Immersive retail experiences are transforming the way people shop, say marketers. Along with technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, brands are using time-tested experiential marketing resources like multisensory environments, gamification, and behavioral data to deliver the immersive, engaging shopping experiences consumers seek. These changes “are reshaping retail spaces into dynamic, interactive environments where customer engagement reaches new heights,” says retailtechinnovationhub.com.
These changes are driven partly by tech advancements but also by cultural shifts around shopping. Today’s consumers want more than great selection and speedy transactions — they want to “feel known and cared for,” says bain.com. More than ease or convenience, “They expect recognition, understanding, and emotional connection.” Increasingly, brands are finding that the way to foster that genuine connection with consumers is by creating immersive retail experiences.
What Is Immersive Retail?
Immersive retail combines relatively new technologies and experiential marketing techniques to create rich, multisensory, high-touch, vividly memorable shopping experiences that drive both sales and customer loyalty. As a type of experiential marketing, immersive marketing transports audiences into brand-themed “mini-worlds” that surround them in brand-specific color, messaging, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures. Immersive environments rely on novelty as well as intensity — consumers are engaged emotionally as they explore a realm that surprises and delights.
Often employed in brand activations, this kind of experiential shopping works in more permanent brick-and-mortar establishments and online as well. Interactive store displays, product sampling, gamification, and custom installations are just a few ways retailers create an environment consumers can immerse themselves in. “Immersive shopping aims to create an interactive experience for customers to make them truly sink into shopping instead of just briefly browsing through,” says content developer 4experience.
How Is Immersive Retail Changing Shopping?
Whether in-store or online, consumers today expect shopping to be an experience rather than a transaction. When consumers immerse themselves in a shopping experience, they spend more time there, which makes them more likely to make purchases. It also builds attachment.
Increased Personalization
As they invest time in selecting products and personalizing them through the choices they make, they get to know more about the brand, which forms a connection. This is how experiential shopping “stimulates more parts of the brain and gives a more personal feel to shopping.” The result is not only increased engagement but also higher conversion rates, because today’s consumers are willing to pay more for more personalized shopping experiences.
Inspiration for Social Sharing
Personalized experiences that surprise and delight inspire consumers to share their experiences online via product reviews and social sharing. “Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have popularized ‘Instagrammable’ moments, pushing retailers to create visually stunning and shareable experiences,” says The Immersive Lab. By encouraging user-generated content, retailers can leverage social media to expand the reach and informative depth of immersive shopping experiences.
Higher Satisfaction, Fewer Returns
Studies also show that immersive retail environments result in lower return rates, because customers have more experience with products before they buy. In-store, this happens through sampling, demonstrations, in-store digital displays, and virtual shopping assistants. Online retail offers information not only virtual assistants, quizzes that match buyers with ideal products, and live chat, but also technologies like augmented reality (AR) that let consumers “try on” products ranging from furniture to clothing to beauty products. Consumers who know what they’re buying before they check out are more likely to be satisfied, and that positive experience builds brand loyalty.
Opportunities for Data Collection and Feedback
Social media, surveys, and reviews are still trusted and much-used sources for feedback from customers, and brands are using this data to improve experiential shopping. But interactive in-store displays, AR features, and the brand’s app and/or website pairs data collection capabilities with customers’ own phones, “to evolve shopping experiences further and help retailers transform the in-store experience from a transactional to an experiential one for their customers,” says Forbes. In stores like Home Depot and Target, consumers can use the brand’s app to create shopping lists, find and use personalized discounts, track loyalty points, and find items on store shelves.
Blending Realities with AR and VR
Immersive retail transforms shopping in many ways, but with recent advancements in AR and virtual reality (VR), the line between the physical and digital realms is becoming less distinct. Through features on websites and in apps that allow customers to see how a rug fits in their living room, how a paint color looks on a house, or how a purse looks on a same-size body, AR “overlays digital information onto the real world, enhancing the physical environment without replacing it.” VR creates a three-dimensional immersive environment, “ideal for exploring complex products or experiencing a brand's ethos in a profoundly interactive manner.” AI uses behavioral data on the fly to offer product suggestions both in-store and online.
This blending of realities is the latest use of experiential shopping, where interactions occurring online connect and overlap with real-world interactions. Sometimes called “phygital,” a portmanteau of “physical” and “digital,” phygital elements seamlessly blend the physical and the digital to make shopping more engaging, interactive, and emotionally compelling. By catering to consumers’ desire for personalization and unique experiences, it makes shopping more enjoyable, more of a complete experience.
Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing firm based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Want to discuss your next project? Reach out below.
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