INDUSTRY EXPERT
The critical relation between retail store design and brand innovation Yujia Huang Lecturer in Design Enterprise at University of Dundee Design is increasingly gaining more attention within the organisation and that it is becoming more strategic in its role as a mechanism to envision new futures for the company. Business leaders and key decision-makers drawn from traditional non-design backgrounds are exploring the numerous opportunities and challenges of this unlikely relationship with design. Brown (2008) argues that design is “...a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and what business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunities”. Retail store design plays a significant role which helps retailers refreshing the stereotype on the types of retail business and help brands to relocate their products and/or services to match with targeted customer groups. Before planning the details of visual elements and key arrangements in the store, designing the concept of a store to elaborate the brand’s core value is critical. To explain, Kioskafe is the second café that the British lifestyle magazine Monocle launched in 2015. The brand aimed to explore the new business model for news retailing and to see how newsagents can be integrated into people commuting life. It is designed to operate a news supplier as a café. Worldwide magazines and print-ondemand services make the brand distinctive from ordinary newsagents. It has clearly defined target consumers who are in their travelling, products like personal hygiene products and ta restroom for them to refresh and rest offers brand uniqueness. The well-designed store concept and identity and selected products and services closely related to their target consumers’ needs will allow brand adoption in any transport links worldwide.
