Skyline above Birmingham Selfridges

In a nutshell, what does Science of Retail do?

We’re a retail research agency. We’re six months old. There are loads of consumer insight and statistical modelling agencies out there. They focus on the consumer – the consumer’s preferences, what they like and what encourages them to go in store. On the analytics side, they tend to focus on measuring the effectiveness of above the line media and the big TV campaigns.

We’re different in that we focus on the in-store environment. We look at the motivations of the actual people in the shops – such as what encourages the sales assistants to promote one brand over another. A lot of the other brands and a lot of the other agencies think that it’s just about influencing the consumers. But the salespeople in store play a very important role, particularly with more informed purchases like fridge freezers, washers, cars and so on.

We’ve found that TV ads make consumers want a particular product, but when they go in store and ask for it, the people in the store will lead them to buy something else.

We look at how brands can best engage with the in-store salespeople to get them to promote their product. It’s much more sophisticated than cutting the price or incentivising them with vouchers – we look at their motivations and why they promote one brand over another.

And you measure all this with algorithms?

Absolutely. Tracking’s fine, but we want to see what influence means for sales – we want to find the levers that we need to pull in-store to influence the guys on the shop floor, and whether this extends to things such as point of sale material or promotions.

In the end, we can show, for instance, that 10% of a brand’s sales were down to the fact that they had a promotion in store. Once you have that kind of information, it’s very easy to work out the ROI of that activity. As far as I know, nobody else does that.

So how do you gather this information?

Some of our clients gather this information in store themselves. Or we can provide teams to go in and audit the store, interviewing shop staff and recording what’s on the shop floor or what’s on display.

Don’t other agencies measure the impact of different initiatives?

Yes, but ours provide more precise insights. Our system removes the need to have a trial in controlled stores. Other field marketing agencies do some activity in some stores, and compare this to other control stores, called ‘fallows’. They’ll then measure the difference in uplift and sales between the two.

That methodology is flawed – it relies on the fact that everything else is equal between those two stores, which isn’t always the case. Different people shop in the stores, the weather might be different in different places, and so on. With our method, you can be sure about the factors that have influence store sales.

Can you talk me through one of your projects?

We’re looking at door to door salespeople for one brand, to pinpoint the qualities that define a great salesperson. We’ve got a lot of data on who the salespeople are, their skills, their background, their training, how long they have been with the company, right down to where they go, what type of consumers they visit, and so on. We’re building a model that maps all of these factors against conversion to see what makes a rep a good rep.

With this information, we can understand how to deploy reps in areas that work best for them, or whether they need a particular type of training to improve their performance. It’s a brand new area of modelling. It’s been talked about, but nobody has really applied it, as the data hasn’t been there. Now brands are gathering the data. With some science behind it, there’s a huge amount of potential.

What’s the ballpark ROI on your projects?

After about a year of working with us, clients generally see an increase of about 20%. The brands that work with us generally have a minimum marketing spend of half a million a year – they’re bigger brands.

What are the biggest shifts in retail data sector at the moment?

The next stage is understanding who’s coming in store and whose looking at outdoor advertising. It’s been possible to get good data from TV and online, but advances in camera technology and definition technology mean that we can now get accurate ratings for in-store and outdoor, which wasn’t possible before. This new data gives brands a much better understanding of how they can increase sales.

Data and tech are certainly the biggest drivers of retail trends at the moment, but it isn’t just about the measurements. It’s about what we actually do with it, understanding the shopper journey both offline and online.

How do you action your insights?

We start with the data, the retailer acts on that, then we measure it again to see whether what they’ve done has actually had an influence on sales or not. If it hasn’t, we go back through the loop again, finding what do we need to do better each time.

We run these loops at the strategic level. If something tactically isn’t working, it’s probably because the strategy isn’t quite right.

Do you help your clients to take action?

The classic problem with analytics in general is that brands commission really expensive research and analytics projects, and everyone thinks it’s fantastic, but then no one actually does anything with it. The biggest opportunity is acting on the insights.

