DESIGN IS AN EXPERIENCE

What is Experience?

Experience is the knowledge that one gets when he uses a product or service and stays with the person for a lifetime. Experience can be classified into three layers:

1. In this layer is where a customer gets an experience using a product or service

2. In this layer being improving the experience even further by providing the customers with instant gratification

3. In this layer the consumers are being provided with a transformational experience such as Phygital connect, 360-degree experience, and many more. Customers always remember the experience they had so brands’ focus should be on creating the best of experience for the customer.

The retail industry has transformed with time and technology thus imposing greater challenges for the retailers in terms of customer experience, which has evolved with the changes in industry trends. Initially, retailers were more concerned about providing the consumers with the best of products and services to satisfy the customer’s needs and wants. With the advancements, product quality along with customer experience became the topmost priority.

Digital innovations in retail stores and omnichannel strategies are together elevating retail customer experiences. Today, brands are focusing on switching to a better physical landscape to offer customers a better experience so that they stay connected to the store environment. Online disruption has led to fulfilling the ever-changing needs of customers and providing easy access to products.

Retailers need to leave traditional methods and start adopting new ways of interacting with customers to build trust and conversion rate. One of the methods is to place the consumer as the focal point in the entire journey of entering a store to the purchase of the product. According to a recent study, 80% of consumers say that the experience they get while visiting a store is equally important as the product and services sold. Today brands are focusing on experiential retail in order to create a promising customer experience. experiential retail helps customers to discover the brand and own the entire customer journey.

Regardless of the growth in online shopping, customers actually want to have an in-store insight prior to purchasing an item. Developing technologies complemented with new customer expectations are impacting the retail sector deeply thus enforcing retailers to create a personalized and convenient shopping experience. Retailers need to come up with new innovative and engaging experiences on a regular basis for consumers to live and breathe retailer’s products and become brand ambassadors.

Today’s brick and mortar stores are no longer designed as endless shelves where products can be displayed whereas with the upcoming developments happening stores are now becoming more colorful, experiential with amazing interiors thus providing consumers to share their experience on social platforms. Therefore, while crafting up designs a more experiential approach is used by the designers.

With the new trends coming up the industry is expected to do much more than offering customers loyalty programs or customer retention. Thus, retailers need to open to adapt to new innovations each day and offer buyers what they want.

As per the current scenario, India is still very behind in the level of development when compared with the developed markets, but we have overcome the traditional challenges and have started adapting to the evolving technologies (AR). The pace of adaptation of new technologies will be depended on factors like spending power, infrastructure available, and many more.

“Design is thinking made visual.”

-Saul Bass