Transformation to a digital era

Challenge

Owing to digitalization and shifting patterns of shopping, there are very few places left where people tend to gravitate toward a brick-and-mortar stores. An airport is one such place. Be it during transit flights, gearing up for a business flight, or taking a relaxing holiday with family, shoppers spend a significant time in the physical spaces inside the airport.

Our client Hudson group has been meeting the needs and wants of travelers for over 30 years now, wanting to turn their physical stores into a digital stage with a sophisticated yet visually engaging merchandise approach. Another major challenge was to produce great quality for hundreds of screens across the different USA and Canadian airports, which means a huge cost implication for Hudson and the requirement to maintain synergy across different screen sizes and types. 

Discoveries

The biggest room for innovation lies in experiential escapes. For many, these terms bring up associations with VR headsets, dizzying screens, and loud spaces that scream “more is more.”

Narrative - strategy

The team at Hudson and Liwa collectively believed in the power of simplistic clutter-breaking, a design that was a beautiful blend of graphics, colors, and animation style.  

We studied the identity and product look & feel of various global brands like Chobani, Pringles, Kitkat, Coke, Reeses, Sargento, M & Ms, and many other brands who wanted to showcase their products in the best possible way within Hudson's retail space and came up with creative yet minimalistic design language that highlighted the products in all their glory and grabbed people’s attention in the store.

One of the key components taken into consideration was to ensure the final design language is such that it can be adapted to hundreds of screens of varying sizes across various airport stores seamlessly. This in turn brought down the cost of adaptation and implementation of creatives on a large scale saving big bucks for a retail giant like Hudson.

What did we do?

The aim was to inform travelers in every location that the stores had all the national necessities alongside a bounty of regional must-haves.

We worked closely with Amazon and Hudson to launch their revolutionary Grab & Go stores.

It was our objective to unify the concepts of grab-and-go convenience and local pride in the communities we serve.

Gradually as Hudson continued to grow and open multiple stores across various airports in the United States, Liwa’s partnership with the brand in transforming retail spaces strengthened.

We created product content that was being driven by the customer. Today, customers expect relevant content in relation to what they’re doing at that moment and in the format and on the device of their choosing. It's their journey that dictated our strategy for the visual content.

An array of video content was produced to highlight the brands that were available in the store, greet people with warm topical content, and introduce the cool grab-and-go concept.

Conclusion

While traditional brands are reconsidering their brick-and-mortar footprint, digital eCommerce companies and digital-native brands are moving into the physical shopping experience.

The rise of eCommerce and online sales does not foretell the end of the physical store. Brick-and-mortar retail is rather shifting to cater to the evolving preferences, expectations, and shopping behaviors of the modern affluent customers.

Successful e-tailers are reimagining the purposes of physical stores by taking cues from digital shopping experiences. Traditional retail brands and digital-first retailers are converging towards an omnichannel strategy, offering a seamless click-and-brick shopping experience which definitely presents boutique agencies like us to help client elevate their customer experience with content even in the future.