We want to present our insights so they’ll be really useful to our clients. Research debriefs normally involve three hour presentations that send everyone to sleep. We want to make this stuff usable – there may be a debrief, but we’ll provide some sort of tool or dashboard that makes it easy for everyone to understand what they need to do.

With our tools, a sales rep in a store can audit what’s going wrong in that store, what they need to do to improve things, and what the likely increase in sales will be when they’ve done it. It’s forecasting on the fly.

For people on the planning side, our tools lets them see their budget and how best they can deploy it to generate the maximum ROI. They don’t have to commission yet another bout of research. They can just run different scenarios through the tool to see what sales might be. It makes it very actionable and engaging.

Any other ideas about what’s coming next?

There’ll be advances in retail display technology – adverts that display different messages according to who’s looking at them. It’s a bit scary, but I think that is the next big thing – the more targeted and personalised a campaign is, the more it will influence sales.

A lot of it will be driven by cost, so it’s probably a number of years off. We’re only just starting to see screens that can show two different things.

How do you see the mix of online, offline and mobile buying progressing?

I think online buying will start to plateau and offline will resurge. Retailers will realise that consumers don’t operate in silos, they look online, they look offline, particularly with those products that require a bit more interaction, such as cars or technology, anything that customers want to interact with.

Offline’s role will focus more on showrooming. Retailers will need to let people go in store, try stuff out, quickly and easily buy it online and get it delivered at a time and place of their choosing.

I think siloed online/offline/mobile will be less of an issue going forwards, these are are just boxes that humans want to put retail into. I think it will all become quite blurred to the point of becoming one and the same. It will all become a means to the end of making the sale through whichever channel. But physical retail will still be central.

What are the main barriers to the growth of online?

Most of the products that people want to buy online are being bought through online already. People don’t see mobile as secure or safe as buying through a laptop, either.

There’s a lot of work to be done around delivery. Once that happens, the lines between all the different channels will become beautifully blurred.

What about the future of the high street?

The high street isn’t dead – it won’t ever be dead. It’s safe to say that the high street in its current guise isn’t working and its businesses that aren’t adapting are dying. Currently, it’s not switched on to the way that consumers think.

The recession means people have to be more savvy, but the appetite to buy stuff is still there, and the appetite for store experiences always be there. It will just be that the nature of that will change.

Who’s your dream client?

We’d love to work with a really big company like Unilever – they’ve got a massive portfolio of brands, which are all very different and appeal to very different consumer sets with different needs and wants. The potential for learning and research there is very very interesting.

And finally, which recent discovery are you most excited about?

There’s a bit of software called Tableau. It’s a bit geeky – you can put your data in and it makes it very easy for people to graph it and interact with it. Excel produces static charts. Tableau lets you create any kind of infographic you want, so you can display stuff in a really interesting way. It’s like Photoshop for data. It’s much more advanced than most other products.

Website: Science of Retail

Image credits:  Luke Hayfield Photography and The Science of Retail

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Smart food businesses are making these ever-fussier customers happy by thinking laterally – so they can deliver more with less.

Delivering more with less is one of the key drivers behind the booming street food scene. Food vans enable businesses to give customers more of what they want – fresh, high quality ingredients – and less of what they can do without – namely, table service and décor.
Businesses with permanent premises can tap into this trend too, however. Leon is one example. It sells healthy, high quality food but manages to keep costs down by bringing in elements of a fast food restaurant. For example, its pre-packaging salads and wraps don’t have to be made to order, and its food is served in boxes rather than on plates. This approach is working well – Leon’s turnover grew by 17% in 2011.

Barrel-aged cocktails are now moving from America to London, partly because they’re new and interesting, and partly because they enable bars to save money. Barrel-aged cocktails are premixed and left to mingle in old bourbon, rum or sherry barrels where they absorb some of the flavours of the wood. Customers like them because they’re interesting and different. Bars like them because customers pay the same price for them as they would a standard cocktail, yet prep time has been reduced from 10 minutes to 2. Bars can use the money they save on prep to put higher-quality ingredients in the drink, charging the customer the going rate for a much better product.

