Fighting against retail emptiness: Unraveling coping strategies of small scale independent retailers in Denmark

Abstract

In the medialised world, the format of various retail environments has changed as channels have been added to the traditional physical retail store. The changes over the last couple of decades have been fast, and many small towns in Denmark experience a problem of retailers who have to close their premises, leading to a lot of empty tenancies in their city centers. This seems to set off a set of mechanisms in which the experience of the town center, the surviving single shop experiences and the individual consumer identity and his/her willingness to engage in and be affiliated with the city and its shops, affect each other. The context of reality described and the suggestion of mechanisms that interact with each other, inevitably also influence ‘retail design’, and inscribe retail design in a far broader context than the ‘interior design’ it is usually said to originate from.

This paper will argue that retail design in a medialised reality needs to be concerned with design in a broader sense, to design viable business concepts that are connected to both place and culture with a starting point in deep customer insight. The article will set out to identify some of the design parameters connected to this.