PopUp Retail

Business Multiplier & A Path to Success…

# A Note from Writer :

In this white paper, I spell out the High level value proposition of PopUp store in Retail domain. I explain and dispute myths held by Principle companies, Retailer and Customer. Then I examine challenges when it comes to while Business execution phase. Then, I listed benefits that supports Business models in Retail. I conclude by listing Key points helpful for concreting the presence of Retail & Grow exponential by reaching out to the larger audience.

Shreyas Gawande, Digital Retail SME,

Makers Lab (R&D Unit), Tech Mahindra

Introduction

First of all let’s understand WHAT is Retail ?

Retail is the process of selling consumer goods or services to customers through multiple channels of distribution to earn a profit. Retailers satisfy demand identified through a supply chain.

1. WHY Retail is Important ?

The retail sector dominates the market, and will continue to do so for years to come. The majority of India’s population is located in villages with limited or no access to digital platforms. Plus our mentality of “dekho, parkho, khareedo” will continue to fuel retail dominance. No wonder the retail segment is expected to double its growth in the next 5 years.” said, Hardik Harsora, GUEST WRITER, Co-founder, Effex Business Solutions.

Also considering global retail market there are various aspects which amplify the Importance of retail :

A.] Variety

With a variety of occupations, career streams (buying, visual merchandising, marketing, finance, e-commerce and human resources) and retail industry sectors to choose from there are a multitude of opportunities. It’s also an industry where you can start at the bottom and work your way up to the top.

Veriety in Retail Store

B.] Flexibility :

There are not many industries that can offer you the same degree of flexibility as retail. For many people, especially those with family commitments, the retail sector is an ideal environment in which to work because of the flexibility of the hours and shift patterns. This means you can still be employed and earning an income whilst also being able to attend to other commitments you might have.

Business Flexibility

C.] Customer Centric Approach :

Customer centric is a way of doing business with your customer in a way that provides a positive customer experience before and after the sale in order to drive repeat business, customer loyalty and profits. But, a customer-centric company is more than a company that offers good service.

Custoemr is the Key

i. What does it mean to be customer-centric ?

Customer centricity is not just about offering great customer service, it means offering a great experience from the awareness stage, through the purchasing process and finally through the post-purchase process. It’s a strategy that’s based on putting your customer first, and at the core of your business.

ii. Importance :

When you put your customer at the core of your business, and combine it with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you collect a wealth of data, which gives you a full 360 view of the customer. This can then be used to enhance the customer experience.

• You can use customer data to understand buying behavior, interests and engagement.
• You can identify opportunities to create products and services for your best customers.
• You can use customer lifetime value to segment customers based on top spending customers.

However, Many more things which happens at the stage, which helps retailer the most :

• Identify the best customers.
• Focus on products and services for the best customers.
• Use Customer Lifetime Value to segment customers.
• Have a commitment to customer success.
• Engage with customers from the beginning.
• Demonstrate customer commitment from the top-down.
• Foster a customer-centric culture.
• Recognize the customer across all channels.
• Design processes and policies from the customer’s point of view.
• Measure what matters to customers.
• Encourage customer innovation.

2. Current Challenges, Problem statements in Retail :

Depending on each level of Retail the challenges are different. Like the way, Small scale business always has problems in terms of Engaging in customers relation & on the other hand Principle companies faces different challenges in their pursuit of growth and sustenance like;

#1. Consumers are Choosing Multichannel Buying Experiences :

With more complete e-retail experiences available, and shipping times greatly reduced, it is little wonder around 96% of Americans utilize online shopping in one way or another. However, those same Americans spend about 65% of their total shopping budget in traditional brick-and-mortar locations.

In other words, while almost everyone is shopping online, they are making more purchases in-store.

#2. Customers Expect a Seamless Experience :

When transitioning between online and in-store experiences, customers not only want the same products to be available, they also want their experience to be seamless. This means, if they are a regular online customer, they want to be treated like a regular customer when they visit a brick-and-mortar location. If they made an online purchase earlier in the day, the in-store systems should already have a record of it.

If retailers can create this type of fluid online/offline experience for their customers, they can cease pitting their channels against one another. Centralized customer data can help retailers build a seamless, fluid experience — beginning with an easily-accessible customer profile.