Other companies are selling more to customers by pitching an experience rather than a standalone meal. Gingerline is a secret supperclub that charges around £50 per person for a 3 course meal with one cocktail and cabaret entertainment. Guests only find out the address of the venue by SMS on the evening of their experience. The meal, like the venue, is kept secret until the event – enabling Gingerline to serve almost everyone the same meal and keep costs down. By telling customers they will be dining somewhere in East London, but keeping the precise location a secret, Gingerline is able to justify the fee it charges each attendee. However, as the space is actually in a relatively affordable part of South East London, the business achieves a much higher profit margin than its rivals in the hippest parts of town.

These are just three examples of businesses thinking creatively to deliver quality food to customers and increase margins without increasing the cost of delivery. Find out more about this trend, and a whole host of others, at Insider Trends ‘Future of Food and Drink’ trend presentation. It will take place in Newcastle on Tuesday 14^th May and London on Tuesday 21^st May. Alternatively, you can download the trend presentation here.

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On Monday 18th March, Insider Trends brought 250 people together for its ‘Trendsetters: Future of Retail’ event at the British Library in London. 4 trendsetters presented their projects and predictions.

Emma Jones, Founder of Enterprise Nation and Co-Founder of PopUp Britain, spoke about PopUp Britain’s work, positive effects and achievements.

You can watch the whole presentation using the video above or use the edited transcript below to skip to the insights that you need.

If you have any questions or thoughts, do share them with us in the comments.

Emma’s transcript:

I was in this very space last week listening to Professor Noam Chomsky being interviewed by Jonathan Freeland. They spoke about everything from the Middle East to propaganda – big issues around world affairs. One of the things he said made me smile: “The internet hasn’t really been a big thing. It hasn’t changed that much.” I thought how interested he would be to hear us talk about these developments, which wouldn’t have happened without the World Wide Web. Hopefully he’d be smiling and maybe question his own thoughts a little bit.

For those of you who haven’t come across PopUp Britain – a campaign called StartUp Britain was launched by the prime minister on the 28^th March 2011. However, we do not take any government money. It’s fully private-sector funded. It’s all about helping people start businesses. We do things like go out on a national bus tour every year – this year we’re going to be on the road from mid-May to June. We’re running a week-long series of events called Finance for StartUp Britain Week – free events about how to raise money for your business and how to attract an angel investors. We do startup days, such as Startup Fashion and StartUp Food. Our Head of Media does everything in her power to encourage the media to give a more proactive, encouraging and positive attitude so people take their ideas, hobbies, passions and skills and turn them into a business.

StartUp Britain was hearing from a lot of small businesses that were based online and at home. They were saying they’d love to have a high-street experience and get their products to the high street and to customers. At the same time we were hearing from the other side that there were 15% vacancy rates on high streets.

The chairman of Startup Britain, Luke Johnson, is very much a property man. He used to own Pizza Express and Giraffe and he currently owns Patisserie Valerie, Strada, etc – he has a lot of knowledge about the high street. So we asked him what we could do.

We did a survey that said 82% of small businesses want to go on the high street, but what was holding them back was the amount of money it would cost and signing a long lease. On the other hand, we had these empty shops. We decided to match the two by opening up empty shops and filling them with small businesses.

Emma Jones, co-founder of StartUp Britain, cutting the ribbon of the first PopUp Britain store with Eric Pickles and Mark Prisk

Our first shop opened in Richmond in July 2012. It was right opposite Richmond Station at 2 Kew Road. Our branding has changed since, but it was very British: red, white and blue. We’ve modernised it since then.

PopUp Britain’s approach is to fill a large shop with six small businesses who trade at the same time. Each of those businesses pays £150 to trade for two weeks, which is affordable for most small business budgets. We wanted to crowd-fund the rent.

 The Richmond store

When we first opened the Richmond shop, the landlord let us have it for three months because it had been empty for four years. The new landlord was looking to get planning permission so he wanted to befriend the local authority. But also, he wanted some rent coming in, a contribution to business rates and for his insurance premium to go down. So by filling the shop with activity, we brought his insurance premium down and were able to give him a contribution to rent. He benefited and our business did as well.

