Key Takeaways: The Art and Science of Experiential Retail
- From Transactions to Transformations: Modern retail is no longer just about the “buy.” Success now depends on creating immersive environments—like Netflix House—that prioritize entertainment, education, and shareability to build deep brand affinity.
- The “Magic” is Built on Math: While the most successful retail experiences feel like creative magic, they require a foundation of data. Predictive intelligence ensures that a brand’s investment of time and resources aligns with what consumers actually want, not just what a team thinks they want.
- Predicting Sentiment Over Demographics: Experiential retail thrives on feelings like nostalgia or excitement. To be effective, brands must use predictive intelligence to move beyond basic demographics and tap into the “unobservable why”—the personal values and psychological drivers that dictate where a consumer will spend their time and attention.
- Timing is the New Competitive Advantage: Because large-scale experiences require long lead times, brands must identify consumer intent (like a plan to take a cruise or an interest in pop culture podcasts) long before the consumer starts their active research phase.
- Alignment-First Execution: Data helps brands decide the “how” of an experience—whether it should be an Instagrammable photo-op for social-heavy users like Pilates practitioners or a tradition-focused event for family-centric travelers who value safety and achievement.
You’ve definitely heard of Netflix. And you might’ve heard of a newer venture by the streaming giant: Netflix House. At Galleria Dallas in Texas and the King of Prussia Mall near Philly, teams are transforming empty department stores into large-scale entertainment venues that invite fans to step inside their favorite shows, including hits like Squid Game and Stranger Things. The goal is to allow consumers to experience the worlds characters that the characters they love inhabit. For Netflix, this represents an ongoing initiative to take streaming into the physical world. For brands, it has a different meaning: It’s an example of creative experiential retail.
What is Experiential Retail?
Experiential retail focuses on the idea that brands should go beyond a strictly transactional relationship with their customers. Modern consumers want more than a “walk in, buy, leave” interaction. Instead, they’re looking for:
- Entertainment and education: Experiences that provide value beyond the product.
- Shareability: Moments designed for social media and word-of-mouth.
- Engagement: Hands-on interaction that builds brand affinity.
Consumers want to do things they’ll remember, that they can post to social media, or that can be shared with friends and family. Netflix House is just one example, and there are plenty of others. Lego’s Times Square store, for instance, contains elaborate, photo-worthy builds of complex Lego products and hands-on stations where customers can interact with the products in addition to buying them. And experiential retail can go beyond permanent alterations to the way a store looks or works; it can also take the form of a temporary pop-up. When Amazon Prime was getting ready to release a new season of its hit show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, for instance, it created a late 1950s/early 1960s pop-up diner in New York City where customers could enjoy authentic period food and ambience.
With experiential retail, the limit is your team’s imagination. In addition to creating shared experiences and photo ops for social media, innovators have come up with hands-on experiences, educational workshops and classes, integration of technologies like VR in the shopping experience, multisensory environments that appeal to smell or taste, and moments that incorporate unique elements of location culture or foster a sense of collaboration and community. Figuring out what will work for your particular customer audience, or the audience you wish to target, however, shouldn’t just be left up to guesswork. Like other parts of your marketing strategy, you can and should incorporate data to ensure that your ideas will resonate with your current or intended customer audience. But why?
Why Data is Crucial to Successful Experiential Retail
Experiential retail is a huge investment of resources for any brands, whether they’re small or national. Long before you spend the money to build the display or experience or rent out a location to do a pop-up, your team has put time and manpower into coming up with ideas, strategizing, developing timelines, working cross-department, and pouring energy into turning creativity into reality. You’ve also likely forecasted revenue that you expect to draw in from the experience, and you want to make sure you at least reach your goals, if not exceed them entirely. And to make it all worth it, you need to make sure the idea deepens the relationships you have with your current customers and piques the interest of new ones. People have to want to come; the experience needs to ensure people patronize your company over the competition.
Data can help you do that. You can use it at the beginning of the ideation process to learn more about your customers or at the end to check yourself (or both).
