Playing Nice: Why Journalism Dictates the Creative Retail Revolution
By Greg Spielberg, Founder, Imagination in Space, the creative retail agency.
Hello World. The creative retail revolution is here. And, as Method’s Jeff Meakins and Bret Janek wrote on Neatly Folded Sweater about brand values, “this isn’t a trend; it’s a movement.”
The creative retail movement is a shift in perspective that’s completely overhauling our cities, our marketing, our consumer engagement, our views of our own companies and ourselves. The movement is a shift from closed real estate to open real estate and desktop to mobile communities. It’s a transformation as big as the one from printing press to WordPress, and it’s driving transparency, collaboration, trust, openness and rapid shared economic development.
Real estate has gone open source, and there’s no going back. This is the first in a series of posts that are intended to spark conversation about creative retail, illuminate the market, share strategies and highlight best practices. Most of all, the series is meant to update us on real-time evolution of creative retail. Here we’ll take a quick look at the reasons even the biggest companies are getting into creative retail. And, how their strategies are dictated by journalism storytelling and playing nice.
Creative retail is the proliferation of pop ups, markets, shop shares, concept stores and retail collaborations. It’s the fusion of experiential marketing, traditional retail and journalism storytelling. Experiential marketing directly engages consumers — people — to create original, positive and memorable experiences. Retail sells a curated selection of products or services to drive revenue. Writers create narratives that explore and illuminate dynamic, real-life and imagined relationships. Relationships aren’t just about people; they’re about the interplay between everything around us
Man Bites Dog (On Paper)
The creative retail revolution isn’t driven by retail rules. It’s driven by journalism, and two phrases in particular: man bites dog and feed the daily beast. The silly first phrase reminds us that vanilla stories don’t make the news because they don’t capture our attention. It’s the reason we see BREAKING NEWS tickers; headlines including Dead, Most, Best, Brink, Shutdown, Startup, Disrupt; and products that are Brand New! New-New, or just different, unknown is the core of the original real-time consumer business: journalism. And now that new media and social media knocked all other consumer brands into the endless sea of competitive content, companies have to take Man Bites Dog seriously.
To feed the daily beast, you have to tell a lot of stories. Every day, all day, storytelling. Online, on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, newsletters, to press, to fans, to partners, to investors, to Snapchat, at conferences, panels, launch parties, promo videos, sizzle reels. And, even though there needs to be a cohesive experience across all platforms, the stories can never stay the same. Think about it — If you pick up a newspaper and it’s the same as yesterday, you’re undoubtedly picking up yesterday’s paper. Or, the New York Times made a big mistake. We’d stop reading the Times if they replayed yesterday’s news, or if they only talked about themselves.
It’s the same now with corporations. They can’t tell us daily or weekly about how great their soda or SaaS is. That gets boring and repetitive and boring and repetitive. And repetitive. So we turn off. In the physical world, we’ve been OK with having the same products over and over, but not with our stories. We can’t hear over and over how refreshing a Pepsi is or how HSBC is the world’s local bank. To keep the storytelling fresh, brands started newsrooms and hired storytellers like Contently, 23 Studies x Conde Nast, Studios@Gawker and Vice. They started creating good, old-fashioned journalism pieces about Pittsburgh mills and New Jersey bike shops and women entrepreneurs who shatter the glass ceiling while softly holding a child. The stories are authentic, new and nice, because they recognize the gigantic world outside the brand. They’re journalism. Journalism has always been an almost laughably kind industry — one of the few businesses that highlighted people just for being people. Look: the Tompkins Square Dog Parade in Gothamist; The science behind why plant pictures make us happy in the New York Times; Neve Campbell guessing which quotes come from The Donald and which from Frank Underwood in GQ. These stories don’t do much for us except provide bits of context to an infinitely dynamic world.
Journalism shows us that we returns to brands daily when they tell us new stories. When they offer up multiple choices for engagement. And, when they’re not trying to sell us something. It’s the original math of journalism — tell the community stories and they’ll come back. Put the products in the medium too, but a little off to the left. Focus on the very community that reads us and express their interests through our product. That’s a nice approach. Nice isn’t just a gracious sleight of hand. It’s likely the #1 driver for successful businesses. Google spent a few years researching the secret to productive teams, and guess what they found? The secret is being nice to each other. And one of the main drivers of nice is the ability for the community to express itself and Now that our companies are driven, critiqued and improved by public communities, we’ve had to view them as teammates rather than consumers. Now that communities respond to and share our stories real time, we see that they reward us for talking about them. We’re still not exactly used to it. At least those of us who remember when companies talked only about themselves. But we continuously love it. My favorite example is GE, the brilliant, boring industrial company that generates good will — and incredible Web traffic — by exploring the neuroscience behind suicide. As Global Director of Innovation Sam Olstein put it, “That is kind of our north star in all of our marketing efforts: How do we show up in an unexpected way.” Man Bites Dog.
