Part 3: Practices and Strategies for Pop-Up Retailing – Primary Activities
Part 3: Practices and Strategies for Pop-Up Retailing – Primary Activities
Chapter 8: Design, Layout and Display
Chapter Overview
Experts agree that a delightful and surprising shopping experience is a distinctive characteristic of pop-up shops. Pop-up retail, as an innovative marketing strategy, is considered a “typical expression of the experience economy”1. Moreover, the ephemeral pop-up shop is also a spatial practice on the boundary between stable place and transitory space. Therefore, pop-up shops are viewed as differential space to immerse the shoppers in an interactive environment to co-create meaning to products and experiences.1 Shopping experiences involve customers interacting with tangible and intangible aspects of a shopping environment. This chapter focuses on topics related to tangible factors, such as store layout and display, but also covers intangible elements, such as characteristics of employees and other customers in a shopping environment.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of the chapter, readers will be able to:
- Describe the key differences in retail designs between pop-up and traditional bricks-and-mortar stores.
- Categorize multi-sensory retail experiences and the strategies behind them.
- Compare design strategies for different pop-up formats and functions.
Setting the Context
VIDEO
The following short video introduces two female friends at a coffee shop who have just returned from visiting a Sunday pop-up market with vendors that promote a healthy lifestyle. They reflect on their experience, the atmosphere of the market and wonder if there will be follow-up communications or continued customer engagement initiatives from any of the vendors beyond the one-time pop-up event.
1. Retail Design: Pop-Up vs. Bricks-and-Mortar
1.1 Shoppers’ Perceptions
Research shows that shoppers’ perceptions of pop-up shops are different from their perceptions of traditional bricks-and-mortar stores. Ibrahim & Chua (2010) investigated shoppers’ perceptions of permanent and temporary retail space (in-line store vs. retail carts) in shopping centres in Singapore and found that customers view in-line stores and retail carts as sharing three common image dimensions: atmosphere, variety of product and service quality. Customers also perceive in-line stores as offering value. In addition, shoppers rated overall retail space attributes and factors higher on in-line stores than retail carts, which may suggest that shoppers consider in-line stores to be superior to retail carts. Specifically, the in-line store is regarded highly for its attributes of means of payment, general lighting and general accessibility. In contrast, the retail cart ranked higher on product type and service quality of staff.2
Although the findings reported are limited to the shopping mall context and focus on only one form of pop-up shop, they do, to certain degree, provide empirical support for the notion that shoppers’ perceptions differ between pop-up shops and their b