How can/does customer-centric design influence/or is influenced by layout decisions

This paper discusses the influence of customer centric design on layout decisions. Store layout decisions refer to the placement of items within the store and the design of a store’s floor area, the store layout is an effective marketing tactic that can directly influence customer’s decision-making which impacts the stores sales and profitability (Dash & Akshay 2016). To create a positive in store experience there are various factors that need to be considered such as, how much space to allocate a product segment, where to place the product categories relative to each other as well as the customer flow through the store (Ozgormusa & Smith 2020). A well-designed store layout will positively influence the shoppers’ movement, atmosphere, patterns of traffic and operational efficiency (Ozgormusa & Smith 2020). A store layout decision is one of the elements of visual merchandising which seeks to display products in a manner that is appealing, attractive and enticing to customers, which acts as a stimulus to attract customers to the store and leaves a lasting impression in the customer’s mind (Dash & Akshay 2016). There’s a growing trend to incorporate digital technology to positively impact customer centric design in layout decisions, the growing availability of instore technologies creates opportunities to observe customers and leverage predictive analytics to exploit the instore customer data (Pantano, Pizzi, Bilotta & Pantano 2021). The increase in availability of digital technologies is creating numerous opportunities to observe and model customer behaviour (Nguyen, Le, martin & Cil 2022). Instore technology such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) can be analysed by applying AI to the surveillance footage, additionally retailers that leverage digital technologies such as – to pay with your face at checkout, check out free grocery stores by Amazon Go, visual and voice search by Walmart (Nguyen et al 2022). Stores that effectively present merchandise that attracts customer attention will encourages customers to walk down the aisles to view more merchandise thereby increasing sales. According to Madsen (2021) the use of digitalisation in store layout has rapidly changed retail store layout into multi and omnichannel stores which have influenced customer behaviour and expectations. Research highlights that 30-50% of sales are achieved through impulse purchase which can be stimulated by a store’s layout which influences the customers exposure to goods which leads to impulse purchases (Ozgormusa & Smith 2020).