#3. To Attract Customer Loyalty, Retailers Need an Experience Which Stands Out :

Customer experience is the biggest contributor towards brand loyalty, with a negative experience being the most significant factor in affecting a customer’s likelihood to make a repeat visit. Don’t forget, most customers also serve people in their own working lives, meaning when they are on the other side of the counter, they want to feel important.

While promotions and offers can certainly contribute towards helping customers feel like they are special, the real key to an outstanding experience is personalization. Getting to know customers from their previous purchases and interests can help retailers drive loyalty. These insights can be gleaned from data, or even a simple conversation. The size of the business will no doubt inform which of these methods is more convenient, but nobody should be too big for a quick chat with a regular customer.

Personalized content and offers can be delivered via the customers’ preferred contact method — even a personalized email subject line can make a world of difference — anticipating their wants and needs, and guiding them down the sales funnel towards their next purchase.

#4. A Siloed Marketing Infrastructure Makes It Expensive and Unwieldy to get Your Message Across.

Modern marketing makes it necessary for businesses to engage with their customers across many different channels. From SMS, to email and social media, multi-channel communications are essential to engagement which, in turn, drives the creation of the perfect customer experience.

However, with so many separate channels, it’s not uncommon for customer data to become siloed. If all the moving parts of a marketing department are not communicating efficiently and working together, customers can become overwhelmed with conflicting or repeat messages. This bombardment of marketing communications can easily have the opposite of the intended effect and drive customers to competitors with a clearer and more congruent message. The right technology and communication procedures can ensure all arms of a marketing team are on the same page. Having a clear strategy will ensure all channels are working together instead of against one another — saving time and money.

#5. So Many Technologies Exist to Drive Marketing and Sales, but They Don’t Seem to Work Together

While the amount of data gathered by businesses keeps growing at an alarming rate, the number of staff available to analyze it is staying more-or-less the same. What’s important, then, is making sure all this data is being used in the correct way and not contributing towards the data silo problem.

This means finding a technology solution which can handle the huge amount of data being generated and ensure it is focused in a direction which best benefits — rather than overwhelms — marketing efforts. The data scientist approach to marketing is only going to become more prevalent as time goes on so when creating a truly unified omni channel service.

3. Retailers also face many challenges while engaging in business relations with principal companies. Obviously, their challenges are different. Some of the most crucial ones are :

1. Without clear direction and involvement from the company leader(s), a wholesale retail store can soon go off course.
2. Natural and man-made disasters.
3. Overhead costs : Supplies and goods, Utility bills, Insurance, Interest.
4. Advertising, Accounting fees, Legal fees, Labor burden, Repairs, Telephone bills, Travel expenditures, and Utilities.
5. Scam or a Fraud? — by customers, employees, vendors, or partners.
6. Waiting Too Long to Sell.
7. Thinking You Don’t Have to Promote or Market Yourself.

# Path To Success, Pop Up Stores :

99.5 The Wolf Pop up Store

Retail is a fast-moving industry as organizations try to respond to — and predict — customer demand and future trends. The retail industry employs around 2.9M people in the UK and generates over £260 bn a year in sales — larger than the combined economies of Portugal and Denmark.

# Important role of PopUp Stores:

# Unorganized Sector is Killing the Growth of Indian Economy. — False

The unorganized sector has a crucial role in our economy in terms of employment and its contribution to the National Domestic Product, savings and capital formation.

The manufacturing activity share of the unorganized sector ranges near to 40%.

Small Story which help one in understanding the Benefits of PopUp concept :

Capture By Capt. Raghu Raman — ( An Ex Army Officer)

- A Juice seller in Pune used to sell a Wheat & Indian lilac (Neem) juice.
He was charging 15 rs. for wheat juice. He kept the Wheat grass juice in transparent pot & Neem juice in steel pot not intentionally. He often go to him & always use to ask about Wheat grass juice. One day I went & ask him, “Whats is in the Steel pot ?” He open the lid & offered me a glass of Neem juice. It’s very good for health, So I simply went ahead & drank it. Later he ask him how much for a glass ? He smiled & said, “Nothing”. I thought I mistaken in my listening. He read that from my face & smilingly said, “There is a process for making a Wheat grass juice, which takes time. People generally take this for there health & Neem is something I do not put much effort in making juice. So I offered it for free.” He is having a customer centric approach which helps to pull him more customer to his shop also he was focused on customer retention. He was again feeling Exclusive. So I preferred to go to his PopUp Store.

