How to Design a Retail Space Around Brand Identity
If you’re reading this blog, chances are you operate a business with a great product to sell and a pretty firm grasp on your brand identity. Perhaps you’re already operating out of a bricks and mortar shop, or you’re planning to. Designing a retail space has two key objectives: making sales and creating experiences. Designing the brand identity in retail spaces helps do both.
With infinite design choices at your disposal, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Where do you start? Who do you hire? What story should your brand be telling? Lower your shoulders, this process should be exciting! In this blog we’re giving you the lowdown of what you need to know before embarking on your retail brand identity design process.
Why is effective brand identity design so important?
It can be easy to underestimate the power of branding – but doing so can be an expensive mistake. Branding is the story we use to sell our products and services. Without effective branding it’s easy to be bypassed.
In today’s competitive and fast paced market, strong branding needs to be fluently translated and recognised online, offline, print, in the products you sell, and in your physical shop. The benefits of strong branding are many, including:
- It improves recognition
- It helps you stand out from the competition
- It creates trust
- It allows you to charge what you’re worth
- It inspires employees
- It leads to return customers and referrals
- It improves consistency
Simply put, strong branding is the backbone of any successful business. As marketing and branding wiz Seth Godin says, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
Branding is the story you tell your target audience and is ultimately what will make people seek you and your business out. For businesses it can be the difference between making the sale or not. Professional retail brand designers help you establish a seamless brand experience from your website and social media platforms to a bricks and mortar shop.
The foundation of a strong retail brand identity
Before starting your retail brand design process, it’s important to know your target audience. Branding tells a story, but before you tell this story you should know who you’re telling it to. For example, if you’d like to attract quality-minded adults with disposable income, you’ll have to create a store that’s altogether different from the one built to attract trend-conscious teens with a limited budget. These are extremes of course, but when it comes to designing the brand identity in retail spaces, the choices are unlimited.
When designing a store, there’s truly endless opportunities at your disposal. Knowing exactly who you’re building it for will help you navigate and make good decisions.Get to know your target audience as complete people, not just customers. Answering the above questions can help you get there. Here are some tried and tested questions for ensuring you’ve identified your target audience:
- Who is your target market? What is their age, gender, education level, relationship status, values?
- What are their behaviours? For example: are they planners or impulsive?
- What are their interests? What hobbies do they have, what movies, music, books, and other stores do they enjoy?
- What are their buying behaviours? Do they buy what they need or are they prone to impulse buying?
- What’s the best way to communicate with them? What platforms do they use, how do they speak, and how do they like to be communicated with?
Once you’ve answered these questions you can start bouncing around retail space brand ideas. What stores do you love stepping into – what is it that they do so well? What stores are popular with your market segment? What new trends are emerging?
Designing retail spaces around your brand identity
So how do expert retail space designers translate effective branding into physical spaces? By leaving no stone unturned. Here are some of the retail space design ideas and elements we prioritise when working on a client’s brand-centric retail space.
- Colour scheme
- Signage
- Wall art
- Decor
- Video and sound design
- Lighting
- Materials
- Furniture
- Effective storage
- Floor plans
- Staff areas
- And more!
From recognisable branding elements such as a custom light-up signage and colour schemes, to subtler brand connotations such as materials, layout, product placement, plants, furniture, and lighting. Everything plays a part in the story your brand is telling and should be carefully selected and executed.
Beyond the design, build, and polish, make sure finishing touches – such as the right music, scent, decorations, staff dress code, service, cleaning protocols, and more are all hitting their marks. They all do their bit in building up (or tearing down) your brand’s story.
Tell us about your upcoming project! Ready to start your branding journey? No matter how far along in your retail space design process you are, you can trust that Total Fitouts will capture your brand identity and vision. Living by our company values of responsiveness, reliability, and responsibility, your local team will have a comprehensive understanding of your local market and target demographic. From start to finish, our passionate team will put their experience to work to set your retail store apart from the competition.
We encourage you to get in touch with your local Total Fitouts team for a no-obligation chat today. We’ve designed and built exciting and popular brand-centric retail spaces for businesses Australia and New Zealand wide. Is yours next? Start a conversation by giving us a call at 1300 654 634, sending us an email at [email protected], or filling in our handy form.