We had a fantastic launch at the PayPal offices in Richmond.

For the first two weeks we had somebody from PopUp Britain sit in the shop every day with our tenants. What emerged was that our tenants would look to PopUp Britain and say, “What are you going to do for me today to bring in customers to this shop?” We thought, this model won’t work because as we expand out across the UK and have shops across the high streets, we do not have the people to resource all of these shops.

We decided to move out and let the tenants take over and do their thing. So now we have crowd-funding and crowd-resourcing. We handed over the key to six people who’d never met and said, “Go trade.” One tenant said, “I want the music on.” Another said, “I don’t want music on.” So we left, and fortunately we had no fights.

Seven months on, we’ve helped over 130 businesses get onto the high street. We’ve now got a shop in Victoria and our next set of six tenants have come together for meetings. They’ve planned an event they’re going to run when they get into the shop. It’s brilliant that they are meeting each other beforehand and collaborating on ideas. One of the things we think is so valuable is that the brands have to come up with ideas on how to market that shop and attract customers.

One of my favourite moments of Richmond was when one of our tenants, a business called Bikini Fling, had a bikini fashion show. It was an incredible event and attracted customers in. Another business sold boxer shorts, so they had people handing our flyers in their boxer shorts in the freezing cold at Richmond Station. Our tenants came up with a whole load of activities.

We moved out six months later and we now have people from Richmond saying, “We really miss PopUp Britain.” Because every two weeks they’d go by the shop to see who the next six tenants were. They were waiting for the next bikini party and looking for the guys with the boxer shorts. So it brought variety into Richmond and attracted more footfall to the high street. It also benefited the tenants, as all of them have made sales.

Zac Goldsmith, the MP for Richmond, was very supportive and Richmond Council, on the back of PopUp Britain, have now introduced a popup grant to help other businesses do it. They saw the benefits of letting us in.

ElephantBranded, a lovely young social enterprise business, were in the shop in Richmond in the early days. They were talking to John Lewis about having their bags stocked. A buyer came in because they wanted to see how the product sold in a retail environment, and sure enough ElephantBranded then got a contract. The founder attributes part of that to being in a shop. So it’s a benefit we’d never even though of – buyers are coming in to see how you perform personally but more importantly to see how your product sells and looks in a retail environment.

Maria Allen Jewellery was in the shop with a business called Tier One Clothing, who make fantastic shirts. They’ve now got a joint venture where she makes cufflinks for their shirts. So we’ve also seen joint ventures form. We also have a luxury fashion fortnight and six businesses who met in the shop are still getting together.

Bertie & Jack made great sales, but they’ve won a marketing agency for a year as part of StartUp Britain. All our tenants have benefited either from sales, increasing online traffic, or having joint ventures with other tenants.

One of the models we’re testing is having a permanent tenant and five others who come in on a fortnightly basis.

Another benefit is that our popup tenants get immediate customer feedback. They’re used to trading online from home – having customers coming in to touch and feel their product brings new insights. We’ve had tenants who’ve change the price of their product based on customer feedback. One tenant at Victoria said her online site traffic had increased by 300% for the two weeks she was in the shop.

All our tenants use social media to promote their shop. One of our best sellers makes shoes for ladies with big feet, so a brilliant niche market that sells all over the world. She tweeted and put it on Facebook that she was going to be in a shop in Richmond and that increased footfall as people came from outside of the UK to meet her. So the social media benefited her, but there were five other businesses that also benefited when she brought extra traffic in.

Finally, we’ve had a lot of people who’ve said, “popups are fine, but the whole thing about a popup is it pops up and then it goes.” But 12% of our tenants are now looking for permanent space on the high street. One of our Richmond tenants, who sells beautiful men’s fashion, did so well there that he’s now looking for a permanent shop. So a popup can test new markets.

In view of us expanding, one of our visions is to enable small businesses to do popup hops where you go in and test new markets on a low-cost, low-risk basis. We wanted to test in Richmond and get the model right for the three months. Then we had a popup in Somerset House.

