During our Breakfast Briefing event last month, Stephen Spencer, Ambience Director at Stephen Spencer Associates, gave our attendees an insightful session on how to maximise opportunities and increase profitability in the hospitality, leisure and retail sectors. This advice can be used to help effectively convey your vision, develop your visual customer journey and plan your builds and land assets.
Here are our takeaways and how these could be applied to other industries:
1. Touch
When designing your room layout, it’s essential to consider the customer’s experience. Creating barriers or cul-de-sacs can be frustrating for customers. Similarly, it’s always good to consider the ‘Butt-Brush Effect’ – this is where customers have to walk through narrow aisles or routes, and in doing so, their backs might brush against one another. Customers will deliberately walk away from products they are interested in if there is a chance that they’ll be brushed.
It’s also important not to discourage customers from touching or picking up products. If you have ‘do not touch’ signs or offer unimpressed looks when customers touch multiple products, this can seriously put off purchases.
“Research demonstrated that picking up a product has the highest correlation with purchasing; 30% of products held were purchased and purchasing increased to 60+% when more than one item was held.”- EyeFaster eye-tracking research
2. Hearing
Music can have a significant impact on the environment of your business and the moods and feelings of your customers. Playing inappropriate music or music that is just too loud can be frustrating for customers. The same goes for employees who have inappropriate conversations within hearing range of the customers.
It’s crucial to listen to your customer’s needs and concerns and ask for their contact details, as it can help you tailor your customer experience to their preferences.
3. Sight
It’s essential to communicate who you are and what you do as a business. Not presenting a consistent image can confuse customers and damage your brand. If your website states you are a 100% green and sustainable business, but on visiting your establishment, there are plastic straws everywhere and nowhere to recycle waste, there’s going to be some confusion.
It’s also important to see yourself as others see you, as it can help you identify areas for improvement.
4. Taste
Be sure to keep your employee eating area out of sight of customers. Eating in front of customers can be off-putting and unprofessional.
Similar to the brand image inconsistency we mentioned earlier, providing food and beverages that aren’t on-brand can hurt your brand.
Consider exchanging snacks for contact details or conversations, as it can help open dialogue and build a relationship with your customers, thus improving their customer experience with you.
5. Smell
The sense of smell is often overlooked, but it can be a powerful tool in creating a memorable customer experience. Think about partnering with a local florist, serving fresh coffee or using diffusers to infuse the environment with a pleasant aroma. Finally, don’t forget to make clean and well-looked-after toilets part of the brand experience.
A study by Rockefeller University in New York suggested that customers remember 1% of what we touch, 2% of what we hear, 5% of what we see, 15% of what we taste and 35% of what we smell.
Applying these tips to other industries
These top tips are not just relevant to retail, hospitality and leisure. These insights can be applied to almost any industry. Think about university or college reception areas, meeting rooms of construction professionals, customers walking into their accountant’s office or patients entering a hospital waiting room. If you can achieve an experience where your audience feels comfortable and positive about your ‘brand’, you’ll be well on your way to success.
Stephen Spencer Associate’s free Ambience Playbook offers a useful how-to guide to help you maximise opportunities and futureproof your business.
Whether physical or digital, Stephen Spencer Associates can help you develop a sixth sense to maximise your commercial opportunities. Find out more or get in touch today.