VIEWPOINT Figure 8-1 Within, Without, Withal
Source: CivicArts / Eric R Kuhne & Associates, 2012
soul of consumers to understand what drives them, beyond simple income and age characteristics. Armed with this information, the astute retailer/center owner will “provide the client everything they never knew they always wanted."
Design to Raise Retail Consciousness Renowned retail designer Douglas Cooper aimed to re-
imagine the department store through the seductive quality of an English garden—how smells, color, texture, tastes and sounds constantly conjure up the promise of sensory rewards farther along. The Cooper analogy is a powerful image and goal for retail design and can be extended to the shopping center or city center as a whole. In this marketplace design, aisles become streets; display cases, storefronts; departments, stores; and floors, city blocks. With the same fit-out wizardry that drives store interiors, so, too, marketplaces need to be re-imagined, with sensual experience at the heart of their design and planning. This re-imagined marketplace is grounded in the
traditional department-store concept that has existed for several hundred years. The essence of the department- store model is that it provides one of the best examples of building synergy between departments, guiding the sense- heightened consumer through a landscape of products. It is that concept that may best serve as a guide for designing and merchandising a marketplace in a city center. The objective is simply to wake up retail consciousness, and the city awakens, too.
INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF SHOPPING CENTERS 40 2
Still Life vs. Wild Life To wake up that retail consciousness, focus on
consumer lifestyles. Therefore, values, images, virtues and ethos really form the basis of and inspire the marketplace. Transforming a personal experience into a communal one is what changes the physicality of shopping from a store to a marketplace, which also serves a bigger function as a meeting place. Static images on a flat screen—the virtual experience—will never trump the vitality of a well-designed marketplace experience. What makes a marketplace a transformational
experience for the consumer? The marketplace must support, host, enhance and excite the consumer. Retail also must include events, experiences and encounters that serve as bookends of a shopping experience. What do people do before and after they come into a shop? Dine, meet, window-shop, explore, discover, entertain, contemplate, debate, escape, enchant, empower, which collectively are the best parts of civic life that can only be experienced in real time and space, and retail plays the best host. Although most people only enjoy “resort” service on
their holidays, few receive such attention at home or work. What retail has always been able to do, at its best, is to treat everyone special. And, in doing so, retail celebrates the heroic routine of everyday life in a way that governments, workplaces and even family life seldom does. This ability to honor the individual while shopping is the best of what the industry can accomplish. When it treats everyone as a guest instead of a consumer, the dynamics of engagement change and the consumer becomes a valued partner.
RETAIL PROPERTY INSIGHTS VOL. 20, NO. 1, 2013
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