Today’s consumer expectations are creating new opportunities for new age brands, and established brands to reboot and demonstrate that they are people pleasers with their consumer-centric strategies in delivering shopping experience in their retail environments. It’s an established fact that modern consumers demand more than just great products or services; they seek meaningful experiences, emotional connections, and values demonstrated by the brand consistently across all touchpoints and channels. This takes the objective of shopping experience beyond mere ‘great satisfaction’ to utmost ‘pleasure’.

Five humanised tenets are helping deliver this.

1. Feeling the Pain

Today's well-informed, socially conBy Surender Gnanaolivu scious, and value-driven consumers are seeking brands that deeply understand them enough to offer them solutions through experiences that align with their lifestyle and beliefs. They expect brands to understand their pains and align the gains, their core offerings, with their life goals and delivery empathetic experiences in their physical environments. This necessitates serious efforts in understanding them deeply in-person by observation, listening, dialogue and feedback or remotely by using data analytics and social listening. Feeling their pain, however little it may seem, would surely help in converting them to pleasure.

2. Making Emotional Connections

 
At the 4Ps Pizza entrance, guests are welcomed by a gallery of handwritten community testimonials and an invitation to embrace the brand's values.

3. Crafting the Journey

Understanding and predicting customer journeys and shopping rituals is as important input when crafting the experience in a store. Every brand touchpoint needs to be planned to be intuitive, seamless, enjoyable, and memorable resulting in excellent pleasurable customer service. Technology, when used purposefully, is a powerful enabler of customer empowerment in the journey.

The Jaguar experience center offers a phygital station to help customers make informed, personalized car choices.

4. Adding the Personal Touch

Every person is unique, and this uniqueness should be acknowledged and valued. Enabling personalization of in-store interactions can make customers feel understood and valued resulting in shopping pleasure and loyalty.

Consumers appreciate brands that recognize them as individuals rather than just another customer. Personalized experiences, tailored recommendations, and customized products or services enhance consumer satisfaction. Data-driven insights are pivotal in achieving this level of personalization, enabling brands to anticipate consumer needs and preferences accurately.

Decathlon’s Design Shop lets customers personalize products using interactive screens for a tailored browsing experience.

5. Behaving Responsibly

Actively demonstrating commitment to social, environmental, and ethical issues are more likely to win consumer trust and loyalty. Here being a people pleaser means ‘walking the talk’ by adopting ethical and sustainable practices that care about people and the planet. Measurable initiatives add authenticity and trust in the brand’s ability to keep its promise and appease amidst all the geopolitical and environmental challenges faced today.

Lush’s Shinjuku store in Japan uses digital packaging, where customers scan products with their phones for details. | Photo: LUSH Japan

A Punt on Pleasure

By focusing on being people pleasers, brands can build strong, lasting relationships with their consumers, ensuring loyalty, making this world a more pleasurable place and helping businesses sustain and succeed