Commentary: The Retail Duel

The stakes are high as brick-and-mortar retailers battle their online counterparts for shoppers dollars. As people get busier, they are looking for quick and simple transactions, and theyre favoring online retailers. Amazons new mobile app even allows shoppers to use their smartphone cameras to photograph items they see at brick-and-mortar stores and add them to their Amazon shopping carts.

So how does a brick-and-mortar retailer stay competitive and relevant? Some retailers believe their advantage lies in immediacy getting an item exactly when you want it. But thats not always enough. Here are some tangible ways in which brick-and-mortar stores can provide a shopper experience that online retailers cannot.

Sensory Experience
Consumers have five senses that a physical store can and should engage to establish a more relevant and satisfying shopping experience. Since most consumer product companies crave better connections with shoppers, physical stores have a unique opportunity to facilitate that reciprocity.

Community
Data suggest that the more consumers are connected digitally, the more they feel disconnected from their environment. While the ubiquity of technology serves a welcome and useful purpose in consumers lives, people still want a balance between their digital and analog lives. A significant driver of this phenomenon is the need for a sense of place and connection with ones community. Even when retailers dont have a local store presence, they can still create a community. HTC, a global leader in mobile innovation, brought pop-up showrooms to major malls across North America to introduce its products to a broader consumer audience.

Proximity
The brick-and-mortar store can deliver the delight of discovering something new and buying it on a whim. Consumer product companies have a great opportunity to partner with retailers to magnify this advantage through merchandising and the in-aisle experience. REI recently capitalized on this approach by reimagining its flagship stores exit procedure. Instead of one long line leading to 10 cash registers, which created a bottleneck and long wait times, REI placed six cash registers each on two large islands. That reduced square footage dedicated to transaction space by a third while allowing those in line to view merchandize while they wait, boosting impulse sales by 149 percent.

Service
Retailers must engage their customers in ways that are personal and make a visit to the store both productive and enjoyable.
Nordstrom, which has always set the bar high in generating customer satisfaction, recently introduced a beauty department innovation to offer customers new, individualized experiences like a beauty concierge, where customers can ask questions without feeling pressured to buy from a specific brand; a trending now station, which displays the latest trends; and a play bar, a hands-on table that invites customers to try out products. All evolved from

Nordstroms Customer Experience Center, a prototype space where salespeople, vendors and customers come together to share thoughts on concepts before theyre introduced in stores.

Brand Story
Its important for a retailer to have a brand story to differentiate itself. But that story must also be the foundation that shapes every interaction with the customer, from a retailers look and feel to messages that are shared. Done effectively, the brand story can generate customer loyalty, which in turn creates brand evangelists. When CVS Pharmacy shifted from a retail outlet to an extension of the health care system, the CVS brand story became about affordable and convenient neighborhood health care.

While online retailers continue to challenge brick-and-mortar stores for dominance, there is still plenty of opportunity for the latter to engage shoppers on a deeper level. Consider why shoppers are in your store, and then focus on engaging them on their terms rather than seeing them simply as another transaction. This may be the key to reinventing the brick-and-mortar shopping experience.

ANDY SHAPIRO is strategy director at Hornall Anderson, a Seattle-based global branding and design firm.