Okonkwo Prelims

Chapter 4

Luxury retail design

and atmosphere

‘Only ever make splendid or awful impressions. The rest are forgotten.’

Alison Mosshart, musician

Luxury retail location

The most popular slogan in retail is the following:

The three most important things in retail are: location, location, location.

This watchword is used to emphasize the indispensable nature of an appro-

priate location in retail. Retail location involves more than physical space but

includes the choice of a place that is most suitable for the sale of the products

or services in question. An inappropriate retail location is difficult to over-

come, irrespective of the feasibility of the rest of a company’s overall strate-

gies. Poor retail positioning can also negatively affect a store’s accessibility

and attractiveness to shoppers, regardless of the brand’s positioning. This

factor is even more crucial for luxury brands because in addition to visibility

and accessibility, luxury brands ought to be situated in the most elite and pres-

tigious locations of the cities where they operate. Retail location is therefore

of paramount importance to the luxury goods sector.

In general goods retailing, the choice of store location is determined

through utilizing socio-economic pointers like population, geography and

consumer disposable income. Other factors include human-traffic flow and

in some cases, tourist-traffic flow. In addition, technical business models that

aid the choice of store location have been developed by experts, including

the ‘Catchment Area’ method and the ‘Central Place Theory’ method. The

main aim of these techniques is to identify the most commercially viable

store locations for optimal sales turnover. These models are, however, more

appropriate for general goods retail, so they will not be discussed in this

book.

Luxury brands have a central requirement for retail location choice. This is

the ‘Prestige’ indicator. The main distinguishing factor between luxury retail

location and that of mass-market retailers is the requisite need that luxury

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