According to Sall, who teaches architectural branding at London’s Royal College of Art, the choice of any retail building’s design eventually comes down to maximizing value for money. Banks, he notes, will only continue to build neo-classical buildings if that architecture continues to show a good return on investment. An underlying assumption in architectural branding—the use of architecture to complement brand personality—is that value is added when the building is in line with the other aspects of the brand, making the overall effect greater than the sum of its parts. So long as a brand’s customers express a preference for purchasing products or services in an appealing environment, branded architecture should influence the bottom line.

Even in the context of fluidity, Germany’s Gernot Brauer, who edited Architecture as Brand Communication: Dynaform + Cube, thinks architecture can—and should—be a timeless expression of the brand. “Architecture—the exterior design of buildings—has to, and can, mirror brand values such as high-tech orientation, openness, competitiveness, sportiness, etc. These are in a way timeless. Even older buildings still reflect such qualities if they were vital in the time when the buildings were constructed,” he says.

Achieving that sort of timelessness may pose unique challenges given that the exterior and interior of a building must communicate with each other. The retail space inside a building is about moving products out of the store, while external architecture is about getting people inside. Retail is also very much about the here and now. While buildings typically last decades (if not longer), the life of a displayed product may be only one season. Clearly if the architecture is to harmonize with the merchandise inside the building, it must remain just as fresh and relevant as the products on display, even as the ideas and materials used in the building’s construction begin to show the patina of age.

Transparent storefronts are sometimes used to link a building’s external and internal domains. Says Brauer, “Glass is a fine architectural tool when it is vital to link the inside and outside parts of buildings. An example will be BMW's customer center at the edge of Munich's Olympic sports ground to be opened next year. The glass building is expected to attract some 850,000 visitors each year. It has to be closely linked to its surroundings—to the BMW headquarters building and the BMW museum on one side and to the Olympic sports park on the other—and retain show value for some 130,000 cars passing by daily. The whole building has to be a showcase, which leads to the mainly glass structure.”

The Austrian supermarket chain MPreis has attempted to convert the traditional big-box structure into one that harmonizes with its surroundings using glass windows. Featuring floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the Alps and on Tyrolean churches and chalets, the stores defy the traditional big-box approach of shutting out the world to make shoppers concentrate on their purchases.

One of the reasons that US-based electronics retailer Best Buy doesn’t have floor-to-ceiling windows in its stores is that people would try to drive their trucks through them, says Matthew Moore, director of environmental design at ESI Design in New York. However, Best Buy is experimenting with architecture in a concept store to try to grow interest among female customers. According to Moore, women generally dislike the big-box stores. “They actually don’t mind, it turns out, the Best Buy brand. In fact, they kind of like it. But they really don’t like the Best Buy stores. They are too big—or they feel too big.” The concept store, located in Naperville, Illinois, features windows that provide views of the store’s interior, offering cautious customers assurance that there will be no unpleasant surprises inside. Meanwhile, the store’s floor space has been broken up into smaller environments, but left visually open.

Not all brands have had the same success with glass. Says architect Sall, “A brand like Prada will often try to have as much [window] street presence as it can. But the actual economics of expressing yourself through the external architecture is extremely difficult to justify because, as with all retail, what you really do need is a black box rather than a glass wall. If you use your external envelope for exhibiting the product, then you are going to have to rearrange everything in terms of the actual main body of products on the inside. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense.”

Another consideration is that most businesses do not build from the ground up, but instead lease retail space. According to Design Forum’s Chidley, these retailers have traditionally had to resort to reliance on graphics and color to communicate the brand identity.

However, Cheskin’s Diller thinks there may be lessons to be learned from architectural branding even in these cases. First, by selecting a building that is not overly descriptive, he says it may be easier for the new tenant to assign its own attributes to it. Second, if the building has been designed to accommodate different trends, it will be better able to satisfy new needs, including the expression of a different personality.

Trader Joe’s, the US-based gourmet grocery chain, provides a case in point. The company’s low prices tend to draw customers whose tastes might otherwise exceed their budgets. For reasons having mainly to do with economy, the retailer has often preferred to lease space for its stores in aging shopping centers. As a result, the stores tend to share a characteristic downscale architecture that resonates with the brand. Although the company’s choice of retail space may not have been a conscious attempt to build brand image, it does seem to reinforce the idea that the stores are places to get value for money. Intended or not, it’s a happy consequence that clearly benefits the image.     

[31-Jul-2006]