​Once again, Black Friday is upon us! Here are 5 interesting statistics around Black Friday and what they mean for retail.

• Sales are Growing: There are many statistics floated around that question the existence of the Retail Apocalypse - we have even written about this in a previous post. But Moody’s, for one, expects 5% to 6% growth in retail sales this Black Friday, and the National Retail Federation projects overall holiday season sales to increase by 4.1% this year. The total spend for Black Friday weekend is estimated to hit $59.6 billion with the best growth since 2011, according to estimates by GlobalData Retail.
• Online and Physical retail shopping are both relevant: Whether in-store or online, some 164 million Americans will go shop at some point over the holiday weekend. 71% will hit the stores on Black Friday. That’s roughly 116 million shoppers. This according to research by the National Retail Federation.
• At least 77 retailers kept stores closed on Thanksgiving but others, such as Macy's, Kohl's and JCPenny opened on Thanksgiving day - with some social media blacklash, asking shoppers to boycott these stores. JCPenny opened up earlier than others, with a 2pm start on Thanksgiving day. It's a fine line to walk to make customers happy - between offering early Black Friday deals and encroaching on Thanksgiving day.
• Black Friday may be becoming a month long phenomenon.   Shoppers spent $2.4 billion online on Wednesday, an increase by 31.8% from 2017, and by 5pm on Thanksgiving day, had spent another $1.75 billion (a 28.6% growth from last year), according to Adobe Analytics data. Promotions started just after Halloween, and will continue well after Cyber Monday.

There are many techniques that retailers use to continue to drive foot traffic into their physical stores. In this article, we share just a few to get you thinking.

Turning a shopping trip into a destination through events
By bringing educational classes, or other experiential elements to your store, you can get customers thinking about a shopping visit as a desirable event outing instead. And as we know, the longer your customer spends in-store, the high probability they have of making a purchase.
For example, Williams-Sonoma offer cooking classes-instore where people can learn how to use products and sample the merchandise. Home Depot offer kids craft and building classes on the first Saturday of every month. And Lululemon has also found success in holding free yoga classes during slow business hours to drive traffic in-store. Classes feature products sold by Lululemon and this increases basket size in the process.

Offer services to complement your products
For retailers whose products require maintenance, offering services for free to in-store customers to encourage people to stop by. For example, Tanzanite Jewelry designs provides in-store services such as jewelry cleaning and battery replacement to help increase traffic and sales. In the cosmetics space, personal stylist consultations or makeovers can help drive shoppers instore. For example, Sephora offers free mini-makeovers where their highly trained make-up artists teach you how to use their products, often leading to not just sales, but repeat purchases by shoppers who are extremely happy with their selection.
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Provide personalized recommendations and advice in-store
One of the leading benefits of making purchases in physical retail stores is that your customers get to physically experience the product before making a purchase, as well as access to sales staff who can help with personalized recommendations. Retailers are tapping into this benefit, as well as introducing technologies which can mirror the benefits of online shopping, such as self checkout or sales staff having access to a customer’s past shopping history or preferences before offering advice in-store. All of this is helping bridge the gap between the online purchase experience and the instore shopping experience. 

Rethinking the grocery store experience from being a transitory destination to becoming an exploratory destination full of discovery is proving to be a worthwhile approach for grocery retailers.
Here are a few techniques stores are using to encourage shoppers to stay in store and elevate the in-store experience.

• Lucky’s market are letting customers take a beer or glass of wine with them when they shop in a program called ‘Sip and Stroll’ - which comes complete with a cupholder in shopping carts.
• Some grocers are holding ‘Meet the farmer’ events, partnering with vertical farming operations like Bright Farms and Gotham Greens to source produce from only miles away. This taps into the trend towards hyper-local produce - a phenomenon that Packaged Facts estimates will hit $20billion by next year!
• A variety of grocery stores are experimenting with growing produce in stores! For examples, a Whole Foods that opened earlier this year Bridgewater, New Jersey features a mushroom farm that generates up to 120 pounds of fungi a week for the store. A Hy-Vee store in Iowa provides up to 15 pounds of herbs and lettuce for the store each week with eight-foot tall hydroponic grow walls.
• Other grocery stores are bringing in an educational element to the grocery shop. Basics Market in Portland, features a large culinary classroom where shoppers can learn everything from knife skills to diabetes management. At select Martin’s stores in Indiana seniors can learn how to cook with local ingredients, while kids can take brownie-baking classes. Hy-Vee offers store tours with its many dietitians while Dave’s Supermarket in Rhode Island runs support groups and seminars for shoppers with celiac disease. 

L’Occitane en Provence has opened up a new retail destination in New York in the form of an interactive boutique. Following the experiential retail trend, the new store is 1,870 square feet of sensory delight. Designed by international artistic director Daniel Contorni and Blackburn, it’s a step into the cobblestoned streets of Provence and all that this entails.
So what does move towards experience this mean for retail? It means the bar has been set higher for in-store experiences. Here’s just a few things that are inspirational about the L’Occitane retail experiences that other retailers can learn from and be inspired by.

A glocal approach
In addition to providing an immersive, delightful experience in New York, L’Occitane has adopted a ‘glocal’ approach, creating customized experiences tailored for local clientele - whether that be in Brazil, Paris, London, China, Singapore or Toronto. These experiences have worked hard to turn each L’Occitane location into a destination, showcasing the local portfolio of services on offer.

An evolutive space
Each location is seen as an ‘evolutive space’ - which continuously changes with the seasons to reflect different campaigns. This continuously change helps keep the physical retail locations fresh and relevant, giving customers a reason for repeat visits, and avoiding a ‘been there, done that’ attitude.

​Experiencing it live
From in-store cafés and macaroons to customized products and complementary beauty treatments, L’Occitane provides even more reasons for customers to visit the physical store while telling the brand’s story through these physical experiences. For example, the new flagship on Regent Street in London offers personalised product engraving, complimentary hand and arm massages and beauty consultations in private rooms, as well as an in-store café offering limited edition Pierre Hermé macaroons. Delightful.

An upsurge in impulse buying mean that the point of purchase (POP) is playing a more important role in consumers’ decision making than ever before.  
So why are consumers open to impulse purchases, despite their best intention to seek special deals or wait for sales?
There are many reasons. Here, we cover just a few behind the continuing and increasing success of the POP strategy in driving the impulse purchase.

1. Improving the shopper experience:  When done right, POP strategies can occupy consumers whilst they’re waiting for sales help - presenting enough useful information in an efficient format to drive an impulse purchase. This can reduce some of the frustrations associated with the shopping experience as well as make the retail experience more entertaining.
2. The ‘Vicarious ownership’ theory: Ian Zimmerman Ph.D writes that “when we’re connected to a product, it literally changes the way our minds perceive it. Our minds essentially start acting like we already own the product, which makes it harder to go without buying it”. How do you make that connection? Zimmerman continues “A physical connection with a product is created when we’re close to it - and when we’re able to touch it. A temporal connection is created when we’re able to purchase it immediately.”  POP strategies are specifically placed to be able to provide these connections.
3. The ability to provide speed and convenience: Quelch and Cannon-Bonventre write about consumers who value speed and convenience becoming more open to helping themselves as the point of purchase - and as a result, more likely to make an impulse purchase. We see this in the increase in use of vending machines and the rise of self service store formats. ​