, a "decompression area" at the front of the store lets shoppers get acclimated and calm down from the noise in the mall or on the street. Dressed mannequins offer a taste of the season's hot trends and set up a line of sight to the shopping ahead. "We're trying to give [shoppers] ideas right as [they're] walking into the store," says J.C. Penney's vice president of store design. In other department stores, the key items that draw women—the high-volume, high-profit goods—are right up front: handbags, cosmetics, jewelry, and sometimes intimate apparel.
At a new Home Depot, the entranceway lures shoppers in with an open floor plan so they get a better "vista" of the store. Floor-to-ceiling racks of goods, long the signature of the warehouse store, are now further back. Lower-down displays of expensive goods— riding lawn mowers, upscale porch furniture, and a home design center for redecorating kitchen, bath, and flooring—are clustered so they're visible from the front door. All are ways to engage you in the store and draw you in.
Once inside a store, "how you as a shopper move in and around a store is not, really, up to you," continues the reporter.
Next time you shop, stop, look, and listen. Successful retailers like Sony Style orchestrate every aspect of the shopper store experience, down to the music, lighting, and even the smells (a subtle fragrance of vanilla and mandarin orange).
In a department store, you're tunneled from the entrance past the store's most expensive goods through a maze of aisles and into departments that are set up as stores-within-a-store. Then you find yourself on "the racetrack," an oval aisle that carries you around the entire building to get a look at everything. Mini-displays
Place Decision
Retailers often point to three critical factors in retailing success: location, location, and locationl It's very important that retailers select locations that are accessible to the target market in areas that are consistent with the retailer's positioning. For example, Apple locates its stores in high-end malls and trendy shopping districts—not low-rent strip malls on the edge of town. Small retailers may have to settle for whatever locations they can find or afford. Large retailers, however, usually employ specialists who select locations using advanced methods.
Most stores today cluster together to increase their customer pulling power and to give consumers the convenience of one-stop shopping. For example, in the United States, central business districts were the main form of retail cluster until the 1950s. Every large city and town had a central business district with department stores, specialty stores, banks, and movie theaters. When people began to move to the suburbs, however, these central business districts, with their traffic, parking, and crime problems, began to lose business. Downtown merchants opened branches in suburban shopping centers, and the decline of the central business districts continued. In recent years, many U.S. cities have joined with merchants to try to revive downtown shopping areas by building malls and providing underground parking.
called "trend stations" are parked in the middle of aisles to stop shoppers' progress and entice them to look and buy.
Meanwhile, everything in a well-designed store is carefully constructed to create just the right moods and actions. At a Sony Style store, for instance, it's all designed to encourage touch, from the silk wallpaper to the smooth maple wood cabinets, to the etched-glass countertops. Products are displayed like museum pieces and set up for you to touch and try. Once you touch something, Sony figures, you'll buy it. Sony Style even has mini-living rooms set up to showcase what its 40-inch flat-panel TV would look like over a fireplace. "We've had customers bring in their architect and say, 'Re-create this in my house. I want the whole setup,'" says a Sony retail executive.
A store's lighting can affect anything from your moods to the pace at which you move and shop. Bright lighting can create excitement, whereas softer lighting can create a mellow mood. Many retailers adjust lighting to regulate shoppers' "blink rates"—the slower you blink, they reason, the more likely you are to browse, pause, and eventually buy.
Sound is another important element of the retail experience. "Music has been used by retailers for decades as a way to identify their stores and affect a shopper's mood, to make you feel happy, nostalgic, or relaxed so that you linger," notes the reporter. "Think of '50s cocktail bar music in a Pottery Barn.
But retailers are becoming more sophisticated in how they use music." They now hire "audio architects" to develop music and sounds that fit their unique positioning. "What does your business sound like?" asks background music provider Muzak. "A bikini and coconut oil or an oil change and a new set of tires? Muzak can create the ultimate music experience designed specifically for your business."
Perhaps the hottest store environment frontier these days is scent—that's right, the way the store smells:
Anyone who's walked into a mall has been enticed by the smell of cinnamon buns or chocolate chip cookies. Now, most large retailers are developing "signature scents" that you smell only in their stores. Luxury shirtmaker Thomas Pink pipes the smell of clean, pressed shirts into its stores—its signature "line-dried linen" scent. The essence of lavender wafts out of L'Occitane skin-care stores. Bloomingdale's uses different essences in different departments: baby powder in the baby store; suntan lotion in the bathing suit area; lilacs in lingerie; cinnamon and pine scent during the holiday season. Last year, it pumped a sugar-cookie scent Into its Christmas shop.
