Retail Ready for Its Close-Up

Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message,” rings as true for retail as it does for media. While the Internet-era nostrum that “content is king” remains plenty valid, the package that content comes in has proven at least tantamount in value. Transpose “inventory” for “content” and we’re talking about store design. At a time when shopping has become an “experience” instead of simply a gerund, the store has to become a destination rather than a mere repository of stuff.

Design In Mind

The importance of store design is clear from a few recent examples. The Apple Store is the iconic manifestation of the destination store, so much so that the store’s distinctive retail layout – dazzlingly illuminated white walls cosseting long, spare product display tables that double as workbenches for the hipster-garbed staff as they demystify your iPhone for you – has been granted trademark status by both the U.S. Patent Office (in 2013) and the European Court of Justice (the E.U.’s version of the Supreme Court).

Two other companies’ stores have not fared as well. Radio Shack, which saw its stock price fall to a stomach-turning 63 cents over the summer, has been touting a handful of redesigned stores as evidence of a prospective turnaround. But these new shops, larger than the typically tiny Radio Shack outlet and freed from their usual dingy carpeting and malaria-toned fluorescent lighting, number only 125 to date, a drop in the bucket compared to the 4,000 stores the chain still operates. It’s that overwhelming mass that more than anything reinforces Radio Shack’s perceptual presence in the market. (The irony is that Apple founder Steve Jobs used to shop at Radio Shack for diodes and transistors when he was building his first devices.)

Then there’s Sears, once the largest retailer and employer in America, now reduced to the point where its own CEO acknowledges that consumers come to use its parking lots without ever entering the doors. Sears’ stores increasingly look worse than the K-Marts they bought in 2004 ago to extend their reach into down-market retail, and after posting its ninth-straight losing quarter this year, it’s unrealistic to expect the giant retailer to invest much more into them. Retail analyst Brian Sozzi told CNN Money that, “Sears becomes more irrelevant by the day.” He says that the company’s unwillingness to invest in their stores has left them antiquated.

Fashion Sense

Both of these companies are finding that their store designs have become millstones around their corporate necks, reinforcing images they desperately need to refresh. In the opposite direction is Guitar Center’s new Times Square location, 28,000 square feet that’s almost as brightly lit as the surrounding neighborhood, and whose video wall helps it blend into the visual cacophony of what’s become New York’s biggest pedestrian mall (and home to a confusingly large array of cigarette-smoking Elmos). GC went to the well for the store’s design – 8 Inc. has worked on Apple’s stores as well as emporia for Virgin, Nike, Coach, and other upscale brands. And like many of the fashion houses that line the better avenues of creative-class cities like San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and Beijing (where 8 Inc. maintains offices), the contents of those stores are framed by the environment that the consumer experiences them in. In the right kind of place, one may want to buy a Stratocaster even if one can barely play the radio, much less a musical instrument. Looked at another way, a music store like this is an extension of why Fender sells clothing and whiskey glasses.

The music store of the future isn’t necessarily something out of a Philip K. Dick novel and won’t inevitably require Bain Capital bucks, but the traditional musty neighborhood store is on its way out. Plenty of music retailers have already gotten that message, modernizing stores and in some cases paying attention to the growing body of science about retail store design, which comprises psychology as well as architecture, anthropology as well as industrial design. It may in fact be headed for that strange tipping point where brand consultants present an invoice with six zeros in it for putting a period in between “music” and “store,” making the generic music emporium into a sui generis “music.store” destination. (All letters must also be lower case, demonstrating a capacity for self-referential irony.) But GC’s new Manhattan flagship serves to remind that when it comes to retail, the medium is indeed the message.