In October 2012, Mark Prisk, the minister for local growth and regeneration, called us into the Department for Community and Local Government (DCLG). He told us he loved the idea of popups bringing high streets to life and wanted us to set up a popup showcase in the building. Lorna Rowe, an executive at DCLG has helped us in this process. We took what was an office space – over six weeks, with planning permission, we converted it into a shop, which opened on the 17^th of December. This has enabled us to present to MPs and town teams to show them what they can have in their towns and what the benefits are.

On the same day, we launched a national popup lease. It is a two-page document that tenants can hand to landlords and it shows them they don’t have to incur massive legal fees. So it’s a great benefit that enables small businesses to open shops. We also produced a kit for town teams who want to open shops.

So our vision is to have popup shops everywhere. We’re about to announce seven new ones. We’re trying to do a deal to get a popup shop on the King’s Road. PopUp Britain has been criticised for the fact that we have been in Richmond, Victoria, Somerset House, Moreton-in-Marsh. People have said we only go to very affluent areas and they ask why we don’t go to streets where there are lots of closed-down shops. Our response is that our job at PopUp Britain is to help small businesses get on the high street. Small businesses want to make sales, meet customers and test new markets. We cannot put them in shops that don’t have very high footfall because if we do that, we’re doing a disservice to the small businesses that we’re looking to help. We have been offered space on the King’s Road that will fit 12 tenants in at one time. We’ll help hundreds of small businesses to have a retail experience and make more sales. That’s our job. Hopefully the King’s Road will be announced soon with others to follow.

In terms of what’s next: payment is massively exciting for the future. O2 have sponsored this event tonight – they’re making it possible for businesses to take payment via smartphones. It’s unleashed great opportunities for our tenants because when we first opened, people would have to go to the cashpoint to pay, meaning we were losing customers. Now with products from the likes of O2, you can accept payment via your smartphone and keep customers in the shop.

Small businesses will be able to take payment, not just in popups, but at trade shows, at farmer’s markets and on the move.

Also regarding promotion, we are working with Intel on a very exciting thing called Audience Impression Metrics. This is an immersive technology. It evaluates who you are and what age you are and what offers might be interesting to you. We are looking to showcase leading-edge technology in our popups – things like brands promoting themselves via local apps and also using Audience Impression Metric Systems.

Finally, I see a massive opportunity for small businesses to form partnerships with large companies such as Intel and Intuit, another business we work with. We’ve also agreed with moo.com to do something called Pickup at Your PopUp. They make beautiful business cards – they’re a big business looking to get their product out to their customers. We have a chain of popup shops where we want to bring in customers, so we are going to make an arrangement with them to have them deliver to the shop.

We’re looking for partnerships with big companies who have got technology or access to customers, as well as partnerships with town teams. These are local authorities who are keen to see their high streets regenerated. So partnerships between small business, large corporate and the local authority is key to bringing high streets back to life, but also in making sure that small businesses contribute to a vibrant economy.

In summary, I see the future of retail as popups in terms of a way of helping small businesses get onto the high street, and as a by-product of that, bringing more high streets to life.

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On Monday 18th March, Insider Trends brought 250 people together for its ‘Trendsetters: Future of Retail’ event at the British Library in London. 4 trendsetters presented their projects and predictions. We filmed the whole thing and will be releasing the footage and transcripts over the coming weeks.

Cate Trotter, Insider Trends’ Head of Trends, introduced the evening and kicked things off with an overview of key retail trends ahead. You can watch the whole presentation on video above or use the edited transcript below to skip to the insights and stats that you need.

If you have any questions, thoughts or additional insights, do let us know in the comments.

Cate’s transcript:

Hello everyone, and welcome! We’re excited – it’s a dream of ours to bring a large number of people together to hear four trendsetters that we really rate discussing the future of retail. They’re going to talk about their most interesting projects and their predictions for their niche in the future of retail, so you’ll be hearing about it from the horse’s mouth.