At a Sony Style store, the subtle fragrance of vanilla and mandarin orange—designed exclusively for Sony—wafts down on shoppers, relaxing them and helping them believe that this is a very nice place to be. Sony decided to create its own store scent as one way to make the consumer electronics it sells less intimidating, particularly to women. At Sony's Madison Avenue store in New York, the scent is even pumped onto the street. "From research, we found that scent is closest to the brain and will evoke the most emotion, even faster than the eye," says the Sony retail executive. "Our scent helps us create an environment like no other." A scents expert agrees: "Scent is so closely aligned with your emotions, it's so primitive."
Thus, in their quest to orchestrate the optimal shopper experience, today's successful retailers leave no store environment stone unturned. The next time you visit a store, stop, look, and listen. See if you can spot the subtle and not-so-subtle things that retailers do to affect what you feel, think, and buy In their stores. "Most people know they are being influenced subliminally when they shop," says a retail consumer behavior expert. "They just may not realize how much."
Sources: Extracts, quotes, and other information are from or adapted from Mindy Fetterman and Jayne O'Donnall, "Just Browsing at the Mall? That's What You Think," USA Today, September 1, 2006, accessed at www.usatoday.com; Ylan Q. Mui, "Dollars and Scents," Washington Post, December 19, 2006, p. D01, and Denlse Power, "Something Is in the Air: Panel Says Scent Sells," WWD, March 25, 2008, p. 14.
Shopping center A shopping center is a group of retail businesses planned, developed, owned, and
A group of retail businesses planned, managed as a unit. A regional shopping center, or regional shopping mall, the largest and most developed, owned, and managed as dramatic shopping center, contains from 40 to over 200 stores, including 2 or more full-line
a umt' department stores. It is like a covered mini-downtown and attracts customers from a wide area. A community shopping center contains between 15 and 40 retail stores. It normally contains a branch of a department store or variety store, a supermarket, specialty stores, professional offices, and sometimes a bank. Most shopping centers are neighborhood shopping centers or strip malls that generally contain between 5 and 15 stores. They are close and convenient for consumers. They usually contain a supermarket, perhaps a discount store, and several service stores—dry cleaner, drugstore, video-rental store, barber or beauty shop, hardware store, local restaurant, or other stores.17
Consider the United States as an example: Combined, America's nearly 48,500 shopping centers now account for about 75 percent of U.S. retail activity (not counting cars and gasoline). The average American makes three trips to the mall a month, shopping for an average of 82 minutes per trip and spending about $90. However, many experts suggest that America is now "over-mailed." During the 1990s, mall shopping space grew at about twice the rate of population growth. As a result, almost 20 percent of America's traditional shopping centers are either dead or dying.18
Shopping centers: The current trend is toward large "power centers" on the one hand and smaller "lifestyle centers" on the other—or a hybrid version of the two called a power-lifestyle center. In all, today's centers are more about creating places to be rather than just places to buy.
Thus, despite the recent development of many new "megamalls," the current trend is toward the so-called power centers, huge unenclosed shopping centers consisting of a long strip of retail stores, including large, freestanding anchors such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Costco, Best Buy, Michaels, Office Max. Each store has its own entrance with parking directly in front for shoppers who wish to visit only one store. Power centers have increased rapidly during the past few years to challenge traditional indoor malls.
In contrast, Alifestyle centers are smaller malls with upscale stores, convenient locations, and nonre-tail activities such as dining and a movie theater. They are usually located near affluent residential neighborhoods and cater to the retail needs of consumers in their areas. "Think of lifestyle centers as part Main Street and part Fifth Avenue," comments an industry observer. In fact, the original power center and lifestyle center concepts are now morphing into hybrid lifestyle-power centers. "The idea is to combine the hominess and community of an old-time village square with the cachet of fashionable urban stores; the smell and feel of a neighborhood park with the brute convenience of a strip center." In all, today's centers are more about "creating places to be rather than just places to buy."19
Wheel-of-retailing concept
A concept that states that new types of retailers usually begin as low-margin,, low-price, low-status operations but later evolve into higher-priced, higher-service operations, eventually becoming like the conventional retailers they replaced.
Continue reading here: New Retail Forms and Shortening Retail Life Cycles
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