home : hartbeat : messing-with-success-the-segregation-vs-integration-debate-part-two

11.15.2002

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

For more Hartman Group articles on RETAILING & RETAIL DESIGN...

NATURAL SENSIBILITY

Wellness Myth #1: Retailers Already Know and Understand the Wellness Market

HARTBEAT

Store Within a Store: Segregation, Integration, Gentrification and Beyond, Part One

Store Within a Store: Consumer-Driven Solutions, Part Two

Archives »
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles

digg
del.icio.us

reddit
twitter

friendfeed

StumbleUpon

Messing With Success: the Segregation Vs. Integration Debate, Part Two

While I don't think I could exactly describe any grocery store in terms of five-point rating scales, I still think I know a grocery store when I see one. As researchers, we train ourselves to look at stores in pieces; pieces (both tangible and intangible) that we imagine represent the whole. There is location, size, layout, reputation, cleanliness, customer service, traffic flows, product mix, and so on, which we can easily conceptualize as independent attributes. And all of our subsequent measurements, ratings, comparisons, and evaluations of these individual pieces supposedly render an accurate assessment of retail establishments. Nevertheless and in spite of all our best analytical efforts, we know that there is more to a consumer's appraisal of a particular store than we can ever hope to capture in the time typically allotted to an interview or survey questionnaire.

Mercifully, consumers themselves need not go around analyzing stores into a manageable set of factors or dimensions before reaching conclusions and acting on them. They simply form general impressions by taking in everything at once and then proceed as if driven by a combination of impulses, explicit wants, and what some social psychologists call demand characteristics of the situation. But the process of forming these general impressions is precisely what underlies the reactions that consumers have upon encountering integrated product sets or specialty stores-within-a-store or any other arrangement. Thus, knowing that consumers carry around a generalized intuition about retailers, we can determine how one would go about integrating, segregating, expanding, etc., allowing us to resolve design choices as an operational decision rather than a consumer dictate.

At this point, it would be nice to spell out which Five Factors will ensure that any changes succeed, but that's not possible. Probably more than any other aspect of retailing, design remains an art form that defies our attempts to reduce it to simple-minded rules of thumb. Certainly, I cannot specify a set of design factors that cover all circumstances without resorting to vague and all but worthless abstractions, such as "always make it appealing." What I can advise is that any plan to construct the perfect store, and "perfect" itself can mean a number of things in this context, should take into account the manner in which consumers size up retailers.

This means, among other things, to start with a wide-angle look at the whole store as it currently stands because that will direct attention away from the trees and toward the forest, which is what consumers first see. What overall impression does the store convey and how could a contemplated change fit in with this impression? This does not mean that only a single design theme can survive under one roof. It is not absolutely necessary to carry ugly over to every area of the store just to maintain consistency. At the same time, if ugly is what customers expect, an addition that is too attractive will definitely appear out of place and may create a negative reaction.

Introducing changes also opens up opportunities to alter the general impression that a store makes. Just as an existing image colors the way customers view additions and changes, the additions and changes themselves become part of the overall impression that the store now makes. Creating displays and bringing in products of lower quality than generally carried will diminish the overall sense of quality in the store as a whole, but could simultaneously create lower price expectations � essentially cheapening the store. Similarly, it is possible to raise expectations by incorporating higher priced and higher quality merchandise. Presumably, a mixture of higher and lower price/quality goods will have little effect on consumers' perceptions of the store's average quality or price competitiveness, but it should cause them to view the store as carrying a wider range of products.

In developing this argument, I've mainly contrasted product integration and segregation strategies, but the same ideas apply to other design characteristics. For example, any discussion of large versus small format should include an analysis of the effect each has on consumers' overall impressions. It appears that the small, (presumably) highly personalized shopping experience has become the in-thing among some pundits. We even have consumer feedback that assures us that the kind of one-on-one interactions you encounter in small shops is second only to the womb, but surely one size does not fit all. To be sure, mega stores can seem cold and impersonal, and no one would suggest that the time is ripe for Starbucks to come out with their super-gonzo, mammoth coffee world extravaganza. But some large footprint stores truly wow shoppers with the sheer weight of all they have to offer. It would be impossible, for example, to package the Whole Foods Market or REI shopping experience into a small box, because a not insignificant part of the experience comes from the magnitude and diversity of the offerings and their presentation. If anything, these retailers may want to think bigger. For them, moving to a smaller scale could only succeed as a totally different kind of experience.

So, whether it's size, integration/segregation or some other design consideration, the success of implementation depends at least partly on how well the final design maintains or fits with the overall shopping experience already in place. If you want to stack the odds in your favor, then imagine what the experience, first of the whole store and second of the particular design element, would be like as a customer and proceed accordingly. If this sounds as if intuition more than analysis drives the process, then I agree. When all is said and done, that's probably my main point, but there's a subtext here as well. So many of the questions we pose and attempt to answer about store design or layout take on an either-or character, as if there is or should be a single definitive answer that fits all cases. I think most of us probably would agree, even if only in secret, that there're no simple resolutions to many of these issues and to suggest otherwise would be disingenuous. To insist on finding the answer to a nontrivial design decision for any and all retailers is, at best, to insist on frustration and, at worst, to exalt the mechanical application of design "principles" over their creative implementation. As analysts we seek clarity, elegance and parsimony, but we also recognize that real life is often messy and that real success in retail often entails messy solutions.

Click here for

PART ONE: Messing with Success: The Segregation vs. Integration Debate

Comment »