Abstract

In evaluation of UK fashion store aesthetics, including department store fashion zones, male and female consumers in their twenties (of both domestic and international origin) were commonly found to use age terminology relating to whether the store is perceived by them as being ‘old’, ‘young’ or ‘younger/too young’ - being suitably ‘young’ standing as the preferred option. In further exploration of what makes a store fit into any of these ‘boxes’ of evaluation, the contributing elements were found to include accepted aspects of the building, location, cleanliness, tidiness, merchandising, lighting, ambient graphics, general coloration, furniture design, clothing design, salesperson and customer appearance in the visual realm, which proved to have the strongest sensory association effects. The aural realm, however, was also found to feature very strongly relative to both type and sound level of music played in-store, as also did the smell of ambience sensory associations with age. There were some evident variances in gender preferences in all of this. However, in all situations there were significant issues of enacted design elements affecting final evaluation effects upon the holistic or gestalt design intent of fashion store experiences. Much in overall consumer evaluation seemed to be based upon operational design enactment (ODE) parameters, not necessarily ‘built-in’ to the design process in all cases. It is these ODE effects that appear to provide the foreground of a retail offer’s design perception and positioning, as opposed to the background of more corporately controlled (and often expensive) ‘built in’ design factors. This signifies that he customers’ actual experience of a store results from ambient design congruence with ongoing operational parameters to form the full store aesthetic. This paper advocates that retail designers need to more fully specify the ongoing operational conditions for full enactment of their design when considered in its performance mode – defining and setting the consumer experience foreground as well as the background ambient and aesthetic elements. Only through such specification can specifically targeted fashion stores achieve effective enactment of the intended positioning and consumer behaviour effects upon their customers...by design.