New awareness and essentials, need for reinsurance, post-crisis consumers are questioning their fundamentals and rationalising their consumption. Because consuming should remain a pleasure, provided they can enjoy physical-and-digital experiences in total tranquillity, they expect brands to strike a balance between security, desire, reliability and responsability.
New business models, platforms, digitalization, immersion: our experts share their insightsillustrated in the FW 21-22 Environments & Design trend book to rethink the retail experience, adapt to the new challenges and expectations of the Alter-essentialists tribe.
Simplify and enrich
As retail models transform, “physical spaces” will focus more and more on experience, convenience and service, and less and less on a purchase goal. Alter-essentialists, after an accelerated digitalization and a reassessment of their values and uses, expect brands to offer them a simplified and enriched digital and physical shopping experience, while benefiting from personalized support!
This tribe of consumers will be all the more attentive to the points of contact and sale: from drive to click & collect, from e-reservation to appointment booking in the store. For them payments will be contactless, local delivery, contactless and respecting the rules of hygiene.
Reassuring, comforting and calming
With consumers concerned about what – and ” who ” surrounds them as well as what they consume, the environment and the feeling of security, become essential to respond to a need for simplification, to create desire and to facilitate the purchase.
+ Creating a comforting environment
In shops and boutiques create an environment and visual merchandising with thoughtful clear and direct simplicity. Offer peaceful atmospheres, where silence and calm are a priority, with a pragmatic and sensitive design, reassuring by its universal and perennial high quality.
In 2019 Consum, a Spanish supermarket chain, to improve the customer experience, opened a store dedicated to calm, from the configuration of the space where everything is at human eye level, to the floor that reduces noise and the illuminated displays to replace the ceiling neon lights.
+ Turning the constraint of social distancing into a privileged moment
Offer individual or “small group” appointments with flexible schedules in intimate atmospheres – in conformity with sanitary constraints – to create a feeling of trust and a sense of privileged relationship with customers.
The Mediamatic restaurant in Amsterdam, in order to respect the physical distance, offers customers to enjoy dinner in mini greenhouses that only accommodate two to three people.
Transforming the virtual and augmented reality into the new reality
The constraint of physical distancing drives brands and retailers to adapt their e-commerce platforms to create the most authentic, reassuring and personalised online shopping experiences thanks to AR, intelligent RV to allow Alter-essentialists to live a “quasi-real” shop experience.
Galeries Lafayette, during an indefinite closure period, offers a virtual shopping experience. The « Exclusive Live Shopping » allows customers from around the world to make purchases from its luxury product range via streaming videoschat with a personal shopper or an ambassador of one of the 120 brands on offer, to create an immersive, exclusive and personalized experiment.
The Veertus application offers a virtual fitting to consumers who, by scanning the product barcode, will be able to try it virtually, order it and pick it up in the shop.
Prioritising sustainability and social commitment
While questioning their ” values “, Alter-Essentialist consumers expect brands to integrate sustainability and social responsibility in their initiatives. Beyond upcycling, brands will use their archives to offer “collector capsules” and respond to the acceleration of the second hand market and the demand for “committed exclusivity” for a cause.
Since 2019 Sézane,, a French women’s brand, has created an online section dedicated to the archives of their collections. It also offers restocks and exclusive pieces in upcycled fabrics from previous seasons. Today, part of the profits from these sales are used to support social actions.
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