Data ensures that your experience:
- Deepens Relationships: It resonates with the values of your current fans.
- Drives Patronage: It gives people a reason to choose you over a competitor.
- Maximizes Resources: You build what people actually want, not what you think they want.
It will help you figure out what your customers are interested in, what their values are, where you can reach them: everything you might need to ensure you’re creating experiential retail based on facts about your audience, not guesswork.
What Kind of Data Should I Use for Experiential Retail?
To ensure data empowers you effectively, you need to make sure it’s predictive. Traditional consumer data has its place in marketing and it can be great for telling you specifically what people have purchased or where else they’re shopping. But experiential retail is based on a lot more than just demographics or purchase history. To ensure it’s effective, you need to create sentiment. Netflix House, for instance, evokes a sense of excitement by allowing people to feel like they’re in their favorite TV shows. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel pop-up created a comforting feeling of nostalgia—a major reason behind why it had a line of over 1,000 people every day. And, since experiential retail requires a lot of planning and timing, you need to know what consumers are going to want from your brand before they know themselves.
Predictive consumer intelligence can achieve all of that. It fills in gaps left behind by traditional data and gives you the insights you need to know what consumers are going to do before they do it.
Four Predictive Intelligence Use Cases for Experiential Retail
Here are a few ways predictive intelligence will assist you with experiential retail:
1. Aligning with Personal Values
Let’s start with a simple example. Many of the people who head to the famous Macy’s Christmasland are moms with kids under the age of 18. But why choose this particular experience, or even travel for it, when every mall has a Santa? Resonate’s predictive consumer intelligence shows that maintaining traditions is among the top three personal values for moms with children under 18. So are achievement and safety. The Macy’s Christmasland is an age-appropriate activity for kids where they won’t see anything parents might not want them to (safety). The Macy’s flagship store is also known throughout the country as a premier Christmas destination with a long line for its holiday activities, so attending and getting to see Santa can be seen as a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. Then there’s the value of maintaining tradition: Moms who got to go when they were young may look forward to sharing the experience with their own children.
2. Identifying Intent to Purchase
Now let’s say you want to develop an experience for consumers who have an annual household income of $100,000 or more a year and, therefore, a little extra money to spend. Instead of relying on traditional past purchase data, Resonate’s predictive consumer intelligence shows that 37% of this audience plans to take a cruise in the next three years. That’s a sufficient time window to plan and execute an experience before these consumers even start researching itineraries. Using this information, you could, for example, develop an educational series focused on travel featuring the beautiful destinations your cruise line goes to and market it to these consumers.
3. Tapping into Interests and Pop Culture
The Mrs. Maisel example from earlier achieved a dream of many brands: It capitalized on a pop culture phenomenon in the right place, at the right time. This is tough to do and hard to replicate. With predictive consumer data, however, it becomes a little easier. Resonate data shows, for instance, that 11% of Gen Zers listen to podcasts that cover pop culture topics, and that this percentage really over-indexes for the behavior. They are 1.7 times more likely to listen to podcasts on pop culture than the average American consumer. This data suggests that if you have an experience that centers on pop culture, this group will be extremely receptive to it, and advertising it on an appropriate podcast will be a great way to get their attention.
4. Optimizing Media Consumption
When you’re brainstorming your experience, you’ll need to decide if you want to center it around an Instagram-worthy photo op or not. The idea you pick, in the end, needs to cater to the preferences of the intended audience, and not everybody is invested in whether or not they get to share on social media. Resonate data shows Pilates Practitioners, for instance, love the ability to post on social: 29% spend 11 or more hours a week engaged with this form of media. Family-centric travelers, however, don’t care as much: Only 6% are heavily engaged with social media.
The most successful retail experiences feel like magic, but they are built on a foundation of math. By leveraging predictive intelligence, your brand can create moments that aren’t just memorable. They’re measurable.
Ready to transform your retail strategy? Schedule a consultation with a Resonate data expert today!
