Retail innovation: Philosophy-based shopping experience

Nearly 35 million (34.900.000) search results are provided by Google in fractions of a second for the term "shopping experience". Among those results, you can find a broad variety of entries. They range from surveys ranking personal experiences in a certain store to blogs of people complaining about bad experiences during a restaurant visit. Certainly, we all know what a good or, unfortunately, a bad shopping experience feels like. However, sometimes it is not that easy to define the reasons why we become annoyed in one store while we enjoy sitting in a coffee place that obviously charges more than double for a regular cup of coffee and why we still keep going there. This paper is about detecting insights and transforming them into new retail projects. Furthermore, it aims to demonstrate how by using the power of a polymathic approach a retail formula may become innovative, providing an extraordinary and sensorial shopping experience for the customer, while being profitable for the business at the same time. In order to visualise this method, the Aquí è case is used. It is a neighbourhood supermarket in Galicia, the northwest of Spain, which was among the six finalists of the World Retail Innovation Award in 2009. It was devised by m f=! retail innovation consultants in co-creation with the client, Grupo Cuevas.