Execution: Recruiting shoppers by reimagining food
Nestlé International Travel Retail (NITR) believes that the food category can play a more significant role in travel retail to address key industry challenges such as declining conversion and increased consumer apathy.
Declining footfall and consumer apathy are long-term challenges facing every player in the travel retail mix, as evolving consumer demographics and wider geopolitical issues continue to impact consumer spend. In addition, given the length of contracts, NITR believes that new stores need to be future-proofed with flexibility to better respond to changing consumer needs.
In order to achieve this, NITR tapped long-time collaborator creative retail agency Portland Design to reimagine the store experience into the Emporium of Goodness – a concept which the partners are calling the antidote to shopper apathy. Portland Design Director Lewis Allen says: “Our project began with Nestle’s insight that there’s a clear opportunity for the food category to recruit shoppers in global travel retail through the food category, increasing dwell time and conversion to deliver incremental commercial value.”
In travel retail, food is primarily focused on confectionery, leaving out the opportunities offered by other categories such as hot drinks, savoury snacks and health supplements. Moreover, the category is often fragmented and undervalued with cross-category opportunities not maximised due to sub-optimal space in the passenger flow and a lack of a unifying category concept, the partners say. This is where Portland Design comes in.
Portland Design Director Lewis Allen
“We saw that food in duty free was centred primarily on confectionery, often fragmented and undervalued. So, our goal was to broaden the food proposition to better represent what food means to people’s lives. This was one of the key levers in helping us reimagine the category itself,” Allen explains. “With all the development in the beauty and spirits world, we didn’t want food and confectionery to be left behind. It can have its own identity, have a stronger character, personality and profile within the travel retail mix.
“Achieving this will make the whole duty free experience more engaging and more attractive to all travellers. Our role as Portland Design is to answer the questions ‘What does that look like in the travel retail environment?’ and ‘What can we do to make food more interesting?’.”
With that mission, Portland Design set out to reimagine the food retail experience through a concept the partners named the Emporium of Goodness – a food utopia of sorts that turns NITR’s VERSE model into a reality on the shop floor. “Our job is to create something which can stimulate Nestle’s partners by giving them a glimpse of the types of activations, animations, experiences and customer moments that are possible within this space,” explains Allen.
The Emporium of Goodness
An ideal model for the food category on the shop floor, the Emporium of Goodness breaks down the DNA of the duty free shopping experience with its key principles. The concept blends environment, inspiration, ‘multi-sensoriness’ and local flavour to offer a reinvented food journey that lets travellers do good, be good and feel good.
“We want to create a conversation that would reverberate throughout the food ecosystem – including other confectionery players – about how we can all work together to create an elevated experience for the food category,” Allen says.
Three key principles inform Portland Design’s approach: ‘multi-sensoriness’, local flavour and flexibility. Allen says: “We’re trying to change the paradigm because people often see food and confectionery as different things in travel retail. The former more linked to convenience and the latter often linked to gifting. We want to consolidate the food category to create a much stronger collection of food experiences.
“By consolidating sweet, savouries, sours and bitters, you create a multi-sensory spectrum of food, kind of like a food hall or emporium. This enables travellers to shop their senses, offering a multi-sensory workout purely on taste. We want to create an Emporium of Goodness in travel retail; a place where people can indulge their sweet tooth but, through pairings and combinations, indulge all sorts of food needs. This ‘multi-sensoriness’ is a key principle of this project.
“We wanted to create a food category which is more stimulating to all the senses not just sight, because retail expression often only plays to the visual. What we’re saying is that food should not only look great as a category, but should also taste great, smell great, sound great and feel great when you interact with it. To do this, we’re linking ‘foodiness’ to ‘multi-sensoriness’.
“Local is another key principle,” Allen adds. “We’d like to think of ‘Sense of Place’ as ‘Spirit of Place’, not as a pastiche of a place but going deeper. We are asking what are the local brands in this airport? Who are the people behind them? We want to move beyond familiar brands and offer newness and point of difference, which travellers are interested in. We want to offer travellers products and experiences that they won’t find in their ordinary lives. Within our concept, it’s very important to put that localness front and centre in the passenger journey.
