The Challenge
THAT was an ambitious, first-of-its-kind retail store concept for Dubai that brings together high fashion retail with lifestyle services aimed at Gen Z and Millennial customers. It needed to deliver an experience that felt authentically local and drive both footfall and digital sales.
Engine were part of multi-disciplinary team, working with the Brand, Digital and Learning and Development teams to develop the customer experience design that would need to bring together the digital and physical experience and could become synonymous with the new local brand.
Getting to know the customers
THAT was a brand aimed directly at millennials and Gen-Z customers and built their brand on sourcing the latest high street fashion from international and local brands and fusing this with a series of lifestyle experiences such as fitness classes, café culture and music. Its ambition was to offer a one stop shop for young customers to not only come and shop but want to hang-out.
Ultimately, the brand needed to offer their customers an experience that felt fresh, consistent across the various offers, and most importantly, authentically local.
THAT needed to understand their potential customers better. Using a mix of existing research, staff interviews and in-store observations, we created a behavioural model and a set of customer archetypes that would represent the breadth of needs, attitudes and behaviours we would want to support and cater for. This brought customers to life for everyone shaping the store, digital experience and staff training programme and bought together the multiple workstreams around a single view of the customer.
Together, we then developed a vision for the customer experience built on a better understanding of attitudes towards lifestyle, community and fashion to define a series of touchpoints that would make the experience feel truly authentic and supported the ‘passionately international, fiercely local’ positioning.
Turning brand strategy into customer experience
With a clear sense of how the experience could deliver the brand positioning, Engine developed several customer journeys for each of the different customer types that would showcase and create the requirements for how digital, staff, place and product would come together to create distinctly THAT experiences.
We also highlighted the ‘signature’ experiences across the customer journeys that would become closely associated with THAT and be critical touchpoints for the customers to connect to the philosophy of the brand.
The customer journeys became a single reference point for retail, digital and front-line teams – helping them align, prioritise, and make design decisions that would shape the store now and into the future.
Although the store design had been largely defined, Engine’s work shaped the digital products like the website, app and the in-store digital touchpoints, as well as the front-line services in store and across other channels.
Engine defined the role of digital across the end-to-end experience, including how it would connect with social platforms and support different customer behaviours.
Empowering the front-line to deliver the brand
When the store launched, it was essential that the staff on the shop floor would be able to bring THAT to life every day. Together, we defined how the front-line colleagues would embody the brand’s personality and values through confident, personalised service.
We developed the front-line behavioural guidelines for the ‘Lifestylers’ that would eventually inform job roles, recruitment and training. This included experience principles, behavioural cues, and the support they’d need to deliver a distinctive and authentic customer experience
