Strategy for the '80's: harness store design to marketing plan

Discount Store News, May 26, 1986

Strategy for the '80's: Harness Store Design to Marketing Plan

NEW YORK -- "Painting a red stripe around the four walls isn't store design."

It also isn't communicating with the customer.

A lot of retailers, however, believing design is a necessary evil, try to solve their interior design problems by painting a bright band of color around the store or by taking some other surface treatment way out. They don't use store design to help set themselves apart from the crowd.

It's been a favorite solution in the mass market, according to store planner Kenneth Walker, because discounters, with their tight gross margin constraints, were afraid "to look too expensive."

It's also been because the discount firms who have dominated the field have been very "word oriented."

"They have put their emphasis on market research," Walker said, but today, sharp pricing is no longer enough to differentiate one chain from its competitors, so they "are falling short in communicating with the customer."

Walker, president and chief executive officer of the Walker Group/CNI, a store planning, architecture and design firm, has spent the last 15 years working with an impressive list of department store clients here and abroad: Burdines, Bloomingdale's, Bonwit Teller, Bullock's and London-based Harrod's are among them.

Much of his work has helped those retailers develop their signature appeal, in large part, by increasing their ability to entertain the customer. The glitzy "B'way" at Bloomingdale's, and the fantastic "Gator"-supported atrium in Burdines' Gainsville, Fla. store, are his firm's work.

The medium is the message: Shopping is fun and exciting. Walker thinks things in the discount store industry are starting to change now. He points to recent innovative design projects among the supermarket industry's leading firms as a sign of the changing times--and his firm's growing roster of mass market clients as another.

His New York City-based firm, with a reputation as upmarket as most of its clients, hatched the prototype design for The Gap and Circuit City superstores, and also for K mart's short-lived Reader's Market discount bookseller.

Last year, the firm completed its first discount department store assignment for Gemco.

A new contract with Lucky Stores, Gemco's supermarket parent, has also been signed and "will use some of the things we learned at Gemco."

"Supermarket retailing is very much a location business. There are only a couple of ways to differentiate yourself from the competition, and that's in the meat, fresh produce and deli/bakery areas," Walker added.

"American shoppers are too sophisticated. They're used to being catered to, whether its in terms of price or in-store service--or the lack of it. There are lots of choices out there."

It's when store design is used as a marketing tool, "in support of the merchandise assortment and operating plan" that a mass merchant can begin to set itself apart.

He used Ikea (not his firm's work), the Scandinavian-based ready-to-assemble furniture seller relatively new to the U.S., to make his point: "The merchandise, architecture and systems all work together. They have a consistent point of view."

This harmony of plan and purpose goes a long way toward reducing the odds that a competitor can knock off the design, thereby taking it out of the realm of the heavily-borrowed red stripe.

Because the discount store customer "comes in with a predetermined purchase in mind," the challenge, as every discounter who's ever juggled a soft lines/hard lines ratio knows, is to get them to shop the whole store.

Walker's answer: good design.

This means, for the discounter, more fully exploiting their stock-in-trade, the one-stop shopping environment. A feature no discount chain has exploited to maximum advantage, he said.

Furthermore, he thinks it's possible to harness good design effectively to a marketing plant without spending a ton of money.

At Gemco, for example, budget-priced, blue and white vinyl asbestos flooring became a signature "yellow brick road" main aisle. At The Gap, "roadside America" and its ubiquitous billboards are evoked with the store's facade--with low cost concrete blocks--to set the activewear outfitter apart from the pack.