Anthropologie achieves the balance between marketed individuality and purchased uniformity by carefully considering each element of the marketing process. From artist-designed storefronts and displays, to cultivated employee bases, to social media promotions, the individually uniform customer is placed at the forefront of each decision-making process. This consideration encourages customer interaction with the store environments and the products they hold. Encouraging interaction with the products shapes the buying process to become highly relational—while shopping, the customer can experience the product while considering the purchase. The experiential atmosphere of each store is presented as unique to each local community through considerations for each target market demographic.
Anthropologie is a retail chain that sells cultivated clothing and home goods and markets an implicitly branded, feminine lifestyle design. This idea of retailing cultivated products is essential to Anthropologie’s marketing strategy. Rather than presenting a uniform selection of goods, each local store’s staff curates an assortment of displays and products to in order to best appeal to the target market within the surrounding community. These curated collections are then imbued with a sense of intentional individuality, which draws customers looking to cultivate their own individuality through their purchases.
ANTHROPOLOGIE:
PHYSICAL GENTRIFICATION OF DESIGN
The minds behind the company have seen the modern desire for individuality and intellect, and found a way to market the same products to different people under the guise of those two desirable traits. As anthropology is the study of culture, the name and branding of Anthropologie flow naturally from this idea into the concepts of cultivation, culture, and understanding. These three are mirrored in the modern market participant’s desires for passion, intrigue, and intelligence.
Anthropologie’s strategy allows the company to market individuality while delivering uniformity to an eager customer base. Local stores often host events (using #AnthroEvents), including parties, farmer’s markets, and fashion shows; the brand also runs a lifestyle blog and publishes a house and home journal, all of which contribute to the individualized lifestyle that the company markets and promotes. This lifestyle design permeates modern culture both subtly and thoroughly.
While each local store’s collection appears highly unique to the community and surrounding customer base, every Anthropologie store across the country is saturated with the same atmosphere of delicate, quirky, and classic vibes. These stores themselves enact the Anthropologie effect; they appear to be highly individualized, yet are still very much a part of cohesive, uniform whole of a national brand.
These three chief elements—delicate, quirky, and classic—reflect Anthropologie’s creative design team’s three customer profiles, and allow Anthropologie’s marketing team to target a wider market. They also allow Anthropologie—and other businesses that follow their model—to market seeming individuality at a steep premium. This seeming individuality contributes to the portrayal of each consumer’s “unique” personality and lifestyle, even though each customer makes purchases from the same store displays as the next customer.
Corporative design
However, if each of these decisions were made on a national or corporate level, the company would collapse under its own weight. Instead, Anthropologie achieves this level of customer consideration primarily through using a trickle-down structure for the creative marketing process. Seasonal themes are determined on a corporate level, but their interpretations are determined on a local scale. Each store employs and engages with local artists and designers in order to bring these themes to life, ultimately demonstrating the gentrification of design. In designing unique, locally relevant storefronts, these designers are still bound by the uniformity of the overarching, nationally determined theme.
For example, a national 2014 storefront theme had called for hot air balloons, to illustrate the seasonal shift to springtime. Display designers in San Francisco, California had incorporated an iconic local landmark in the Golden Gate Bridge, while the storefront in Omaha, Nebraska had alluded to the Missouri River winding path through the city.
Although the designers had been separated by half of a continent and a trickle-down creative design process, the two displays are still notably similar. The balloons float in arrangements of odd numbers, draped with bunting across vertically striped domes. Each display incorporates a hanging backdrop that draws the focus to the balloons and mannequins without obscuring the store’s interior displays. Additionally, both displays make use of the windows themselves as a layer for illustration by utilizing them as drawing and labeling surfaces. In San Francisco, the windows are used to incorporate a fog effect, while the display in Omaha uses the windows to draw a frame around the diorama and to create a postcard effect.
By drawing inspiration from Anthropologie’s creative design elements and this seasonal theme, these local artists enact individual installations while still conforming to a nationally branded design. Ultimately, these storefronts are local interpretations of a corporate theme. Yet since these stores are localized, nestled within communities to reach specific demographics, concern over direct comparison and recognition of this indirect uniformity is unnecessary. This juxtaposition of seeming individuality and indirect uniformity contributes to the implicit nature of the Anthropologie effect. By incorporating a structure that fosters the seeming individuality of these displays, as well as the store interiors, Anthropologie directs its customers’ interactions with its wares in a highly specific way.
