Part Four—Store: Make it brilliant and they will spend.

That’s a supermarket! Austria’s MPREIS chain uses hot architects to design every store—each is then unique. They use the very fabric of the store to differentiate their business.

Source: MPREIS/Thomas Jantscher

The Fundamentals

When customers wander around your store, or look into its windows, they are subconsciously demanding “INSPIRE ME! MAKE ME WANT TO LOOK AT SOMETHING!” If there is a trick to retailing, it’s in understanding how to manage that demand to your advantage. The principal tools you have to do that with are:

• Your external communications

• Windows

• Use of retail theater

• Discovery

Those tools will be wielded passively by the store and actively by you and the team. I’m going to talk about discovery first because it both informs everything else but also because it’s the one of those four that was most likely to have made you say “you what?” Let’s turn a bit of jargon into some practical good stuff then ...