„It‘s all about understanding customer needs“

You are an expert in retail design, acting as an academic, a designer and a consultant. In your foreword to Hammertime², you address the academic perspective. What are the most significant current academic findings in this field?

Elisa Servais: In my experience, countless academic findings are published each year. Sadly, they too rarely make their way to practice. This is in part due to the journals they are published in and their academic tone. There is also the matter of academic research requiring a very pointed view, meaning it most often investigates individual aspects of a problem statement. For instance, in retail design academia, it's very common to find research on specific atmospheric factors: music tempo, specific color applications, etc.

That being said, what I appreciate in these findings is the constant focus on the lived experiences of customers. The accepted academic value chain is that value for the customer leads to value for the retailer and in turn all its partners. The customer is therefore always placed at the core of any problem statement and the research for solutions to it. This is an approach I personally implement in my design consultancy and which I would like to see more retailers also apply.

What does the concept of Convergion mean for your field of expertise, and specifically for your work – both academic and practical?

The Convergion model calls for a more holistic approach to the DIY and home improvement retail sector. At the core, it points out that value (for all stakeholders: customer, retailer, partners) is best achieved when the entire eco-system of factors leading to the delivery of a physical store experience are considered together.

The reason it resonates so much with me is that the need for this holistic approach to experience design was also a key result of my PhD research on "valuable in store experiences". If, as mentioned in the previous question, we place customers at the center of our considerations, we realize that today these consider all their interactions with a single retailer as one whole. They expect seamless transitions between communication and delivery. In practical terms: the products, the app, the website, the advertising campaigns, the in-store experience, the after-sales service must all operate as one.

This requires a shift in our industry's ways of working. We can no longer operate the various customer touchpoints…