We’re experiencing an epidemic of loneliness in our country,” said Retail Alliance event speaker Matthew Wagner. He’s chief innovation officer at the National Main Street Center, Inc., and was one of the presenters at Retail Alliance’s 2ND Annual Virginia Retail Matters event on September 19, hosted at the scenic Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg.
The event, which made its debut last autumn, centers around the findings of an annual report commissioned by the advocacy group Retail Alliance, conducted in partnership with Main Street America, a nonprofit subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The report analyzes current sales statistics and retail trends, blending them with national and state findings from Main Street America’s Small Business Survey of nearly 1,000 micro and small brick-and-mortar retailers across the U.S., to provide an in-depth look at the State of Retail in the U.S. and, in particular, Virginia.
“People are moving toward retail encounters that are not just transactional, but which are also experiential,” Wagner emphasized. But why is this important, and why should retailers and small business owners lean in?
Virginia Retail Matters Highlights
- Brick-and-mortar stores compelled to adapt, integrated omnichannel sales strategies blurring the lines between physical and digital shopping experiences.
- Shoppers say they want brands to give them a multisensory shopping experience, and they’re increasingly conscious of environmental issues, prompting retailers to adopt sustainable practices.
- Influential Gen Z consumers are young, well-educated, influential and discerning shoppers who value authenticity. They are ‘loyal-ish’ shoppers who are less impulsive, and who often need to be won back with every encounter.
- Consumers are becoming more impatient, with many shoppers prioritizing delivery speed over price.
- Early-stage companies continue to explore alternate ways of accessing capital via a variety of innovative crowdfunding models such as NuMarket.
- Data rules. Retailers will increasingly use data analytics and machine learning to create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns and product recommendations.
Let’s start with a personal story.
At the height of the COVID pandemic, the everyday encounters that grounded us and reaffirmed our existence on the planet vanished overnight. Concerns about the health of our families, friends and neighbors took center stage during those months of uncertainty as we struggled to grasp a newly constrained and claustrophobic world.
For my partner and me, the experience was disorienting. Time as we knew it warped. Our lives and calendars ceased to be punctuated by much-anticipated, regular visits to our long-time hairstylist, our favorite family-owned Indian restaurant, and the small specialty stores where we’d shopped for decades.
We missed the small talk and gossip, the welcoming smiles, the warm fragrance of garlic naan and tikka masala wafting from the buffet on a cold day, and the casual “Sup” head nods from other regulars. Over the winter holiday season we missed not being able to browse at the shop of a specialty merchant whose staff would carefully wrap holiday packages as a standard part of their festive, personalized service.
One day, during a particularly bad bout of generalized malaise, it dawned on us what was wrong: we were grieving the loss of the extraordinary ordinary.
As happens during a great flood, the loss of familiar social and physical wayfinding systems that position us and anchor us to our communities go AWOL. As a result, we, along with scores of other people, began to re-value the stability and joy found in ordinary, rather humble day-to-day encounters. I vowed never to take them for granted again.
The thing is—we owe much of that stability to the vibrant small businesses, local hangouts and retail establishments that form the foundation of our cities, towns and rural communities as they give us those all important ‘third spaces,’ those socially-oriented civic places that are separate from the home or workplace. Enjoyment of third spaces has been characterized as a type of “public relaxation” necessary for personal wellbeing, and it has an important role to play in the building of resilient communities.
In Coastal Virginia, no one knows this better than the members of Retail Alliance, and it was perhaps one of the most important takeaways of their entire event.
In the brand new, comprehensive 2024 Virginia Retail Matters Report—which was provided to all attendees and which can be downloaded from the Retail Alliance website—the authors emphasized the importance of these ever-evolving third spaces that are being defined as “micro-communities” that foster brand affinity by creating inviting and experiential environments where opportunities for social interaction and engagement for people of all abilities are present—and which may also offer alternative spaces where less socially inclined individuals can enjoy the ambiance in more passive ways.
In-store events, meet-ups, personalized service, and initiatives that give back to the community are key. By looking for ways that customers can engage with their brand and with each other, retailers and small business owners can, as the report’s authors contend: “Drive brand loyalty and turn customers into brand advocates.”