Another One.

- A normal street vendor use to sell Flowers at Festivals, Colors at Holi, Flag monuments at Independence or Republic day, Christmas caps & white Beard. He always do this over the year. His one business has no link with the other one because of the obvious reasons that the Colors used for Holi is not useful until next Holi.

Look at his efforts or Management skills bind with crisp time lines resulting high earning & huge profit out of it. Entire business paradigm & strategy shift has been done with in very short time span. Even well organized IT firm will take around 5 to 6 year to change their Business paradigm. PopUp store strategy helps a lot over the short time strategy without missing out the important part of Customer Connect.

# The fact that came out from study :

1. A NCEUS (The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector is a national body commissioned by the Indian government to address the issues faced by enterprises in relation to the unorganized sector) report estimates that in 2005 out of the 458 million persons employed in India, 95 percent or 435 million worked in the unorganized sector, generating 50.6% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

2. According to a Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) report of 2014, the unorganized or informal sector account for more than 90% of the workforce in the country and almost 50% of the national income evolves from this sector. … The contribution of the unorganized sector to NDP has been over 60%.

3. Although as a matter of fact, the informal economy is associated with developing countries where up to 60% of the unorganized workforce works, and almost every economic system contains an informal economy in some proportion. If the unorganized sector gets regulated to the mainstream formal sector, the share of the unorganized sector in the economy will ultimately be reduced. This will automatically reflect in the net taxes and manageable skilled and educated workforce.

4. Solution Approach :

- The National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association, passionately advocates for the people, brands, policies and ideas that help retail thrive.

“In today’s competitive and evolving retail landscape, companies need leaders who are willing to take risks to make more meaningful, personal connections with their customers.” said, NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay.

The Grandfather of pop-up stores was Swatch founder Nick Hayek and his Swatch stores. This was followed by the financial crisis of 2007–08, but the technology wasn’t ready for this marketplace, because of Obvious reasons.

On one hand, the economic crisis pushed brands to find more flexibility. But it’s really about the technology. Millennials are simply not buying the way their parents were buying.

The Idea of PopUp Store is not to fill all the places of the mall. Certainly, it’s better to have two pop-up stores on the street than two empty spaces in the mall. Well, that decision solely work as per Retailers mindset.

We can solve most of the problems stated above by PopUp Retail Store. Pop-up stores Which comes under PopUp Retail strategy.

# What Is Pop-Up Retail ?

- Pop-up retail is a retail store (a “pop-up shop”) that is opened temporarily to take advantage of a faddish trend or seasonal demand. Demand for products sold in pop-up retail is typically short-lived or related to a particular holiday. Pop-up retail stores are found most often in the apparel, brands & Seasonal. Pop-ups are becoming a mainstream media channel when it comes to retailing. Historically, when you look at retail marketing, the main driver of retail is sales per square foot. But because of the way customers are behaving the past few years with the big push of social media and the influence of millennials, we’ve seen a transition from physical retail as a channel of sales to a channel of communication or experience.

5. Why it is necessary Capture behavior of a customer :

- Customer centric approach is the Key.

- A Small story around How customer want them to be feel special : Once a developer uploaded an App on Apple’s App Store which was costing around 1000USD. On launching an app, it was popping a message as “I am Rich…!” that’s it. People were downloading the app only as a status symbol. Point here is having that app in their iPhone which was feeling them that they are Rich. This is how customer expects where they invest money.

• Big Brands also come on streets & put PopUp Store for sale NO for People connect YES.

More and more brands are communicating through pop-up stores. They’re not just trying to sell goods but to connect with customers. It’s the idea that commerce isn’t online or off-line, but a blurry area — you can touch in physical retail but buy online.

# Can you provide an example?

A biggest example would be of Google.

Google opened a pop-up store in SoHo. — (SOHO — small office/home office)

This store isn’t for people to necessarily buy things, though they can, but for Google to advertise its products and for people to feel and connect with the brand.

