Six Lessons From Retail Shopping malls may have been introduced as a way to bring stores together, according to a 2012 trend report by New York City–based experiential marketing company Creative Realities, but what put them on the map was their ability to bring people together. If you think that sounds a lot like a trade show, Creative Realities CEO Paul Price agrees. Many of the suggestions that the firm aims at retailers are equally applicable to trade-show organizers:

Work with your turf Buying online has advantages, but don’t forget that physical interactions ignite emotions. Grant attendees full access to your products and gain their brand allegiance.

Controlled Experience At the National Retail Federation show, exhibitors experimented with creating multisensory ‘experience pads.’

A century ago, the show was “all about hangers and dis-

plays,” Newman said. Beginning in the 1980s, technology began to dominate the show, and now makes up 95 percent of exhibitor content. And as the industry has been transformed, so has Retail’s BIG Show. “The experience that we give our attendees, as well as what attendees experience at booths, has changed significantly over the last 10 years,” Newman said. “I think exhibitors are trying to be more experiential about how they show [products]. So, it really does add a lot more excite- ment on the expo floor.” In years past, NRF built what it called “The Store of the

Future” on its exhibition floor, where the next generation of technology was unveiled to dazzled attendees. But technology is now so ubiquitous, Newman said, that “most of the larger exhibitors are creating that ‘Store of the Future’ experience within their own spaces.” Today, Retail’s BIG Show offers a Customer Experience

and Mobile Pavilion, offering attendees demonstrations of multisensory environments. Davis-Taylor, who formerly was a vice president at the New York City–based experiential branding and marketing firm Creative Realities Inc., helped design one of the pavilions, working with Creative Realities’ then-president, Robin Reardon, a former Disney Imagineer.

“We actually created a bunch of little ‘experience pads,’” Davis- Taylor said. Large digital screens bring attendees toward a series of dome-like structures, where they can choose a path, depending on their interests. The domes are enclosed so that lighting, sound, and other environmental features — includ- ing scent — can be controlled. “People were crazy for it,” said

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Physical meets virtual Remember that attendees often dwell within multiple contexts at once. Fuse your online, mobile, and trade-show experience to create a symbiotic system — virtual should infiltrate physical, and vice versa.

People are talking Tap into the actual behaviors occurring on digital channels like Facebook. Complement your physical space with a digital presence that connects your brand evangelists with potential customers.

Someone to love Don’t forget the power of human touch — use your staff to choreograph the dance between digital and traditional. Your staff is your silver bullet — arm them with digital tools like tablets.

Draw them a map Bid farewell to static directories. Use digital to direct attendees to the products and services they want.

Ditch the still life Gorgeous graphic displays may attract eyes, but dynamic, digitally enhanced ones win hearts. Leverage new technologies to replace static displays with dynamic ones that tell evolving stories.

SOURCE: “Reimagining the Shopping Mall,” Creative Realities Inc., cri.com