By Andy Harris, Symphony GOLD
Intelligent virtual store design is one of the fastest growing technology applications in the retail industry. It’s helping retailers deliver a compelling in-store experience that retains consumer loyalty and drives financial performance. This new technology is helping retailers push beyond the boundaries of traditional category and space management offerings to quickly simulate and evaluate assortment and space alternatives based on shopping behavior and market trends.
In fact, traditional in-store testing of concepts is time-consuming, disruptive and costly. This is especially true for space planners who are trying to understand the overall impact of micro and macro space planning changes as they create new innovative store formats, or implement overall store changes that require moving heavy fixtures.
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In an effort to differentiate themselves and to connect with the omnichannel shopper, retailers need to create new shelf, aisle or even store-wide concepts quickly and effectively. In order to do this, they need new ways of creating and testing new concepts before they commit the time, money and resources to build them out in one store or across an entire chain. It is crucial to adopt faster processes to manage the shifting assortment and layout demands across all channels.
Virtual Reality, The New Frontier
Many retailers already use virtual environments to test NPD data and to access shopper insights. Taking this one step further, retailers are combining space planning software with these environments to make virtual collaborative planning sessions a part of the merchandising process. In fact, many retailers are practicing intelligent space planning with a combination of analytics to drive space optimization and virtual reality headsets to gain an in-store feel.
Consequently, category teams are developing store strategy from a consumer point of view and with insights on how any layout changes will affect shoppers. From understanding sightlines to judging shopper activation strategies, virtual reality testing helps these planners make decisions much more quickly, which directly affects in-store execution and the customer in-store experience.
For retailers, a collaborative and shopper-centric approach significantly speeds up the process of testing new category layouts, store formats, promotional elements and NPD awareness, all while improving the in-store experience with a customer-centric approach. Business units can plan their activities and prepare the deployment and execution of store activation, resulting in better execution effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
Looking forward, intelligent store design will integrate even more with Big Data and use virtual reality as a platform to understand how stores are performing. Store managers and staff will achieve real-time appreciation of their store’s heartbeat by moving beyond visualizations of planograms and products to integrate replenishment, supply chain data and macro and micro plans to visualize data across a store. This is really just the start of the impact VR will have in the retail store.
Andy Harris is Product Marketing Director for Visual Communications for Symphony EYC.