Firstly, I’m going to discuss the key trends to give some context. Then we’ll have Emma Jones, who’s the founder of Enterprise Nation. She’s actually here with her PopUp Britain hat on. PopUp Britain currently has five popup centres around London and is going on to set up lots more. She’ll discuss popups, payments and partnerships and the future of this. ThoughtWorks specialise in delivering highly effective e-commerce, retail and multichannel experiences for all sorts of retailers. Mark Collin, the Head of Europe Retail for ThoughtWorks, will discuss how large retailers can become very flexible and much more agile with the process that they use. Then we’ll hear from Eric Van der Kleij, head of the Level39 tech accelerator, the largest finance and retail tech incubator in Europe. Soon they’ll be setting up a retail lab mall in Canary Wharf that gives their tech startups a live space to pilot their technologies. We’ll finish with Jonathan Chippindale, the CEO of Holition, a leading provider of 3D and interactive retail and marketing solutions who specialise in the luxury sector. By 3D, I mean holograms and augmented reality.

Our Twitter hashtag is #blretail, which stands for ‘British Library Retail’. I’d like to thank the British Library and O2 for making this possible, and thank you to all the speakers for sharing their expertise with us.

My first section focuses on key retail trends. We can see that technology is changing everything, not just in online retail, but also in offline retail. Here are some key stats: by this time next year, 90% of the UK population are predicted to have smartphones in their pockets. Almost 30% of the population now has a tablet, an iPad or similar device. That’s incredible, given that the first iPad was released less than three years ago. So the growth there is just astonishing. Also, 4G networks are going to be available to all of us by the end of this year. Broadband coverage is spreading and broadband speeds are getting faster all the time. So it’s easier to shop online, but it’s also changing our expectations for offline retail. It’s not just that online shopping is simpler – new systems are also being developed to make it a lot more convenient. One of our favourite examples is Chirpify. It lets customers buy anything through a tweet. Customers can sync their PayPal and Twitter accounts and buy anything through what used to be a marketing channel. So Twitter, which is primarily a marketing channel, is now becoming a selling channel.

Companies like Shutl are massively speeding up online delivery. One of the key benefits of offline retail, immediacy, is now being moved into the online world. Shutl, on average, can deliver something between 90 minute and two hours, but their fastest delivery was just under 15 minutes. From the moment someone hit the ‘buy’ button, they had their item in front of them 15 minutes later. It’s incredible.

Online sales are predicted to grow over the coming ten years by up to four times to £125 billion in 2022. And, at the same time, we’re going to see the high street shrinking. It’s just a fact of life – it’s predicted that there will be 31% fewer stores and less retail space overall by 2020. But this doesn’t give us the whole picture. We have to put this in context, and although online sales are where the growth is, offline retail is where the value is. And even in 2022, only a third of sales are going to be conducted through the internet. Offline still has a lot of relevance, not just in selling to people, but also in building an entertainment experience as well. 45% of people say they’ll always love going to the shops, no matter how convenient online selling becomes. This is because offline retail has an entertainment function that, in some ways, online retail can’t compete with. Offline definitely isn’t going away.

Also, offline has the interesting effect of making online businesses a lot more visible. Twelve of the top 20 e-commerce businesses in England have high street stores. That’s not a coincidence. I think having these stores on the high street brings a lot of visibility to e-commerce sites. That’s why there’s now a trend for some pure play online retailers to come offline, some in a permanent guise such as Funky Pigeon, with their concessions all around British railway stations. Dezeen experimented with popups during London Design Week and around Christmas time. Etsy have a store in New York. Made.com have a showroom in Notting Hill. They’re doing this because these interactions in the offline space help them sell more online.

IMRG Experian’s list of top ecommerce sites. 12 of them have a presence on the high street.

Although offline sales help online sales, it also works the other way round. Online sales increasingly help offline sales, so the two things are becoming a lot more interlinked. Currently 44% of sales overall are influenced by online, but by the end of the decade, 70% of sales are going to be influenced by that.

So the more you can intertwine these channels, the better off you’re going to be. IDC have observed that customers who engage with a company through more than one channel go on to spend around 15% to 30% more than ones who engage through just one channel. The customers of companies that fully intertwine the channels to create an omni-channel experience spend 15% to 30% more again. That means there’s up to a 69% increase over single-channel ones – it’s really worth doing.

