This article focus on brick-and-mortar businesses and how to stay relevant in a digital world where soon, most of us grew up with 24-hour access to everything and everyone from a little screen in our pocket.

It highlights the importance of (brand) experience and what happens if we treat it as business innovation rather than just another marketing tool.

STOP FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU DON’T HAVE

You don’t have the luxury of being the only option anymore. Everything you offer, someone else, most likely, is for selling cheaper with faster delivery.

You don’t have the right to be good enough anymore. You have to excel at what you do, backed up by a Cause* and Vision.

You don’t have anything to gain by adding another obscure sale*. You only risk undermining your brand’s reputation and your offer’s worth.

You don’t have a marketing problem. You cannot buy relevance and trust; you have to earn it.

You don’t have the infrastructure, pace and scale to compete with Amazon*.

START DEVELOPING WHAT YOU DO HAVE

You have an opportunity to deliver a physical experience that goes beyond reason and rational shopping behaviour.

The experience is what makes it worth paying a little extra buying from you; why someone wants to represent (customers and employees) and talk about your brand; why other business owners and influential people want to collaborate with you.

The experience helps us connect with our customers on an emotional level; to generate lasting (brand) stories that will spread organically; to help us deliver meaningful content and conversations online.

EXPERIENCE AS A BUSINESS STRATEGY

Experience doesn’t start or end anywhere. It’s omnipresent*: your ads, social feed, storefront, packaging, unboxing, sign up, and even cancellation. Everything you do and don’t do have consequences, use that to your advantage
It requires a uniform commitment, understood and shared by all parts* of your business
It’s exceptional service with an endless curiosity for your customers and what it means to own, use, visit, wear, or subscribe to your brand
Experience goes beyond your core business offer. You need to leverage your space; look for synergies in other categories and industries; find like-minded partners, and create something together; don’t just innovate where you stand
It’s your way of conveying your passion (is a strategy if you’re brave enough). Do everything you can to empower and inspire through passion; it cannot be enforced or trained; it’s only transmittable if true

EXPERIENCE AS A SOCIAL CURRENCY

A product or service has most of all functional value, while (brand) experience has social value.

Try to look at it like “if social media is the market, experience is the currency,” we all look for opportunities and contexts to be a part of, and to share as stories. Stories that we traded for social status and cultural belonging.

This is why experience is business-critical even online, but what most companies fail to see. They treat social media like just another marketing channel that they need to fill, like a never-ending DR pamphlet.

We want you to give us experiences, and it’s worth paying a little extra.

WHO’S GOOD AT THIS?

The hard truth is that online-born brands are starting to outshine even in the physical realm. They know that the only thing you can’t offer online is a complete, human experience that speaks to all our senses.

Gentle Monster’s (eyewear) stores are all full-blown art installations; immersive fairytales; each one uniquely themed. Like their glasses, they seem designed to be collector’s items; it’s impossible not to share.

Gentle Monster knows (by heart and through customer data) that brand experience builds their reputation and provides visitors with share-worthy, high-end content that they trade in for social status.

Bumble (dating, friends, and networking app) is launching specially planned social spaces to help their members feel comfortable on their first date, connect with new friends, or impress a new potential business partner.

These are just two examples and not the cheapest. But, they might push you to look at what you have to offer a little differently and to discover new business opportunities.

We can’t stand still just because our business is tied to a physical location. Start looking for new sources of revenue streams, partnerships outside of your market, new ways you can offer your products, and serve your customers.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Can you be a Yoga Studio in the morning, a Co-working café by day, and a powerlifting gym in the evening? Or even more interesting, can you be all that simultaneously?

Why start just another wi-fi spot, I mean coffee shop, when you can open a Laboratory. To the passionate nerds, coffee is both science, taste and art.

Why can’t your hardware store be one big maker space? Turn your staff into mentors for hobbyists and teachers for us “Millennials” and “Gen Z’ers,” who are growing up not needing, but still want to learn to do things by hand because it’s still the most fulfilling experience there is.

Is it crazy for a car dealer to offer free driving practice? Can that be done with an in-store-simulator experience, and at a more convenient location like a city mall that visitors can reach on foot?

What happens if you place your design studio and designer(s) in your store? For every customer to see; being able to interact and collect feedback already in the prototype phase; Co-create with customers; offer workshops etc. Show them your craft, commitment and passion.

What if a hair salon offered a corner of their space as a free photo studio? And for one evening every month, that whole salon turned into a super-exclusive dining experience, followed by a club night? When the rumours of your amazing, exclusive after-hours experience are starting to spread, why not use it as your “brand plow” into new potential markets? Let that brand live the lush-life, the one your service helps your customers be are apart of.

Is anyone stupid enough to open an upscale restaurant in their own home? Far from downtown’s fancy addresses where you have to bribe a taxi to take you. Can that restaurant source all its ingredients from the backyard garden and local boutique producers? And have the menu be what’s ripe and available for the day? Well, I know you can, I’ve been to one, and it was the best dining experience I’ve ever had.

CONCLUSION

The Brick-and-mortar problem is not because of someone else, and it's not something that can be solved by more measuring, producing even more reports, or with more money spent on marketing.

You need to be creative with your business, not your spreadsheets or marketing.

You need to better leverage your internal capacity; fight silo thinking by involving different parts of your organization in more project, and earlier.

You need to leverage that your business is local; you have a physical space that people can visit for more than just a transaction of goods and services.

You need to start innovating your business with a cause in mind, showing that you mean it, and letting that grow your community of followers, customers, employees, and partners.

If you don't know how to start, find someone who does!

FOOTNOTES

Cause: Approaching and filtering business decisions through a Cause helps us deliver opportunity for our customers and community beyond our products or services with social, political, health and climate in mind. It's is not about CSR, charity or altruism per se; It's how to gain a competitive advantage by "Using business as a source for good."

Sale: If most of your traffic and visitors only show up when you have a BIG SALE or offer stuff for free, they are not there because of you and your business effort. They are there for that isolated opportunity that could've come from anyone. Your SALE is competing with you. With overuse, people will, at best, figure out that they shouldn't buy from you unless you're having a sale. A sale is to retail what antibiotics are to us, use it carefully, it's not a longterm solution, and overuse could lead to people resisting your brand (poor reputation and low trust)

Amazon: It's not fair to compare any retailer to Amazon. The time it took most legacy-retail giants to swallow their pride and admit that online is not even the enemy. It's just the future; Amazon had transitioned from retailer to platform, and now, an entire ecosystem.

Amazon is the market now, at least one of them.

Omnipresent: Every stage and customer interaction can be approached and planed as an experience. Use Customer Journey Mapping, but with Experience in mind—how can you turn those interaction points into a sharable memory?

Parts: All parts and every role in your organization must be able to see the opportunity from their perspective (function, goals, and objectives). Experience has to be a driving metric and measure for every role in your company, not just Store Managers, your marketing team, and visual merchandisers.