Retail brands that have made a success of their business are known not for competing with big brands like Walmart, wrote Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, but by creating unique shopping experiences for their customers, the community and their staff. Companies in Nigeria that have experimented with this concept to include Vita foam Comfort Centres, Coca Cola, Diageo and Nigerian Breweries with their merchandise display units and branded fridges, and Unilever in-store sales staff explaining new features of their products.
In the opinion of Nigel Hollis, Executive Vice President and Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown, successful brands must compete smartly and differently.
In the book Creating Passion Brands, Helen Edwards and Derek Day define three zones of brand perception: the zones of mediation, discovery, and intimacy. The Zone of Intimacy is the place where people are physically interacting with brands: holding the packages, reading the labels, sniffing, tasting, or touching the product. This is the zone where brand perceptions and images are most intensely felt, experienced, and built.
The authors say that “here brand contact is voluntary, sensory, and direct. The brand is there because the consumer wants it to be, and its sensorial qualities taste, colour, fragrance, feel, sound, weight, atmosphere are strongly perceived and noted.”Of course a brand has control over the sensory qualities of other product, but if it is sold through retail intermediaries, it does not have direct interaction with shoppers.
Consequently, a big opportunity to make a real and memorable difference is lost. But there’s a solution that has proven to be extremely successful: Create a unique shopping environment around your brand. This can facilitate the direct interaction that can build the virtuous circle of trust that leads to shopper loyalty and profit. This shopping environment may be a store in which you deliver your brand directly to your customers, but for many brands that’s not feasible. Even so, there may be overlooked opportunities to draw shoppers into your brands’ space, whether that’s a section of a store, an aisle, or a shelf.
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