Should Brands Keep Opening Stores?

Buying and consuming are big part of our lives. Holidays like Christmas or Easter are opportunities for shopping, life events like child birth or back to school are opportunities for shopping . Shopping is a leisure and a pleasure, like hiking or playing the piano. Shopping is everywhere, in the plane, in your phone, and very soon in your house's drawers and cupboards. Amazon just launched their dash button, it will allow you to reorder laundry detergent or coffee capsules by pressing a button placed in your cupboard. Seamless shopping at your fingertips.

Actually nowadays if you want to shop, you can do it from anywhere, and anytime. So what is the point of stores?

Regulations, real estate costs and sales staff salaries make running a store very expensive and difficult. A store is a risk. Risk of wrong location, risk of unqualified staff, risk of inventory... Once the store is open, there is not much you can tweak to make it perform better. You can't change its location, you can't change staff (you can fire them, and start hiring all over again which takes time and energy... but you can't change people) and it is very difficult to change its reputation. So why open a store?

Stores are like embassies. They are a little piece of a big thing. They are like excerpts, extracts of the brands. Stores should not try to embody the whole essence of the brands, they are merely one representation among many others (websites, products, advertising, social media, events... are all other manifestations of the brands). One thing can not be everything, One store can not tell the whole story. And one store certainly can't do everything. Some stores are not even meant to sell.

Stores should be profitable of course, but they are not the final destination anymore. In the 1980s, the store was the the ultimate goal, brands would drive people to the store using advertising and promotion. Today there are so many alternatives for shoppers. They can choose from thousands of brands from all across the world. They can shop at 3:00 AM on their iPad. The goal is not to get people in the store, the goal is to drive people to the brand and give them a great experience they won't forget. Brands should not aim at a one-stop visit to the store, they should use the store as a media, as an giant ad, to create a meaningful relationship with consumers, to turn them into fans, returning customers, and to have top of mind brand recognition. The store is not the end anymore, it is the beginning.