Back to the future
Published: 19 May, 2011
Technology has moved on a long way in the two decades since Shopping Centre was launched, and it has changed the face of shopping, finds Sean Kelly
As retailers struggled in the depth of the UK’s 1990/91 recession, partner John Hollis and a core team of consultants from Accenture (then known as Andersen Consulting) were otherwise engaged. On the future.
The Accenture main board had tasked the team with conceiving the ‘next generation of retail challenges’ for Accenture’s clients in Europe. The task was to build a facility to capture the essence of the future retail landscape, at which Accenture’s consultants would engage with clients about business change. The result? Smart Store Europe – a £3m facility in Windsor which opened its doors in autumn 1992 – a year after Shopping Centre launched.
“Smart Store Europe was to preach a message of the retail and related industries being revolutionised by massive changes to be driven by the future ‘internet’ - a term then unknown in public circles,” says Hollis, who ran Smart Store until 1998. “The facility quickly became a massive hit with clients and, in a sense, turned ‘consulting’ on its head in the process.”
Hollis and his team hunted worldwide for future and technology change concepts. In California he met Prof Jim Clark (founder of Silicon Graphics Inc in 1982 and then co-founder of Netscape in 1994).
“It was immediately clear to me that, if just 30 per cent of his ideas about ‘a commercialised information superhighway’ came to fruition, retail and related industries would never be the same again,” Hollis recalls.
The Smart Store development team - including Hollis, Kevin Duffill and David Symonds, and Accenture’s US-based then worldwide head of food Glen Terbeek - injected new ideas for technologies, business practices and their implications into a thought-provoking 24,000-sq ft facility.
It sought to question whether companies were prisoners of their past; with a room built as the inside of a customer’s head ‘to help see the future through the eyes of the customer’, and areas illustrating the ‘digital home of the future’, the ‘store formats of the future’ and many operational or back office functions.
“Many ideas and technologies which later became commonplace were first simulated or showcased at Smart Store including Home Delivery, the use of hand scanners for self-scanning, multi-channel retailing, meal solutions, virtual mirrors for clothes shopping and GPS mobile marketing, among others,” Hollis says. “Glen Terbeek pushed us to be logically provocative. Initially some retailers felt we were too radical. That was great – we didn’t want to deliver comfortable or known messages; we simply got agreement to quote the skeptics on placards in the facility. But as the future we were illustrating started to unfold, we were swamped with demand and related work.”
The future customer experience will remain an industry priority – but one driven by technology, believes Kate Ancketill, founder of GDR Creative Intelligence, trend consultancy to consumer-facing brands worldwide.
“Future mall customers will primarily be seeking entertainment and leisure because e-commerce will increasingly provide the transactional experience - so on one hand people will be more likely to go to stores for specialised services and education, and on the other hand for socialising, entertainment, thrills and immediate gratification,” she says.
“There’ll be more in-store gaming and checking-in incentives from Facebook Deals, Foursquare and their ilk, offering discounts and offers,” she forecasts. And virtual experiences will come to the fore, as H&M has recently trialed in New York. Shoppers view virtual outfits via their phone’s screen outside the store, take a photo of a friend standing in front of the outfit, appearing to wear it, and then receive a 10 per cent discount at the till upon production of the photo. “This will undoubtedly become a form of entertainment in shopping centres,” Ancketill says.
Additionally, Ancketill believes future customers will let their phone be their product guide. “The traditional shop assistant will provide other services such as demonstrations, trouble-shooting, styling, directing people to online reviews of products and checking receipts upon exit when customers have paid via self scanning,” she suggests.
Dr Yvonne Court, cross border retail partner at Cushman & Wakefield, also believes technology will continue revolutionising the sector.
“Twenty years ago the closest we got to remote shopping was probably a paper-based mail order catalogue or direct sales party with friends,” she says. “The worldwide web and browser was only invented in 1990 with its first commercial applications coming a year or so later. It was some three years later that the first online shopping site was launched and in 1995 Amazon began to change the way we shop for books and other items.”
However, Dr Court sees technology as “an avenue for customer relationships”. She says: “The internet has revolutionalised how, when, where we shop and how we think about it. It has meant that instead of the time when we might choose to go up to town or to the shopping centre it has now become a moment when we could shop any time any place. That said, our relationship with shopping in physical and virtual places is complex and for many shopping remains a social activity. It is difficult to imagine having a real experience with a laptop or mobile device in quite the same way.”
There have been other versions of Smart Store subsequently. Among them Future Store in Toenisvorst, Germany, created in 2008 by Metro to test out technologies and concepts such as automated pay stations and ‘intelligent freezers.’
SAP Research Living Labs’ Future Retail Centre in Regensdorf, Switzerland aims to improve the customer experience while optimising in-store processes. University College London and Imperial College established the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment. It digitally fuses computer graphics, interaction and digital data to the virtual building to project design-development-operation cycle.
No matter how good the technology the customer remains at the heart of matters… for the moment. In 1998 Julian Markham, chairman of Glengate Holdings and then the chairman of ICSC’s Worldwide Commission, published the book The Future of Shopping. He predicted that while the technology would increase retail and shopper power, the computer would never replace the shopping mall.
“I still believe that but I’m less definite in my opinion on it over a period of time,” Markham says today. “Realtime 3D imagery and visualisation has become so good since those days. I don’t think it will replace what is there because people like the experience, but it will increase in its influence.”
Ermine Amies, managing director of ICSC Europe says the ‘clicks & bricks’ relationship is a two-way one.
“The challenges presented by on-line retailers remain, though it is interesting that a growing number of on-line retailers are recognising that a physical presence in the shopping centre sharply increases brand awareness.”
And Hollis, who retired from Accenture in 2003 and today consults for Guernsey-based Island Analysis, agrees. “Shopping centres will continue to evolve as social meeting places,” he says. “Humans are essentially social animals who have had a desire ‘to go to market and meet’ for thousands of years.
“As the ease of making mobile retail purchases online increases, I believe there will be a corresponding increased yearning for ‘social interaction and experience’ in a marketplace. However, this may require a greater educational or entertainment-based environment in future shopping centres if they are to attract a changing customer,” Hollis concludes.
