Carol Spieckerman

Retail Customer Experience: Retailers, take back your shelves

March 5, 2010

FROM RETAILWIRE:
Over the past generation, stores lost their individuality, becoming homogenous and undifferentiated. A major factor in this lack of personality came when stores began selling space for advertising. To what degree is co-op advertising responsible for any sameness seen across supermarkets?      [more...]

I wouldn't blame the sea of sameness on co-op. To me, retailers have been focused on sanitizing the store environment and correcting errors at the expense of creating exciting and differentiated store environments that more closely mirror shoppers' outside world. The result is that an "ideal" store ends up being a buzz kill. (I posted a blog entry on this last September).