“We’re proposing that the way to deliver food is by using local flavour to introduce people to the category. I think customers are getting so used to seeing the same brands front and centre that it’s important to break that formulaic approach to the category.”
We don’t want them just making the purchases they came for but to explore everything that the store has to offer
LEWIS ALLEN
Disruption, disruption, disruption
Addressing a perceived lack of imagination within confectionery in the travel retail space, Portland Design’s proposition turns the traditional confectionery model on its head. At the Emporium of Goodness, big brands, value and promotion are located in the deepest parts of the store, while inspiration and local brands are in the limelight. “Rather than a category approach, we’re taking a journey approach,” Allen explains. “The hook is to inspire the travellers as soon as they walk in the store. We want to inspire them to slow down.
“In a traditional duty free environment, 50% of what you’re looking at is value – but that’s not necessarily inspiring for all travellers,” he adds. “We’re looking to inspire them in terms of newness, nowness, localness. The things closest to main circulation need to feel and look different.
“This is where the multi-sensory stimulation comes in. The next step on the journey is we want to get people to start exploring. This could be more conversational, where travellers can try things and learn about the story of the brands in-store. This is where experiential activations, storytelling and immersive features all come into play.
“The final part of the journey is dedicated to high-growth categories. Consumer trends are constantly evolving and never more so than in food, yet store design and contract lengths are a barrier to the ability to leverage these opportunities. In terms of flow, we see food as being last in flow next to till points in order to capitalise on the impulsive nature of the category and provide a moment of levity in the consumer journey as they approach the departure gates. For retailers, this offers a last chance to convert or increase spend and provide an elevated customer experience.”
Allen continues: “Duty free is centred around different shopper missions where people either want to explore and be inspired, or they have a specific product in mind and buy it at a better price than the domestic market. We want to disrupt that shopper mission. Retail has to work very hard to convince travellers not just to go straight to their gates but stop and stay and invest their time in stores. This is why inspiration is key. We don’t want them just making the purchases they came for but to explore everything that the store has to offer.”
Feeling Good and Doing Good
A key part of NITR’s VERSE model is Regeneration – it therefore must play a key role in the Emporium of Goodness too. Portland Design’s approach is to create a retail environment that enables travellers to do good, taste good, be good and feel good.
“We want food to be a category that’s doing good in terms of sustainability,” Allen explains. “There are different aspects of doing good: sustainability, supporting local, creating a sense of community. Every airport has its own version of doing good and we know that consumers are looking for brands that are doing good.
“Feeling good is another aspect, and this is all around wellbeing and health. Feeling good when travelling is a consumer need currently not well met in travel retail and there are options that are better for people’s health. This is why Nestlé has been successfully trialling vitamins and health supplements in the main duty free store.
“We’re clear about how we deliver those two levers in the concept because we break these things down into the DNA of the experience from architecture and storytelling to messaging. We look at how the store can, as a piece of architecture, do good in terms of using eco-friendly materials.
“We explore how the store can feel good in terms of its ambiance, look and feel. By using certain materiality and colour palettes, we can put a smile on people’s faces even before they enter to taste something. We outline how we can deliver a feel-good experience through the staff, associates, and with activations that stimulate all the senses.”
All this goes back to the VERSE model – Value, Engagement, Regeneration, Sense of Place and Execution – which served as the skeleton of the Emporium of Goodness project. Allen says: “VERSE is a B2B model, and our job is to make that tangible in an accessible B2C way. After all, if you’re doing good, being good and feeling good then you go through each of the VERSE letters naturally.
“People find value beyond price. When you engage with them in a memorable way, they feel good. Regeneration is all about doing good, while Sense of Place and execution are about bringing all that together. What we’re trying to achieve is to translate the VERSE model into something tangible on the shop floor; blending inspiration, the DNA of the experience and local flavour to reimagine the store experience from the ground up. We’re creating a store, not just the strategy of a store.
“VERSE is the insight and the catalyst to the project and the execution of VERSE is what we’re trying to achieve. We hope that our concept can be a true antidote to shopper apathy.”
Spotlight Series – September 2023