Topshop is one of the businesses bringing channels together really well. They have catwalk shows, but they share it with a lot more people than those who are in the room. They stream the shows on their website – they even have a system that lets customers take photos of the show as it’s happening and post those onto their social profiles. Also, as the show is happening, customers can buy the items and personalise them.

Topshop is also a leader in all things social. It’s doing something interesting and genuinely engaging with almost any social channel you could name. This all forms part of a strategy that they refer to as their ‘infinite loop’. The idea is that they’re so close to the customer that when the customer comes to need something or buy something, they automatically go and buy it from Topshop. Communicating with Topshop is such a habit that they have to opt out rather than opt in.

Another example we love is the Burberry Regent Street store that recently opened. If you’ve not been, you need to go. The store is designed to be a physical manifestation of its website. They key part of the omni-channel experience is a satellite link-up that will broadcast footage either into or out of the store. When they have a catwalk show, they pull the store displays to one side, put out seating and stream the show from wherever it’s happening in the world onto the store’s massive digital screen, turning the show into a global retail event.

Also, the Burberry store has a hydraulic stage that comes out of the floor. Jake Bugg did an in-store gig where footage was broadcast on the website. Burberry essentially see their store and their website as equals. They both sell and they both promote. This is a key part of the ultimate omni-channel experience – using every channel in its own way to engage and sell.

So we’ve just covered technology that customers have access to, but technology is also shaping how stores do business overall and how they can optimise the experience in other ways. There is a service called Cara from Immersive Labs which is available in the States. It’s a series of webcams that scan customers’ faces to see what gender and age they are. It can then personalise displays according to the customer’s personality or demographic. Also, the cameras through the store can capture dta on the space and how it’s being used. They can show dead spots and the places where people are spending the most time, giving retailers a lot of information about how to optimise the experience and sell more. It’s a win-win for both parties. The company using Cara will sell more and the customer will be more engaged and satisfied.

At Burberry, they have iPads that track customers’ orders. When you buy something in-store, the assistant can see what you’ve bought online or in-store before and give special personalised recommendations. This is a useful service for customers.  Burberry are also using their iPads to make the buying experience more comfortable for customers too. They’ve observed that when people buy online at home, they’ll do so in comfort, sitting on their sofa or their bed. They thought, “Why should anyone queue any more?” So now you can remain seated on one of their comfy couches and go through the transaction on an iPad. This reflects well with customers. 43% of shoppers say their experience improves with systems like this, so again there’s a win-win .

Some companies are rethinking the function of their offline spaces. They see the online channel as the primary selling channel and therefore they focus on building the experience much more in their offline spaces. We have a few examples for you here. Nike 1948 in Shoreditch is almost like an exhibition or an events space rather than a retail space. Selfridges’ quiet room has been going for a couple of months and this is just an empty room where people can chill out and forget about the hustle and bustle of Oxford Street. Disney have reopened their stores as Imagination Parks. Rather than selling to children, they aim to create the best 30 minutes of a child’s day. By doing that, they sell more than they have been before. Lomography’s shop is half store and half events space. This whole concept of putting selling second was developed by Apple, which is still London’s most successful retail space. This stuff really does work.

To conclude, the retailers that will be successful in future are the ones who can intertwine these channels the most, getting customers engaging with and buying from the same channels; moving across channels seamlessly. Every stage of the customer journey is now being enhanced by technology. It can be used in one of two ways – either to speed up the experience or slow it down and make it more enjoyable and experiential. I recommend you go through and map out your customer journey, thinking about how you can use technology at each point either to condense it and make it faster, or to open it up and make it as effective and engaging as possible.

I’m now going to hand over to Emma Jones, the founder of PopUp Britain. They have five spaces at the moment, but hopefully soon the whole country will be overtaken by them.

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When the Attendant opened its doors in February, there was much fanfare for this strange new cafe concept: an underground toilet turned gourmet cafe. Could it work? Could it even start a new trend? Cue endless puns, jokes and cries of “gimmick” from every angle of the blogosphere. It’s fortunate then that it really works…

Image: Huh Magazine

So you saw the toilet when you were drinking in a nearby pub. I’ve had similar ideas when I’ve been drinking but somehow they’ve never materialised. When did you decide this could be a real possibility?