Man Bites Dog (In Real Life)
Sharing your world, platforms and resources with the community is easy online. Social sharing is systematic, storage is cheap, and there is a galaxy of Websites willing to repost the content. There are also infinite interesting human stories to feature. There’s one catch, though: People still like people best. And online isn’t a person. So in the binary of “likes better” and “likes less,” online can never win over in person. That binary was irrelevant up until now because first there was no Internet, so it was all in person. Then the Internet allowed companies to finally tell more stories, and realize that was even valuable, so online was the key. But the Internet has been tied to desktops. Now with a mature mobile ecosystem, we can return to offline first but with the sharing power of mobile social media. The result is that the storytelling principles of online — nice, collaborative, unexpected, ever-changing, leveraging the community’s stories — power the offline world. Hello, Creative Retail.
The goal of corporate creative retail is the same as corporate journalism: Get people to care about you in real-time and give them as many reasons as possible to care. Hotels are the best example. The Ace and Standard Hotels don’t care whether you buy their core product, a room. Come by, hang out, take selfies in the lobby, dance in the club, drink in the bar, lounge on the rooftop, work on the couch, queue on the coffee line. Have a burger, have a beer, have a free hot chocolate with your ice skating, play some ping pong, browse the gift shop, listen to the band. We’ll open the door for you with the tip of a cap whether you’re a guest or not. Both of these businesses are, at their core, nice, and pleasant. They recognize that being just one product, a “hotel,” excludes 99.9% of the population. They also recognize the voice of the city that says, “Well, cool, yes, hotels are definitely useful. But we spend much more time eating, drinking, dancing, talking and working than we do sleeping in 2,000-thread Egyptian sheets.” And, by the way, “We already know that you’re a hotel!! You don’t have to remind us of that in every inch of your design!!”
The same goes with stores. Unless you plan on selling out of every product in one day, you don’t need to have all of them on the floor. We love buying, and prefer brick and mortar to online, but we’re community first and consumer second. In fact, since space is a storytelling medium, and our favorite medium to play in, you don’t have to sell anything at all. We’ll pop in for all sorts of other reasons! Trust us, we will come even if you have more than just our money in mind. A few years ago, Marc Jacobs’ pop up shop sold perfumes for tweets. At Glade’s Museum of Feelings over the holidays, the floor plan called for 99% art installation and 1% gift shop. On Fifth Avenue, the Nike store has an industrial sized treadmill with a big screen. Next door at New Balance, there’s a fella in the front who builds shoes onsite.
The Glade, Nike, New Balance and Marc Jacobs shops are built with the mobile media landscape in mind. We’re media companies now with our phones, photographs, friends and followers so companies build with mobile media companies in mind. The more dynamic the store, the more likely we’ll be interested. The more interested, the more likely we’ll share. New Balance’s cobbler is Man Bites Dog in the same way as GE’s content strategy — the subject is unexpected. These stores are still Creative Retail 1.0, though. They’re content marketing machines that are fun but too self-referential to be true journalism. Journalism isn’t meant to be a monologue (definition 2). It’s meant to establish and explore relationships between many people, places, products. Retail space, inherently public, open and community facing, is a space for expression and stories since it’s a medium. At the Club Monaco flagship down the street, we’re seeing a glimpse of Creative Retail 2.0, and at Samsung 837, across the street from The Standard, we’re seeing it full fledged.
Club Monaco has a simple math: Attract as much interest in as little space as possible. They went beyond men’s and women’s clothes (Story #1 and #2) into other lifestyle essentials. Up front is a standalone Toby’s Estate coffee shop (Story #3) that curates croissants from Balthazar (#4) and donuts from Dough (#5). Walk past the coffee shop and enter the Strand bookstore (#6) with a seating area and fireplace (#7). In the bookstore is a little flower shop to purchase stems (#8) or learn strategies from the florist who works on a nice wooden table (#9). Browse the book shelves and find more than 100 other, literal, storytelling options. Club Monaco’s flagship is an expression of New York City, of our creativity and of other voices.
If Club Monaco takes the perspective of a tight-knit lifestyle blog, Samsung Meatpacking is a full-fledged publication. The reasons for the community to engage is essentially endless. One is to fulfill curiosity into a store that does not sell any of its own products. Two is to contemplate the offset see-through architecture. Three is to watch screenings in the theater. Four, attend events. Five, get all tech crazy with phone x sound integrations that can “read” photos aloud and display your Instagram feeds. Six, visit the rotation of commissioned art. Seven, the VR tunnel. Eight, a responsive chair synced up to a virtual experience headset. Nine are unreleased phones. Ten are new products from Samsung’s IoT (internet of things) product lines like fridges and TVs. 11, the tech support you’ll inevitably need for all the gear. 12 is a family room with friendly gadgets, custom case etchings. 13 is the radio studio for DJs and podcasts. Story 14 is my favorite, the Smorgasburg-curated cafe in collaboration with half a dozen New York food businesses.
The Samsung store is not a product. It’s a social experiment in telling stories in space. Driven by people, on one of the most intergenerational blocks in the city, 837 is taking a point of view on retail. That space is yet another medium that we can use to explore the rapidly changing world of tech, the creators behind the tech world and the cultural expressions of the category. They’re acting like journalists but leveraging the ability for us to come consume content, share it and have a local coffee, too.
About the Author:
Greg Spielberg is founder of Imagination in Space, a creative retail and coalition-building agency based in New York. You can find the agency here on Twitter.
