Social Retail Research

 

Social retail is a collaborative platform that connects restaurants, streets, campuses, and cities to people by providing environments and events that encourage community and idea sharing.  Social retail is not 'social media for retail', like using Facebook and Instagram, but is a new approach for customer relations. Let us break this down for you; social retail does for businesses what co-working does for the office space. When coworkers from separate companies get together and collaborate, they can share ideas and discuss solutions.  The 10 social retailing tactics include: monitoring and analytics, targeting advertising, user-generated content, check-ins, social graph analytics, working the crowd, gamification, F-commerce, social shopping, and group buying. 

Home and lifestyle retailer, West Elm, continues to connect with young entrepreneurs through their West Elm Local initiatives by building assortments from regional designers and allowing these vendors to share their brand story. They’ve also introduced their small business grant program and have portfolio reviews at stores throughout the country.

These initiatives show that fostering the local environment is key towards building communities and giving new talent access to gain the exposure they need to build their brand. It also encourages active conversation between the retailer, designer and customer, ultimately bringing together like-minded people that share the same beliefs and not just providing a transactional experience.

By creating a collaborative space it encourages creative conversation between designers/artists and the customers around the product including the vision and process that led to the design. The workshop further displays the clever solutions that have to be considered to create beautiful and conscious design in a tactile manner that really resonates. A regular retail store showcases the finished product only and rarely tells the whole story.

Social retail as a concept converted into a space is displayed by Staples collaborating with Workbar, where they offer shared work spaces within select retail locations.  This creates a retail space as an experience venue.

Urban retail is a shopping venue offering community goods and services accessible by surrounding areas and drawing from a wider market area.  Pop-up shops and markets are examples of urban retail spaces, opening the community to new products experiences.