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For the second session of the 2015 Summit, Vision Monday strived to determine what the new definitions of "retail" were and how social media and consumers' familiarity with technology are influencing store and health care environment design. Ultimately, the goal was to determine how all these things impact consumer purchasing and brand interaction.



To help answer some of those questions, VM tapped David Kepron, creative director of the brand experience studio at Little, an international architecture and design firm and author of "Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World (www.retail-r-evolution.com)," who has more than 25 years of experience as an architect, artist and educator.

His multidisciplinary approach to the creation of shopping places focuses on understanding consumer behavior and the creation of relevant shopping experiences at the intersection of architecture, sociology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. He began his session with a quick lesson in the science of the human brain before explaining how the retail experience, the good and the bad, shapes consumer decisions.

David Kepron began his session with a quick lesson in the science of the human brain before delving into how the retail experience shapes consumer decisions.
"The rise of social media has disengaged us continuously from in-bodied experience which we should all be very concerned about. On the other hand, social media allows us to project our own emotions to a much broader audience. And so the power of digital is that it has the intrinsic ability for us to extend our mind to a number of other minds. I can't tell it's there but I know that as I enter a Facebook post or I put up a picture I'm affecting other people because they will see those pictures, and I know their neuropathy is changing," he explained.

"We don't have these close knit social groups anymore. What we do is build a multi-dimensional, digitally connected, cognitive network. And this has some challenges to it, it's a paradox really, because as we connect more and more and more brains to our social network world, we also have the power of the individual becoming more important," Krepon continued. "The individual has the ability like that, like one fish in a school to change direction and the rest of the school begins to do the same thing, but now it's not just a group of five but 500 or 5,000 or 5 million.

"So the retail world is no longer this two dimensional landscape. Get out of this mind set of thinking about this as omni-channel and think about it as omni-experience in a biosphere. Separate ecologies that are molded together in intricate patterns in three dimensional ways. No longer verticals of selling one thing to one channel that means they are satisfied in the end," he said.

"'Making' is key to this young culture who is on their phone all day making and creating and pushing data into the world," he said. "It means that the brand of 'me' is going to be a big thing. Forget about demographic marketing. It's done. You are going to be marketing to individual needs because big data will allow us to do that and it's going to become extremely important.

"But in doing it, you will have to understand that what those customers want is to create because of the empowerment of the device in their hand that says they can. Because in doing social media work, what they do all day long, it has become natural for them. So, customer created content will lead to customer created prices. Stores will morph. Stores will change because I can change them, because I am the one that makes it and I want to make it. Customers will enjoy a different kind of relationship with brands and there won't be plenty of give and take, but give and make experiences."

"Understanding that technology in the service of empowerment, as a happy extension, an enabler for me to connect more to you, will offset the digital dystopia that we're all concerned about and will engage us in a way that we have never been able to do in the past. It's not about the 'thing' it's about the relationship.

"So where is the 'experience?' Experience isn't out there. It's within us. It is in the way that man reacts to the conditions of his environment. In the end, it's not what people carry home in their shopping bags that's most important but what they carry home in their hearts and in their minds that drives the relationship," Kepron concluded.

dcarroll@jobson.com