Neuroscience in Retail

The World Economic Forum talks about how the world is now a global market and is transitioning into the 4th industrial revolution, or ‘Human Era’.  For retail this means consumers are now leading the industry.

Traditionally brands would sell to their audience through the standard means of advertising products with features and benefits. Now brands need to understand their audience and they must start with a two-way conversation and developing a relationship. This relationship builds loyalty, which will support in the futureproofing of their business.

Our world is increasingly chaotic. We are inundated with data and find ourselves deeply over-sensed and struggling to ‘unplug’ from our digital world. Along with our wellbeing and mental health being affected by this saturation, we are seeing this affect the way we shop too. "This shift in behaviour means we have very little working memory and upon reaching our ‘cognitive load’, we are no longer able to attend, or effectively process, our retail experiences" quotes Lucy Hackshaw, seen displays CEO..  When this happens, we disengage, which means brand attachment and loyalty cannot exist. 

 This has highlighted several key issues in retail.

• After several decades of rising profits, and a strong reliable customer base, they find themselves in this new climate of choice, convenience, and digital integration.
• They are faced with losses, and failing stores.
• They look around and analyse the market to discover it is a younger audience that’s taking the lead, and they have different shopper habits.
• They invest heavily and reposition in order to target this audience.
• They appoint young, social influencers as their ambassadors to drive their social presence.
• The result however, isn’t the successful migration to a new audience with greater market-share, but in fact, less market-share as they alienate and lose their original audience. Rather than authenticating their older audience and rewarding them for decades of loyalty and value, while slowly moving the dial to encourage a new audience to engage with their brand, they lose out entirely.

The video below looks at how Seen Displays have researched into using a Neurodeisgn lens to build a better design of displays and retail environments to capture the imaginations and attention of a new audience. To build an enriched environment that creates memories and builds a relationship with the brand. Of course, these designs are not for everybody, but you can see - brings a completely different experience to the retail world.

What could you do to bring the customers senses more to life. To learn more about Salecology, contact us today.