l spaces to digital technology and its willingness to move on from unsuccessful activations to newer ones. Curating its content to more visible and relevant platforms both within the store and outside has also played a big role in the brand’s adoption of customer-centric strategies. In my previous column, I talked about lo-fi testing and how retailers have adopted elements of this successful digital practise to simulate, test, and rollout store designs, pop ups, and other instore experiences. In this one, I’d like to discuss testing in a real-time environment and the importance of curating retail content. Physical spaces, stores and pop up’s, are sometimes the best testing platforms to observe, learn, and adapt. In the past, testing in a live retail environment was not cost effective or easy to execute given clear product demarcations and aisle allocations. But the infiltration of digital technologies resulting in connected customer engagements and lifestyles experiences around brands and products have made it easier to use stores as testing environments. To offset several quarters of sluggish sales, Target started using its store in Quarry, Minneapolis (its home state) as a testing environment and started tinkering with new innovations to respond faster and adopt quicker. While Target’s innovation lab in San Francisco is dedicated to identifying and testing new retail tech before it becomes mainstream, its test stores are all about merging digital and spatial environments. The flagship or test store functions as a brand beacon and, also an educationally focused exhibition space. Because it is curated, it allows more exchange with marketing, messaging and social media. The company’s strategy has been to use flexibility and modularity of instore design, mannequins, screens, graphics, and content in reaction to real customer engagement and feedback. Two key imperatives to the success of Target’s instore testing have been: a) effective curation of its content and, b) synchronisation with other areas of business. As customers increasingly make decisions based on lifestyle, Target is curating retail stories and content around them. Last Christmas, they teamed up with NYC concept store, Story, for a first of its kind collaboration that saw a curated holiday-themed gift shop that refreshed its merchandise and store design every four to eight weeks. Back in its Minneapolis stores, they redesigned the home department by bringing products out of shelves, placing them in-situ and making it look like customer’s homes. Rather than investing in heavy, modular display systems, Target is letting the products speak for themselves – while educating and enthralling shoppers. Target understands that digital integration and project synchronisation is crucial not just within the store but across the organisation as well. According to the Star Tribune, the Quarry store had an assistant team leader assigned only to innovation and corporate staff held frequent conference calls or visited the store to gauge how the new concepts were doing, while also listening to employee and customer feedback. Testing in real-time retail environments will only work if brands are accepting of and willing to change direction quickly based on feedback. Not everything Target has tested has worked, and that is fine for the brand. In a world where customers have access to hundreds of brand touchpoints, Target is finding its sweet spot and fine tuning the few that make a real difference to its customer base. And, its strategy has paid off with the company reporting larger than expected profits in the first quarter of 2015; proving that the key to a bigger share of wallet rests on agile retail experiences curated by testing new ideas. Karen Spear is GM of MashUp. She can be contacted at karen@mashup.com.au.