How to maintain a Brand experience at the retail outlet?

Retail stores should credit their survival to a combination of high traffic and low prices for delivering the total brand experience and to feel the repercussions of failing to provide a cohesive experience. With their potential to move product while bringing entertainment into the retail environment, flagship stores should provide good opportunities for marketing executives who previously had minimal authority over their brands' retail real estate. Retails should become something like tourist destinations in major cities. While selling product should be secondary and should be influential landmarks for creating experience-based retail environments.

Even with all the money spent in managing the communications around a brand, so much of a consumer’s sense of a brand comes through the brand experience. This is particularly true in a retail environment where ensuring brand consistency can be more challenging than with the manufacturing of products.

The Apple store is a great example of a retail experience that is consistent with and enhances the brand. With a clean, light layout, the computers are spaced for easy use by potential customers. The store atmosphere has a clean, minimal feel. Employees are friendly, knowledgeable and accessible. The entire sense of the store reinforces the brand’s image of friendly, easy-to-use and stylish computer. Small decisions, such as naming the help desk something like “Genius Bar”, reinforces Apple’s brand image.

Visual Merchandising is the way to go, according to me!

In my personal opinion, you can have all the communication in the world with the best visual merchandising, but you NEED a warm, well-informed, adept at communication, adaptable, sales staff to make the experience last in the consumer's mind. I think the negative force of a put-off factor like rude, ill-informed, struggling-to-communicate sales force is far more stronger than any positive branding factor. Also, level of customer service at the point of sale gives a subconscious idea of the quality of after-sale service of the product to the consumer, which is a significant factor in his mind. I think the sophistication in visual branding and merchandise assortment HAS to be matched by the same in spoken communication with the customer. Because an apparent disconnect between the two is in my view, a major put-off factor and decision-delayer. I think along with the spending on lavish visual branding, retailers ought to concentrate of staff training and all aspects of their sales communication.