retail image and consumer perception

1. Store Image, Design and
Consumer Perception

2. Today’s session
• Today we will examine:
– The antecedent consumer factors within the store
environment
– The important of the purchase environment in today’s
retail environment
– Some important basic store design principles
• Invariant right
• Adjacencies
• De-compression zones
– Retail image and the retail store as a theatre of
consumption

3. David Meade video
• How did David read the lady’s mind?
• What does this tell us about store layouts?
• What does this tell us about store
atmospherics?
• What ways can we manipulate customers?

4. Consumer behaviour & the Shopping
Enviornment
Antecedent states
- Situational factors
- Self Image
- Time
Purchase Environment
- The shopping
experience
- Point of purchase stimuli
- Sales interactions
Post-purchase
processes
- Consumer
satisfaction
- Product disposal
- Alternative
markets

5. Antecedent States – Situational factors
• Situational factors
– Mood and physiological state influence purchase
decision
– Consumer form goals based upon mood
– What is retail therapy?
• Think of all the mitigating factors involving mood that
influence your decisions to purchase -
Chocolate???
– Situation factors; usage contexts; time pressure;
shopping orientation

6. Antecedent States- Situational factors
Situational factors
• Not just demographic characteristics of consumers
• Mood can mitigate on what we want to do, what we
want to buy and what products / stimulants attract us
Situational self-image: ‘Who am I right now’
• Think about being out on a first date
– Spending lavishly on champagne to impress a date / friend
• Would you behave differently if:
– You were meeting your boyfriend / girlfriend’s parents for
the first time in a restaurant?

7. Antecedent States - Self Image
Concept & Shopping
• Carl Rodgers (1951) – famous author
• The beliefs a person holds about his her own attributes
and how she or he evaluates these qualities.
• Situational self image:
– Influence store perceptions as a number of attributes a person
holds about themselves can be conveyed in a store.
– Music played
– Staff (look and personality)
– Merchandise - Products
– Merchandising / store design / layout – Lifestyle stores
• E.g. Next and Female yuppies

8. Antecedent States – Time & Shopping
• Time is a further temporary situational factor
– One of the consumer’s most precious and limiting
resources.
– Time = money
– Perceptions of time poverty – convenience,
innovations
– Susceptibility of consumers to innovations which
will save them time
• Scenario advertising approach – show consumers how
the product will help them overcome scarcity of time.

9. Purchase Environment – Store
Design and Retailer Image
Basic principles of
• Store Design
• Retail Image

10. Why has the store environment become
so important?
• Impact of Retailer  private label branding
– Leads to commodity markets due to reduced differentiation between
manufacturer brands
– Remember commodity (undifferentiated) markets more price sensitive than
branded markets.
– Own label markets traditionally characterised by
• Limited differentiation (commodity)
• Low investment in innovation and technology
• Grey markets
• Legal distribution channels which undercut manufacturers
(growth online and discount retail formats)
• Retailers and manufacturers clash based on retailers selling
below RRP
• E.g. online retailers often sell below recommended retail price
• Two way movement retailers towards creation of branded environments
and manufactures to retail

11. Importance of Purchase Environment -
In store decision making
• Traditionally ignored by manufacturer brands
– Recognition of importance of in-store context
• e.g. Research has shown that women are strongly influenced
by in-store information clues.
– Investment in point of sale
– Manufacturer purchase of shelf space
• Think: How many people plan what they will
drink before they enter the bar?
• Research by Diageo suggests that consumers (60%) did not
pre-plan their drinks order before they got to the bar.

12. Importance of the Purchase
Environment
Social and physical surroundings:
• Think about your consumer behaviour at an empty night club
• Are you likely to drink more or less in a busy bar / night club?
• Are you likely to purchase more in a night club playing loud music?
• How does merchandising impact your consumer behavior?
• How do retailers use the sense to influence consumer behaviour?
• Crowding impacts arousal:
– When is crowding a good thing?
– When is it a bad thing?
– Perceptions of space
– Atmospherics

13. In store decision making
• Cues within the retail store can encourage
impulse purchasing
– Vast amount of research (remember for next year)
• Sudden urge to consume
• Usually low cost items e.g. sweets and chewing gum
• Can be high ticket priced items
• Sales staff and store information cues play a role

14. In store decision making
• Point of purchase stimuli
– Convey elements of the product other
promotional tools can’t
– Experience:
• E.g. Perfume samplers provide consumers with
opportunity to experience the product.
• Computer gaming industry – demos
• Retail technology - touch screen interaction
• Fashion touch, feel fabric, try on clothes

15. In store decision making
• Sales people
– Exchange theory
• Consumers engage with sales people in order to gain
value
– Information
– Expertise
– Knowledge
– Money off
– Persuasion
• Compliments
• Flirting
• The power relationship within exchange theory – e.g. if
sales person establishes himself / herself as the expert

