CASE STUDY > EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Engaging consumers in a six-month study to understand the role of emotions in shopping.

Challenge

At a time when e-commerce is capturing nearly all of the growth in retail, shoppers in the brick and mortar landscape are becoming more desired. Our client, the world’s largest physical retailer, hired us to conduct an in-depth inquiry that could supercharge their in-store customer experience.

We took an ethnographic approach, distributing creative culture kits to shoppers to better understand their priorities, expectations and points of emotional influence at retail. Over six months, we engaged shoppers through diary entries, mobile assignments, in-depth interviews and shop-alongs that employed a proprietary method to track stimuli, emotion, and behavioral response.

I co-created the research plan and built all culture kit collateral. I also led fieldwork in the Kansas City market, and introduced and championed applying attachment theory to our analysis of the retail-consumer relationship.

Process

Solution

Through a proprietary fieldwork tool that tracked emotional experiences in-store, we learned that shoppers’ emotional responses, and subsequent purchase responses, are heavily influenced by the quality of their pre-existing relationship with the retailer. We also developed a retail attachment survey and fielded it to 1000 shoppers, measuring retailer attachment quantitatively. 

By applying the science of attachment theory, we developed a framework for retail-consumer relationships. These insights led us to create the Emotions in Shopping Toolkit, a training book for store managers that shows how to increase the frequency of in-store experiences that trigger positive emotions in shoppers.