How can retail brands tell stories people actually care about?

What makes pop-up retail so powerful, and how can you harness this power to connect with consumers on an emotional level, make a lasting impression, and drive brand loyalty?

In this series of insight reports, StudioXAG’s Gemma Ruse sheds light on how industry leading brands are creating retail moments that live a lot longer in the memory than on the shop floor.

As we begin to imagine life in a post-COVID world, we’ll explore how experiences that trigger emotions will be more important than ever, not only to reconnect with our community but also with our senses.

As the retail landscape evolves retail experiences will become more conversational. Engagement with a brand narrative will no longer be passive, but an active experience that the consumer takes part in. Pop-ups are spaces where culture and commerce intersect, they can be spaces that deliver powerful narratives that are about ‘feeling’ instead of ‘reading’.

Post COVID-19 consumers will seek new meaning in their retail experiences. As we enter a global recession and disposable incomes decrease, purchases will be more strongly driven by brand affiliation and authenticity. Tone of voice will become more important than ever before.

A pop up allows a brand to test new ways of communicating with their consumer, to understand how this will resonate and to measure the impact it has.

Level Shoes – Another World

StudioXAG were invited to reflect Level Shoes’ innovative brand ethos, designing a futuristic pop-up with a focus on an immersive, multi-sensory environment. Referring to the trend ‘Future Underground’ as a starting point, we took cues from cultural references such as Blade Runner to develop the concept ‘Another World’.

By interpreting the four elements of life (Earth, Water, Fire and Air) into contrasting zones within the store, the customer is taken on an unpredictable journey through each element, immersed in another world of diverse forms and materiality. Each department contains a plethora of materials including concrete, mirror, basalt, quartz, copper and neon.

Disregarding traditional super-luxe design codes, we opted for unexpected and playful elements such as air-duct tubing or coating surfaces in condensation. Even going as far as vacuum sealing the footwear so they appear cryogenically frozen, or placing shoes atop a volcanic structure torn apart by streams of molten lava. These elements would seem more at home on the set of a futuristic sci-fi movie and are rarely brought into the realm of retail.

The pop up achieved its aim of bringing a younger millennial clientele into the store, starting new conversations with a new consumer base.

Explore the project here.

The emotional and cognitive intensity of an immersive experience is powerful: the use of sensory, cognitive and emotional mechanisms can create shocks that can lead to radical and unexpected changes in behaviour. By moving from spectator to participant, the customer actively interacts with the experience becoming a part of the narrative, triggering these emotional signals and creating stronger memories of the event and driving brand loyalty.

Jo Malone – Blossom Daze

To launch their Brilliant Blossoms collection of fragrances, British perfumer Jo Malone created an interactive exhibition to take place over three days at Victoria House in London.

Each cologne had a dedicated zone within the exhibition, immersing visitors in the story of each scent. Perfumed air filled the rooms, such as the Star Magnolia space where delicate blossom notes mingled with lemon and shiso leaf. Atmospheric music and colour-wash lighting was added to complement each space, creating an immersive space which offers the opportunity to stimulate every sense.

Created to accompany the immersion rooms, a schedule of hands on workshops in partnership with the Flower Society invited customers to create unique flower arrangements inspired by the collection and train in water marbling to adorn signature Jo Malone gift boxes. Visitors engaged with the product and brand narrative through immersive experiences in order to make a lasting impression.

As customers are becoming oversaturated with visually rich, passive content, they seek extra meaning. Time has become the new currency, it is not about how much customers buy from you, but how much time they spend with you. Immerse time-hungry consumers in experiences which are sensorial, narrative-driven and interactive to capture and retain their attention.

adidas Ultraboost 19

Taking product testing to a new level, adidas made trying out sneakers engaging with an immersive and dynamic space, designed to launch the Ultraboost 19 series.

The Manhattan-based installation invited customers to take part in a series of challenges that highlighted the power of the product’s Boost technology as well as challenging the wearer, testing both the shoes flexibility and the wearers mental flexibility. Visitors first entered a maze filled with dead ends that could only be solved through ingenious spatial thinking, product testers then continued to a sea of bright yellow balls which could only be crossed by tightrope walking across a narrow beam.

Wearers gauged the flexibility of the Ultraboost’s bouncy sole using a giant seesaw, before reaching their final challenge, to jump as high as possible and catch a ‘future reading’ which sat suspended from the ceiling in clouds of yellow.

The pop-up merged the elements of the high performance sneaker with the science behind the design, with each challenge telling the story of the product benefits in a visceral way, allowing the visitors to live it and understand it intuitively.

‘Living’ a narrative not only ensures that the visitor intuitively understands the product benefits and brand storytelling, but they will also feel encouraged to share their experience and amplify the story on other channels, creating a buzz which goes much further than just the first hand experience.

The Gucci Apartment

Created to coincide with Milan Design Week 2019, Italian fashion house Gucci opened a temporary, two-story boutique in the heart of the city. The opulent, apartment style space was created to showcase their newly launched homeware collection which included furniture, dinnerware and accessories.

Gucci’s Alessandro Michele wanted to imagine an apartment which has been ‘gucci-fied’, translating the house’s distinctive codes of offbeat grandeur into a physical space through coating the walls and floors in an eclectic and clashing mix of prints and patterns. Staying true to the brand’s iconic maximalist aesthetic, lounge areas, salons and dining rooms feature a cornucopia of Gucci candles, plates, incense, tables, cushions, wallpaper and much more.

Merging the classic with the modern, the brand also launched a complimentary augmented reality app where users can explore historic palazzos across Milan, also allowing virtual renders of Gucci furniture to be visualised in the users home. As one of the most photographed events on the Milan Design Week calendar, the narrative continued on social channels with thousands of extravagant selfies.

Conscious consumers will seek new meaning with their purchases, and will vote with their wallets. In order for consumers to better understand the provenance of what they are buying, transparency of information on where a product has come from, and what impact it has, will be an even stronger driver in the new post-pandemic retail landscape.

Brands that can communicate this information effectively, bringing the story to life and educating the consumer through their physical retail environments will succeed. Moving the dialogue off digital channels or packaging, into an immersive experience will ensure the narrative cuts through.

Space10 – LOKAL

Innovative research and design lab Space10 launched a new type of farm at London Design Week in Shoreditch, designed to take a process that is usually global and make it local.

In the studio’s ‘LOKAL’ salad bar, visitors are brought into the farming process in real time and can see the life cycle of their salad, from seed to leaf. A pink-toned hydroponic farm sits in the centre of the pop-up, which has the power to grow greens three times faster than a traditional farm and with 90% less water.

A range of appetising workshops educated curious Londoners on how locally growing food within locally has dramatically less impact on the planet, also reducing waste and putting the power to grow vegetables into the hands of local communities.

Space10 also partnered with Google’s voice controlled Home device, allowing visitors to talk to the plants and find out about their nutrition levels. A conversation might go “Hey Google, let me talk to sprout”. Sprout then responds: “Hey there, welcome to our hydroponic farm. I’m Sprout, the voice of all the plants growing around you. How are you doing today?” creating a narrative dialogue between visitor, installation and product.

A story has the ability to foster meaningful emotional connections. Harvard Business Review states that “A business that optimises for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 85% in sales growth.”