Upon entering Anthropologie or wandering into a specific vignette display, customers are enveloped by wafts of incense, eclectic playlists, and an abundance of playful arrangements of potential purchases. Each display area is designed with careful, artful consideration for user experience and a customer’s interaction with each product. Each space is meant to feel “lifestyled.” As explained to Racked.com by eastern regional display manager Jill Gallenstein, "We want people to walk through the space, to be able to visualize themselves in it. The merchandise is displayed so shoppers can pick something up and put it back down. We want people to interact in a way that a lot of luxury brands probably don't want customers to touch their product—we're hoping that people really touch it and move around the store with it. We want them to wander and find moments of discovery."
The customer’s interactions with a store’s displays are crucial to the individuality component of the Anthropologie effect. These spaces are designed to encourage individual exploration and consideration, which translate to each customer feeling as though the space had been especially designed for her singular experience. And yet, hundreds of customers move through any given display in any given store during any given season, so each shopper experiences an individualized interaction. This individuality within uniformity is unwitting, and therefore the embodiment of the Anthropology effect.
Gallenstein’s moments of discovery are hosted within each display as opportunities for a pre-purchase test run. Once tested, these items—be they a shirt, note pad, or wall decoration—allow individual customers to demonstrate their personalities through their purchases. Yet each of these purchases are made from the same display, so while they are marketed as individually relational to each customer, they are sold to every customer who is persuaded by each display. In the “geeky chic” display pictured above, interaction is invited by every surface. The varied methods of product placement and portrayed movement encourage the customer to move through the space as she experiences each product in a thoughtfully designed environment. Neither the potted plant or the chandelier of hangers are necessary to a purchase, but each of these elements contribute to the space’s quirky atmosphere, and therefore the customer’s shopping and purchasing experiences. This specialized consideration of user experience embodies Anthropologie’s cultivated intentionality and enables the enactment of the Anthropologie effect.
Once these displays are designed, approved, and installed from a managerial level, they are carefully maintained by each store’s well-trained sales associates. Although each display is enacted separately from the others, structure is provided to each sales floor by parallel lines intersected by lines at 35* to 45* angles. Of course, nothing close to a right angle is approached or considered; 90 full degrees within a walk-in diorama is too rigid for the Anthropologied, relaxed, feminine shopping experience. Any time this arrangement is disrupted by a wandering customer, a stray clothing rack or shifted table will be moved back into place by one of these sales associates. Their purpose is to guide and enhance the customer’s experience during the shopping process, not only through direct interaction but also through subtle maintenance of the environment they are creating. Even on this structural level, the consumer experience is shaped by a gentrification of design. While each display is presented as uniquely whimsical or creative, the presentation occurs within a preset frame structured by the sales floor’s overall layout.
Interactive DESIGN
Again, these interactions are directed to be personal and experiential, although this direction is thoroughly uniform. As a result, the same storefront designers are used to create vignettes within the store interiors, creating interactive dioramas to be used for experiencing and interacting with a themed collection of cultivated products. In an interview with Racked.com, consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier explains: “The craft efforts and the attention to detail creates a store experience where customers will want to take their time, look around at the quirky, and feel comfortable. People will buy into that promise of discovery and purchase a dress, even if it's on-trend and something everyone else has, because they feel what the brand stands for.” Even when a trend is recognizable as a marketed trend, the atmosphere Anthropologie creates in the realm of user experience prioritizes the marketed lifestyle that the trend embodies. The Anthropologie atmosphere encourages this consumer-product relationship, which develops into brand loyalty. This atmosphere, marked by coziness and creativity, not necessarily solely by functionality, is evident in every display in each local store.
IMPLICATIVE DESIGN
The physical gentrification of design’s subtle nature provides both economic and ethical considerations and implications. When customers participate in and are persuaded by the Anthropologie effect unwittingly, they are marketed one value while purchasing another—individuality and uniformity. Since this phenomenon occurs not only in this one retail chain, it is even more hazardous to interact with unknowingly. Individuality can be marketed at a much steeper premium than uniformity, since the former appeals to a customer’s selective identity rather than her collective one. This collective identity is captured by many other retailers, leaving the Anthropologie effect to appeal to an untapped segment of the market and to provide a breath of fresh, feminine air to the unique identity of each customer. Yet, this individual identity is still subjected to marketing strategies that require standardization of such uniqueness, rendering the original individual identity as a uniform part of a cohesive whole.
This phenomenon occurs outside of Anthropologie, in coffee shops, bookstores, or other retailers. The marketability of individuality through the products offered in these places can be increased by the use of social media, by allowing each customer to express a uniformly distributed experience on a highly personal channel. Anthropologie encourages this phenomenon by labeling their displays with hashtags and taglines. These phrases, like #AnthroWindows or #AnthroEvents, trigger shoppers to individualize their experiences by including them in their digital personalities. #AnthroWindows encourages further digital and economic implications by fostering imitations, like these from Buzzfeed, another highly interactive digital platform. However, this is not the only way that the Anthropologie effect extends past the physical space into the digital. Read on to learn more.