New study: IKEA and John Lewis lead the way with best retail brand experience
New research has shown that retail brands should focus on building emotional connections with customers to beat the competition.
According to the study by independent design agency Rufus Leonard, IKEA was the best performer in the retail sector in this regard with a score of 91 out of 140.
Other strong performers in the sector included John Lewis at 87 and Marks & Spencer at 82, which meant that both exceeded the average score of 80.
The majority of the featured ten retail brands were clustered through the middle of the league table, while Debenhams was the only retailer with a score significantly under the average at 74. However, it scored significantly higher than the lowest ranked brands in the travel and telecoms sectors which were also part of the research.
Rufus Leonard’s research aimed to track the impact of a brand’s experience on customer loyalty and why people choose and remain with brands by measuring five facets of experience that consumers have when interacting with a brand including ‘sense’, ‘feel’, ‘think’, ‘do’ and ‘connect’.
Retail brands tended to score better than the overall average in the ‘Think’ category (sets expectations), which reflected the clear functional purpose of brands like B&Q. However, retailers were found to be lacking in ‘Connect’ category (inspires social connection) and ‘Feel’ category (creates emotions). Brand champion IKEA was 14% ahead of the sector average in terms of the ‘Connect’ score and 17% on the ‘Feel’ criteria.
Laurence Parkes, chief strategy officer at Rufus Leonard, said: “It’s harder for retailers to emotionally engage customers who relate primarily to third party brands in-store. Yet without such an emotional connection, retailers are putting customer loyalty on the line – and making themselves vulnerable to competition.”
