Experience isn’t just a noun or a verb, it’s a journey of many moving and inter-related parts…
Retail experience isn’t just about UX tech, but about understanding how we blend all touchpoints we have with the customer into a single, seamless conversation.
Many see experience as one thing – the in-store experience, the product experience, the UX experience and so on – but it’s really a top-line word that’s used to describe everything – and disguises everything.
We need to unpack it, and talk about the functional experience, the social experience, the educational experience and the entertainment experience, and if you make these work across a brand – from online to in-store, you create the escapist experience, which is the underlying framework or impact of what we need to deliver to the customer, when all the other parts are in place.
Crucially, we need to define the experience first, and the technology second. Fun, in other words, precedes function. Technology is merely a tool and is only beneficial when it serves to improve moments along a customer’s in-store journey. Design the best journey first and then decide how technology can improve it.
We then need to create unique phygital retail experiences that are not repeatable or generic. Yes, they need to be adaptable and interactive, but stores now have the potential to be infinitely dynamic, with each store visit being unique to a time and place.
Listen to the full conversation between Quinine’s Founder, Ian Johnston and Martin Raymond, Co-founder and host of The Future Laboratory’s Back to the F**kture podcast here or on Audioboom, Spotify, and Apple.
