Born out of the fashion industry, pop-up shops are becoming testing grounds where companies experiment with more spontaneous ways to engage the customer. Pop-up stores are points of sales have a complete retailing mixed: they all have an expiration date, know in advance. For instance, Nivea is about to close its pop-up store in the Ticinese neighborhood of Milan. Examples abound in Europe and America. Lancôme Italia kept a pop-up store open from 17 to 28 February 2006 in downtown Milan, in order to launch a new chemical peeling product. Song Airline closed a pop-up store in Soho within two weeks, to give its clients a tangible example of its low fares for air travel. Ebay held live auctions in an open space in downtown New York for ten days, perfectly mimicking the online auction process. Meow Mix, a company producing dry food for cats closed a pop-up shop on 5th Avenue within two weeks. Comme des Garçon made the Guerrilla Store a distinctive element of its retailing mix, by “squatting” shops in bohemian neighborhoods from Berlin to Copenhagen, from Warsaw to Cologne, from Singapore to Reykjavik. Guerrilla Stores are complemented by a Web site showing which one have been squatted and which have been abandoned: if you haven’t made it there on time, there won’t be a second chance.
The pop-up store, by virtue of being a temporary point of sale, contains two aspects: a relational platform enabling the contact between brand and consumer, who can thus verify by herself the service or good being proposed; and experience exclusivity, by its virtue of being limited in time, so that shopping turns into an unrepeatable event. The temp shop favors customer participation, unlike other types of marketing events: when you enter a shop, your behavior tends to be more mundane, therefore more spontaneous than if you had taken part in a focus group. In other words, spontaneity is prized because it provides richer information on consumer profiles.
Experimentation is the key word when it comes to pop-up stores. At first temp shops were considered by marketing managers as communication events that put the brand in the familiar context of the urban shopping environment, but they have gradually turned into privileged observation points, where firms can study the impact of new product lines, perform tests on preferences and attitudes of consumers, and last but not least talk and listen to them, like only a retailer could. In such a shop, the brand opens the doors of its home to consumers: you just do window-shopping in a temporary store, because either you enter or tomorrow it will be gone.
by Armando Cirrincione,
Contract Professor at the "Giorgio Pivato" Institute for Corporate Management, Università Bocconi