Thought Leadership

Are you curious to see behind the smoke and mirrors of Fragrance Lab and discover its inspiration? At The Future Laboratory we keep our nose firmly to the ground, identifying signs of consumer change in order to anticipate the future and steer the conversation. LS:N Global is our trends and consumer insight network that helps our clients to keep one step ahead. The Fragrance Lab, the result of a collaboration between Selfridges, Campaign Design, Givaudan and The Future Laboratory, reflects our research into the future of retail, which discovered that brands need to be experience-providers and thought-leaders, and to offer personalisation.

Today we will look behind the curtain and the paywall to reveal some of the stories on the retail innovators that are offering more than products. They are also thought-leaders who are bringing ideas to consumers to inspire them. Thought-leadership is an integral part of Total Retail, a 360-degree retail experience in which the focus is not solely on the transaction. These stellar examples of thought-leadership show how it can drive loyalty, make a statement and include consumers in a conversation. This preview will be available only for a short time, until midnight on Friday. It is the last of three previews of the many highlights that LS:N Global has to offer.

Read what the press has been saying about Fragrance Lab here.

That moment marked a changing of the guard. The next generation of luxury consumers will not reel at the sight of sneakers on the catwalk. Nor will they be satisfied with a retail experience that is slower and more expensive than the one they can find online.

Kyvetos’s Sneakerboy store, which opened in September in Melbourne, Australia, caters for the next generation of luxury consumers with a mix of new technology and old-fashioned retail virtues. A former buyer at Australian department store Harrolds, Kyvetos saw his store as an ‘opportunity to re-imagine the whole thing’, asking himself the question of how to cater for a market that half shops online and half walks the street.

Customers in Sneakerboy pay for their products in store using the Sneakerboy app on their phones or on Sneakerboy’s iPads, but they leave the shop empty-handed. Sneakerboy carries no stock, only a range of samples for fitting. Once a purchase has been made, an order is sent to a warehouse in Hong Kong, which ships the sneakers directly to the customer’s home.

With no stock to cater for, 77 of the 80 square metres in Sneakerboy’s Melbourne store can be given over to shop floor. ‘If we were doing what we were doing in a traditional sense, we would have to be about 40% bigger,’ says Kyvetos. In Australia, where retail rents are high, saving space means saving money. Yet, for Kyvetos, competing with online stores on price is less important than competing in terms of product range.

Traditional Western seasons are meaningless to the growth markets of the East, so in his re-imagining of the store, Kyvetos decided to discard them. ‘Being from Australia and always having had to buy anti-climatic collections, I’ve always said, ‘We shouldn’t have seasons,’ ’ he tells LS:N. Without stock to shift, Sneakerboy can switch its products with the flexibility of an online store. ‘We’ve been able to present online-type collections in physical spaces,’ says Kyvetos.

For luxury brands to connect with the next generation of consumers, they will have to embrace this kind of flexibility. Kyvetos echoes the findings of a recent study by consultants Bain & Company, which showed the luxury base fragmenting over the next 15 years. ‘Since opening Sneakerboy, I’ve been surprised by the range of the age demographic,’ he says. ‘It’s a culture shift rather than an age shift.’

There is no longer a ‘typical’ luxury consumer, says Kyvetos. ‘What’s the future of luxury? It’s luxury brands appealing to a broader culture than just the establishment.’

US – US-based beauty retailer Sephora has launched Beauty Board, a social networking site that lets users upload photos to share beauty looks and recommend products.

Beauty Board adopts the Pinterest inspiration board format, except the feed is made up of user-generated content. Users can upload pictures of themselves and then tag the items from Sephora.com that they used to create their looks, making it easy for others to shop from the social platform.

‘Our beauty lovers are gathering and sharing beauty tips across a variety of social properties like Instagram and Pinterest, as well as our blog and beauty community site,’ said Sephora’s Julie Bornstein in a press release. ‘We took what we admire as social users to the next level by developing and integrating our newest social site, Beauty Board, into our Sephora.com experience.’

For a company that has seen mobile sales grow by 150% since 2012, according to Mobile Commerce Daily, it’s crucial that Beauty Board is available across all of Sephora’s digital channels.

Shopping on social media is the next step for brands that have mastered other social media platforms. As predicted in our 2012 macrotrendTransmedia Futures, the successful brands will be the ones that facilitate social sharing.

Add pervasive technology into the purchase tracking equation and things become even more accurate. In one respect consumers have become used to online retailers providing helpful suggestions for products or coupons/vouchers based on cookies – which is like legitimised stalking. I consider it useful and definitely opt-in. But learning that retailers can now measure the signals between a smartphone and a wi-fi antenna to count how many people walk by or enter a store makes me think of an invisible drone following my every move. Then there is the video footage that stores can use to study how shoppers navigate the different aisles to determine how long they linger and whether they choose a product for the first time or as a repeat purchase.

Apple’s new geo-location tracking device iBeacon will have a big impact on retailers. US retail brands including Macy’s and American Eagle Outfitters have announced partnerships to trial the software and will, in time, show how consumers’ shopping habits are changing in physical stores. This invisible technology can recognise regular customers from their smartphone’s ID, and even their age and gender. But the genius part is that some technology can measure shoppers’ moods. Paired with predictive apps such as Google Now, I like to think that a store might identify my good mood on a Friday afternoon in anticipation of going out with the girls, and hey presto, a deal on multiple bottles of prosecco would be forthcoming.

Once consumers with privacy issues get over their reservations about being watched in-store or tracked via their mobile device, I hope they will see the benefits that sharing data with retail brands can bring. It will help their shopping journeys of the future and can save them money in the long run. What’s not to like?

For more insights on the future of data-mining and predictive retail technology, see our Total Retail micromarket. And learn how consumers feel about The Dawn of the Mega-Systems in our macrotrend. 

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