Chapter 10: Retail Design as a Communication Strategy: Exploring Customer Experience via Eye-tracking

Retail environments have never been so competitive and challenging as today. Not only are traditional retailers hounded by online businesses but even so by brick and mortar competitors with an increased online presence [1]. To stand out and capture the attention of consumers, retailers need to go the extra mile: merely selling products and services does not suffice anymore [2,3]. But what does ‘going the extra mile’ mean? What bothers the consumer when they visit a shop? What makes them happy in the store or what makes them unhappy? To find out, we set up a study aiming to grasp and better understanding what in-store retail design elements facilitate an optimal customer experience and why so. In order to do that, we used a mixed method. We combined eye-tracking data to provide insight regarding a person's gaze direction and whether or not dwells on a certain element, with semi-structured in-depth interviews, that helped shedding light on the why behind this gazing behaviour. In what follows we shortly discuss customer in-store experience and in-store eye-tracking. Next, we will discuss the results that were obtained by combining the data of the eye-tracking and the in-depth interviews. We conclude with the benefits of this methodology and the practical implications of our findings. Before we do so we would like to highlight the role and importance of customer in-store experience.