TOTAL LICENSING
Going into 2022, Gary Pope, co-founder and CEO, Kids Industries, outlines what retailers and brands need to consider when creating a retail experience in order to create a purchase...
“It doesn’t matter how good your thinking is, if you don’t execute with magnificence, it’s all a waste of time.” 42
The Experience Design Framework
In space of just one generation, that is the last 15 years, online retail sales as a percentage of total retail sales have grown from 2.8% (Nov 2006 ONS) to 26.3% (Oct 2021 ONS), peaking at 37.6% in January when the UK went back into lockdown and non-essential stores were shuttered once again. This rise is phenomenal and, powered by Covid, which drove a huge migration to online shopping, it shows little sign of declining. With the likes of Debenhams,Top Shop, Gap and the entire Intu shopping centre portfolio now gone from our High Streets, headlines predictably continue to forecast the death of ‘bricks and mortar’. After all, if customers can buy practically anything they want from Amazon, probably for less than if they hopped on a bus and headed into town, without the hassle of struggling home with armfuls of bags, the cost of the bus fare or the battle against the winter wind and rain, why would they go instore again? And therein lies the $64 million question. Why indeed would they? The answer is – and can only be – to get something they can’t get on the Internet, which may be a limited edition, a special discount, customer service or – more likely – an experience. A physi-
cal, non-Metaverse, IRL, warm blooded, emotional, haptic experience. The experience economy During my presentation to retailers at BLE last month, I quoted Joseph Pine (author of The Experience Economy) who said, “In the new experience economy, companies must realise that they make memories, not goods.” Where the service economy is all about convenience and time saved, the experience economy is about the val-
ue we place on how consumer spend their time and crucially the amount they are willing to pay for it. People continue to crave the experience they can’t replicate at home and experiences can’t be delivered by Amazon.Yet. An experience has the power to make memories, memories that drive recall, and recall drives purchase (up to 30% higher value in some cases). And it’s no surprise that positive memories also power brand affinity, which creates
