Designing Product Presentation and Communication to Enhance Product Experience at G-Star RAW’s Physical Retail Stores and Shops in 2023

Abstract

Previously to the start of this project a research in fifteen monobrand stores of G-Star Raw has been conducted. During this research four major insights of the current consumer experience in the G-Star stores were derived which led to the following problem definition:

Currently, G-Star RAW’s products are not experienced in full potential by the consumers since the product stories and features are communicated and presented unclear and inconsistent across their various physical stores and shops. For this reason, consumers are not able to value the full potential of the products. This is considered as an influencer of missing out on sales potential. G-Star believes that the physical stores and shops are fulfilling an important role in the coming 5 years (until 2023) to enable consumers to experience their products and therefore their role needs to be researched.

To research this problem definition the Vision in Product Design method is used. This approach is used to deconstruct the current context and interactions to be able to design a new vision which functions as a starting point to reconstruct a new context and interactions.
The most important outcome of the deconstruction phase is that G-Star is trying to set up a new identity to appear more emphatic to the consumer. This new appearance is toning down the other values of G-Star and therefore the identity of the brand is experienced less strong by the consumer. Besides that, are the services that G-Star provides in their stores focussed on making instant sales are therefore not matching the needs of the current consumer.
To find out how G-Star can improve their service to the consumer in the coming five years, a research to formulate a new retail vision is executed during the reconstruction phase. In the envisioned context consumers are constantly dealing with an overload of influences in a world where they are always connected to others. This provokes the insecurity of how to express their individual identity. To take this insecurity away from consumers the following statement has been created for G-Star:

I want G-Star to empower people to stand out individually and to express their unique values by approaching them in an assuring way.

To be assuring to the consumer the interaction should contain the following qualities: clarifying, fascinating, evaluating and unconstrained. To enable this interaction in their physical brand environments G-Star should appear as unpretentious and bold.

The design that is created to facilitate this interaction is called a physical identity environment. In these environments are consumer able to mold their own identity with identity expressions of G-Star. The products of G-Star will be presented in ‘attitude areas’ and therefore they will be able to value the G-Star products by relating the attitudes to their own identity.