16. Purchase Environment – Store Design
• Customer Flows
– How do customers move around a store
• Generic Movements.
• Fast tracking.
• Most shoppers manipulated.
– Invariant right rule
• Use by retailers to position merchandise in the store
• Think about this the next time you walk into a supermarket
– What products are placed? Why these particular products?
– Ergonomics - how do customers use the physical
attributes of a store

17. Purchase Environment – Store Design
• Space & Merchandising Management (Varley,
2004)
– Where to place merchandise
– Decompression zones
• The importance of changing the consumer’s mindset from
walking to shopping
• What do you think this means?
– Adjacencies – what products should be placed
together or apart
• Supermarket design
• Lifestyle zones

18. Purchase Environment – Store Design
& Atmospherics
Atmospherics
• Kotler (1973) – manipulation of the 5 senses
(???) to influence in store consumer behavior.
– Touch, sound, taste, smell, sight, movement
• E.g. Raising temperature can make a store feel more
crowded, welcoming in winter
• E.g. Taste, sight, smells commonly used to influence
food sales e.g. engender memory and associations of
food / fresh food in consumers

19. Purchase Environment – Store Design
& Atmospherics
• Human perceptions of Space not just based on the
visual.
• Supplemented by other senses
• E.g. Lifestyle zones in retail stores influence the
kinesthetic space due to perceptions of how we live
and move within a space – imagery of how we might
move / live in a lifestyle store
Space factor Sense
Auditory Sense of sound
Olfactory Sense of smell
Gustatory Sense of taste
Kinesthetic Sense of bodily movement

20. Purchase Environment – Store Design
& Atmospherics
• Music a further important area of academic
research:
– In what stores would you most likely hear the
following genres:
• Classical - e.g. Mozart
• Generic pop - Lady Gaga
• Funky house
• Heavy metal
• Trance
• Hip-hop

21. Purchase Environment – Store Design
& Atmospherics
Layout

22. Retail Image
• Martineau (1958) “The Personality of The Retail
Store”
– Stores have ‘personalities’
– Store characteristics and store image helps us to
predict what consumers prefer and how they will
behave
– But recent research has uncovered the importance of
other intangible elements as important. E.g.:
• Service characteristics
• And Staff

23. Retail Image
• Consumers are not passive recipients of store
based messages
• Shopping locations try to appeal to our needs and
wants through design
• What aspects do you remember from retail
locations last semester?
• Blurring of lines between shopping and
interactive / experiential marketing
– Shopping as theatre (Sherry et al., 1998)
– Brand experiences (Schmidt, 1999)

24. Model of Retail Image
• Ailawadi and Keller (2004)
Retail
Image
Cross category
assortment
Within category
assortment
Brands offered
(Private labels
and manufacturer
labels)
Atmospherics
Services
Promotion
Prices
Access / Location
Store fascia and
physical displays

25. Retail Image - Retail Theming
• Brand-scapes
– Celebrate and communicate essence of brand
– Key brand associates e.g. brand heritage, values
– Mind-scape themes – shoppers travel on a journey throughout
the store where they enter as novices and emerge totally
immersed in the brand
– Kozinet et als’ (2001;2002) studies of ESPN Zone – consumer
‘play’
– E.g. Hollenbeck’s (2008) study of Coca-Cola brand museum
• Lifestyle retailing themes
– Helman and De Chernatony (1999) – Lifestyle Retail Branding
– e.gs Hollister, Jack Wills, Department stores (e.g. Mary Portas
House of Fraser)

26. Retail Image – Shopping as theater
• Kozinets et al (2001) – Shopping as a stage where
consumers ‘act out’ consumer experiences:
– Hard rock café – Place of pilgrimage
– Apple stores – Brand community gathering place
– Games workshop – Brand community gathering place
– Department stores – Historically act of displaying
social class
– Retail theming - ESPN Zone (Kozinets et al., 2001;
2002)

27. Retail as theatre
• Design of space
• Remember use of senses in design of space
• Being space- retailers who design their space like
the consumer’s home, where they can feel
comfortable, hang out, read,
– E.g. Starbucks – concept of becoming the “third
space” in consumer’s lives (aside from workplace and
home)
– Not just limited to large companies- e.g. Hope and
Harlequin

28. Retail as theatre – Pop up retail
• Pop up stores:
– Makeshift installations which perform a variety of
roles
– Show off the brand in a location
– Based on concept of occasional time – Christmas and
Halloween
– Creation of an event / buzz around a brand – PR role
– E.gs American apparel – 45 pop up store in New York;
daily spontaneous events (karaoke; dreidel spinning)

29. The future
– Play
– Interactivity
– Education
– Acting
– Display
– Branding
• See article on future of the High Street.

30. Reading
Ailawadi, K.L. & Keller, K.L. 2004, "Understanding retail
branding: conceptual insights and research priorities",
Journal of Retailing, vol. 80, no. 4, pp. 331-342.
Martineau, P. 1958, "The Personality of The Retail Store",
Harvard Business Review, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 47-55.
Varley, R. (2004) “Retail Product Management: Buying
and merchandising”, Routledge: London.
– Chapters 9 and 10 especially

31. Branding presentation groups
Group tutorials