I spent a couple of years in South America watching all the coffee changes and that kind of thing, and Dan (co-owner) has been in New York, seeing this whole New York deli sandwich scene. We were having a drink outside the pub thinking wouldn’t it be great to have a little place and do great coffee and great sandwiches and a couple of weeks later there was a to let sign – which someone had actually graffiti’d and put in an extra i. It’s such an unusual and such a beautifully preserved piece of Victorian London, we thought it’d be a great idea to try and do something in there.

It’s very fashionable to create a cafe/bar in any spare space in London at the moment – in a toilet, an old tube carriage, on top of a multi story car park – why do you think that is? Is it just a passing fad, or is there a long term future for it?

I think traditional retail space gets more and more competitive, there’s lots of big chains out there, there’s lots of investments. It takes the small businessperson to see the beauty in things and do something more unusual. So with a tube train or a food truck it takes a little bit of inspiration and a bit of a dream and a slightly eclectic attitude to find these unusual spaces to transform them.

And transform it they have. The original Doulton and Paisley urinals have been kept and converted into benches. The colour scheme is a tasteful mix of white, Victorian green and burnt orange – to match the original Attendant’s door. The attention to detail is great: small porcelain lamps hang on the wall, subtly giving the whole cafe a light, airy feel. You’d hardly know you were underground.

The food is exceptionally good. Their sandwiches come courtesy of a chef who’s a veteran of the legendary Pollen Street Social. And great chefs can make anything spectacular, even the seemingly saturated world of sandwiches…

It’s not often you get ex-michelin starred chefs making sandwiches. How did you manage that? And why was such a high level of food important to your business?

It’s really important to us to have top quality food. Our whole strategy has been to attract people down into the cafe and wow them, not only with the way we’ve restored it, but with the quality of our food and the quality of our coffee. We work with small producers who supply us with beautiful meat, we have a water purification system to filter any impurities out of the hard London water, a £10,000 coffee machine. Even our milk comes from a tiny farm in Somerset called Ivy House farm, who supply Selfridges and Harrods. The quality of the ingredients and the quality of the experience is very important to us to deliver a great experience to our customers.

Image: We Waste Time

Again, I want to shout gimmick. £10,000 coffee machine?! Milk from a tiny Somerset farm?! But again they pull it off. The coffee really is phenomenal, and could easily compete with London heavy-weights like Monmouth.

The same level of detail is found in their cakes…

Are there any other particular products you are really proud to sell and why?

We have a brilliant small baker called the bittersweet bakers. They’re really innovative and have recently been voted by the Evening Standard London’s number 1 biscuit maker. They look at the weather forecast for the following week and tailor the products they send us around that. So if it’s going to be sunny and light we’ll have for example lemon drizzle cakes, or blueberry cakes. If it’s going to be raining they will send us brownies and cookies, that sort of thing. Every week they do innovative stuff like giant adult oreos, cookie sandwiches, generally really exciting things that are always changing, and that’s part of our food philosophy overall really. We give customers something interesting and exciting that they can talk about or tweet about with their friends.

Image: The Perfect Trough

A baker who makes cakes based on what the weather will be like. It doesn’t really get any more seasonal than that. So where’s the catch? Is everything just woefully unaffordable?

Do you think that customers at the moment are seeking such a high level and are they willing to fork out for it in such a difficult economic time?

We are very competitive in price. We offer beautiful hot sandwiches every day for about £6, we’ve got a selection of cold sandwiches, granola, cakes and it’s not that expensive. I think people are beginning to get bored with the offers in more generic sandwich places and for a couple more pounds you get a great experience and great produce.

I can see the Attendant doing very well indeed. We’re forever discussing the importance of being spectacular and unique with our clients: letting social media do your marketing is a trend we’ve discussed for some time. And this is exactly the sort of thing that gets people tweeting. It’s a remarkable space that remains accessible and affordable.

So go on, spend a penny.

The Attendant, 27a Foley St. W1W 6DY

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