I rarely get to experience public places before they’re open to the public. Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to visit, the day before ribbon cutting, the Mercy Corps Action Center, located in the nonprofit agency‘s new global headquarters in downtown Portland.
Mercy Corps and Portland Spaces Magazine presented a discussion with Ed Schlossberg, principal of ESI Design, which designed both Mercy Corps’ Action Centers (the other one is in New York City). Ed’s presentation touched on a few aspects of designing physical places that pertain to sustainable marketing.
If you consider that Place is an element of the marketing mix and that sustainable marketing aims, among other things, to empower people, the design of your physical location – store, office, center, other place of business – matters a great deal.
The Action Center was designed as a public place for people to collaborate, learn from each other, and connect and interact. The goal in creating such a space is to engage people in the physical, built environment, to encourage them to take action. Everything in the Action Center guides you as a visitor to learn how you can help, what concrete actions you can take, and then take them, within the time you have available, whether it be a minute, hour, day, week, month, year, or a lifetime.
Think about your physical location and its design as not just a place to sell your wares, but more as a place to bring people together and engage with one another. Use Place as a platform for enabling communication among your customers; they’re already talking among themselves, about you (C2C communication), why not create the space for those conversations to occur?
If your customers learn something from one another, or do something together there, or discover one another’s expertise at your Place, you will become the source of their connection. They’ll be likely to talk about it – “where” is a crucial part of any story – and they will also be likely to return or encourage others to visit.
If you offer natural paths to action, people will take them: curiosity and tactility are strong motives. Offer ways and reasons for people to spend time at your Place, and they will hang out. (One local business that does experiential branding superbly is Twisted, a yarn store in Northeast Portland. In addition to buying their supplies, knitters can sit around and knit, while drinking tea, chatting, or even browsing the internet for resources. It’s community experience at its best.)
Place can create and strengthen relationships among people. Design your Place for community!
What other examples of retail or other locations have you experienced that encourage community building?
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