Brain Food: To Boldly Go

For years, retailers have been touting the benefits of providing experiences that not only delight the eyes but engage the senses. Providing immersive environments that play to the five senses triggers neural pathways that enhance memory, unlock emotions, and enable customer engagement to be more profound and build longer-lasting relationships.

A song can mentally bring you back to high school, and a smell can transport you to the kitchen table of your childhood home. Research into the neuroscience of how our brain is intimately tied to our body’s perception of the world is providing a solid foundation for why we need embodied experiences to fully live in the “real” world.

With the emergence of the digital-selling realm, retailers initially expressed concern that a torrent of binary ones and zeros would sweep away the store as the platform for connecting to a brand and buying its products or services. When the word “dot-com” was regularly mentioned in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it would send a shudder down the spines of retailers that feared online sales would cannibalize its stores’ profits.

While shopping has indeed shifted a certain percentage of sales from the traditional store to shoppers’ desktops and other digital devices, it is no longer feared, and today, we see the digital interface as simply another vehicle for customer connection.

Developments in digital technology are now providing what some call “better than real” virtual constructions of immersive environments and shopping experiences. With enhanced visualization capabilities, we’ve come to expect “Avatar”-like virtual worlds as a baseline for what is acceptable when putting on a virtual reality (VR) headset. However, digital environments are often used as something apart from the in-store channel, rather than being a fully integrated series of platforms, between which the boundaries are blurred and customer experiences are dynamically shifting.

Collaborations between companies like Samsung and Oculus are allowing everyone with a smartphone to stand in a virtual world with the download of an app and a lightweight headset. No longer tethered to a computer, new VR headsets are providing increased mobility and enhancing, yet again, the possibility of virtual environments truly becoming a widely used channel for customer experiences.

But the virtual world still seems to stand apart from “real” experiences in a designer’s toolbox. The connection between VR and the real world are tenuous, and often these two mediums of customer experience are seen as independent of each other. Typically, one leaves the embodied world to experience the digital and then “comes back to reality.” The general perception is that a VR world is its own vehicle for customer-experience making. It is not typically seen as a way to get customers more interested in real experiences.

What if, instead of disconnecting customers from embodied experiences and having them experience the digital world in a vacuum, the digital world was expressly used to foster a deeper desire for the real thing? What if a digital experience was not treated as just entertainment but a preview or rehearsal for a trip to some exotic location? What if customers could stand in places they were about to visit, rather than simply clicking through an online gallery on a laptop? What if the virtual experience played to all of the senses – the feeling of mist on your face, wind in your hair, the smell and taste of salt water and the rumble of a volcano under your feet – rather than activating only the visual and auditory areas of the brain?

Would a virtual experience of a place make potential customers want to leap up from the comfort of their couch and head off to somewhere new?  In a word, yes!

Marriott Intl. (Bethesda, Md.) had the same questions, and they answered them by building a “Teleporter,” – a 4-D virtual experience portal that brings the experience of far-off lands to customers and makes them want to get up and go, to experience the real thing. (See some examples here and here.)

A mind shift to considering the digital realm to be less of an isolated series of selling channels and more as a vehicle to enhance the likelihood that guests will commit the time (and money) to an on-property or in-store, embodied experience, could refocus the intention of digital media use.

Retailers can’t deny the influence of digital technology on the way they have run their businesses since the online world grabbed hold of consumers wallets. This influence will only become more profound as a whole generation of shoppers sees their digital experiences as a natural extension of their embodied lives. As a result, their expectations about how experience should unfold will be wholly different than the generation before them. Digital experiences, including augmented and virtual reality, will lead to the necessity of a paradigm shift in using technology as a tool for meaningful engagement in-store.

If the retail market still harbors concern for the digital world undermining the in-store experience, can they use digital experiences to reverse the flow of traffic back into stores?

At the upcoming International Retail Design Conference (IRDC) in Montréal, I’ll look at the issues of creating VR experiences and how retailers can see them less as something to syphon off customers and revenue from stores, and more as a vehicle to provide customers with what we all crave in the end – novelty, meaningful relationships and actually being in places that engage us in experiences that are relevant.

David Kepron is Vice President – Global Design Strategies with Marriott International. His focus is on the creation of compelling customer experiences within a unique group of Marriott brands called the “Lifestyle Collection,” including Autograph, Renaissance and Moxy hotels. As a frequently requested speaker to retailers, hoteliers and design professionals nationally and internationally, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising as well as creativity and innovation. David is also author of “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” published by ST Media Group Intl. and available online from ST Books. @davidkepron; www.retail-r-evolution.com.