06 Nov The customer as a guest (Entertainment store)
The Customer as a Guest
(Entertainment store)
New disciplines in retail and merchandising have led the rise of a large number of new experts whose specialisms can be applied to pharmacies. Space managers recommend optimising a shop’s layout to give customers more space and put them in contact with the largest possible number of products. Merchandising layout experts know the best ways of organising the layout of the retail floor and its various product sectors while visual merchandising experts suggest the best ways for displaying products. Category management experts collect and analyse data to construct a picture of your clientele, chart consumer trends and then use this information for optimizing your pharmacy’s design to increase sales. All of these new approaches to pharmacy design are very useful but their application risks making every pharmacy identical and similar in look and feel to a large supermarket.
As your customers are often tired and demotivated, your pharmacy’s interior should be relaxing and have a revitalising effect,transforming stress into positive energy and making them more receptive to advice.
Nowadays, consumer trends are much more complex than it used to be. Consumers go in search of a particular product to satisfy a particular need. They hunt for the latest products looking to have fun and socialise at the same time without necessarily wanting to buy something straight away. Pharmacies have the potential to become the cross-roads where all of the diverse consumer trends meet as they are places where consumers find a variety of different stimuli. Pharmacies should try to diversify, moving away from a retail-centred approach to one which aims to entertain, fascinate and educate customers, just as if they where house guests. Even if today’s consumers generally have much more than they need, they will continue to spend if what they are buying satisfies an emotional impulse, is fashionable or perceived as inherent to sustained their lifestyle. In short, consumer spending is driven by desire rather than need. As a result, retail outlets are turning every purchase into pure entertainment, where the Emotional Quota (the relationship between impulse, emotion and function) is the critical factor making consumers buy rather than the product itself.
Firstly, shop design must engineer spaces that provide consumers with extraordinary “emotional experiences”. Retail outlets must be thought of as a theatre where products merge with the set. Rather than dominate the stage, products must coexist with more emotional and immaterial factors. Secondly, pharmacy design must be totally customer centred, taking customer satisfaction as the starting point from which to begin the design process as well as having it as the overall aim. Good pharmacy design leaves the customer satisfied, providing the foundation stone for a customer’s continuing loyalty to the pharmacy.
Sartoretto Verna helps transform buyers into long-standing clients through our intelligent design process. We use a functional analysis of the pharmacy as the basis for designing an interior that gives each pharmacy its own individual identity and particular atmosphere. This is done by taking into consideration the consumer’s total experience (smells, sounds, tastes and tactile experiences) rather than concentrating exclusively on the goods on display. By involving everyone of your customer’s 5 senses, you will make their experience of your pharmacy around 15-20% more memorable. This is very important as today’s customers buy something because they are curious or interested in it not, just because they need it. For this reason, pharmacies must be able to stimulate its clientele intellectually, physically and emotionally – persuading them to spend more time in the shop, buy, remember their experience and want repeat it.
To create a new style or new customer trends, talent and motivation are required both of which are on a higher plane to other tried-and-tested methods. Such creativity is difficult to repeat, comes before its time and is impossible to clone and reproduce on a large scale. Sartoretta Verna’s creations are concrete testimonies to the power of ideas, the genius of their creators, and the pleasure of the spark of inspiration and passion from which every design has leapt forth. The design of Sartoretto Verna’s ®Ral System furniture series is based on two distinct yet inextricably linked factors: freedom and peace of mind. We freely experiment with new ideas and materials and give our clients peace of mind as they can trust in our extensive catalogue of case studies showing are proven track record of delivering results as well as in our staff who share the same values with our clients and constantly give prove their worth.
“A journey of discovery does not consist in searching for new lands, but in having new eyes” (Proust)