6. One of the most Successful Pop up Story is StoreFront.

- Storefront likes to call itself the Airbnb of short-term retail space. Since it was founded six years ago, the New York startup has become the world’s largest marketplace for brands to connect with retail spaces. It currently has more than 10,000 listings representing more than $1.2 billion of annual rental value across three continents, with active listings in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Amsterdam and Hong Kong.

- By 2023, we want to be a $1 billion company. We hope to add another 20,000 more listings in the next 24 months.

Pop-up stores are also beneficial to retailers; in a down market, sellers can take advantage of lower rents and shorter leases if they are looking to generate sales but have a limited amount of inventory. Pop-up stores may appear under short-term leases in abandoned retail spaces, which also provides landlords some reprieve.

# Examples of Pop-Up Retail :

1. In November 2013, Samsung opened a pop-up shop in New York City’s SOHO area that worked as a brand experience space. The temporary pop-up space was extended and eventually became a permanent retail space.
2. In July 2015, Fourth Element opened the world’s first underwater pop-up shop at a depth of 19 feet at TEKCamp.2015 in Somerset, England.

7. Some key resolutions for Pop Up Stores :

1. Utilize the space within Limited Space:
2. Add strategic seating : Unique displays and lifestyle elements that represent your brand guarantee a memorable experience for anyone who walks in your store.
3. Think outside the box:
4. Be a visual thinker: Collaborating with an artist whose aesthetic reflects your brand adds a distinctive touch and instantly elevates your space.
5. Be Collaborative: Understands that there is power in numbers.
6. Offer Deals:
7. Pick a killer location:
8. Cater to your audience: Pop-Up Store may include activities for the kids, like face painting and games. This kept the kids happy and the parents busy with shopping.
9. Be the first but Don’t Hurry up: If you have a new product that can change the landscape of retail, don’t give other brands the chance to catch up and take over your share of the target market.
10. Welcome feedback: Modify Pop-Up Store functioned as both a storefront and a sounding board where customers could voice opinions about what they’d like to see in future collections. When opening your Pop-Up Store, welcome the idea of hearing customers concerns, likes, and dislikes. After all, they’re the ones purchasing your product.
11. Surprise your audience: This will always help, As Everyone like to get Surprised.

# Conclusion :

Retail is expanding steadily in the country. Customers have the ever increasing choice of products at the lowest rates. E-commerce is probably creating the biggest revolution in the retail industry, and this trend will continue in the years to come. India’s e-commerce industry is forecasted to reach US$ 53 billion by 2018. Retailers should leverage the digital retail channels (e-commerce), which would enable them to spend less money on real estate while reaching out to more customers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. It is projected that by 2021 traditional retail will hold a major share of 75%, organized retail share will reach 18% and e-commerce retail share will reach 7% of the Total Retail Market.

Nevertheless, the long-term outlook for the industry is positive, supported by rising incomes, favourable demographics, entry of foreign players, and increasing urbanization.

“ There are a number of benefits for a retailer or brand to do a pop-up. Among the top benefits, outside of sales, can include brand awareness with press, media, influencers and customers, customer education — such as allowing you to give customers a more in-depth education of your value proposition and product offerings — and experiencing a brick and mortar environment,” shares Melissa Gonzalez, CEO of The Lionesque Group and author of the recently released book, “The Pop-Up Paradigm”.

Happy Shopping

#Abbreviations :

1. NCEUS — (The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector)
2. GDP — Gross Domestic Product
3. CCA — Customer Centric Approach
4. CII — Confederation Of Indian Industries
5. SOHO — Small Office / Home Office
6. NRF — National Retail Federation

# Related Links :

https://www.ibef.org/industry/retail-india.aspxhttps://www.forbes.com/

https://www.forbes.com/

https://stores.org/?s=Pop+Up+retail

https://www.trzcacak.rs/imgb/hhRJioi/ — Business Ecosystems.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleleinbachreyhle/2014/12/24/pop-up-retailers-must-know-details-to-make-yours-a-success/#1da59fee27e1

http://www.995thewolf.com/wolf-pop-up-shop/

http://www.keepcalmandposters.com/poster/429107_keep_calm_and_happy_shopping

Thank You Note :

Thank you for spending time in reading, Hope you like this High level article. Will be posting out multiple retain structures & strategies in trend soon.

_Regards
Shreyas Gawande,

Digital Retail SME, Makers Lab (R&D unit), Tech Mahindra.