Yup, I know it’s been months since I’ve blogged but I really haven’t had strong thoughts about any particular topic—until now.
I’d like to share my observations about the current “pop-up store” craze. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it calls for companies to open a temporary store location, hopefully in a high traffic area, where they can expose their product or products to the public and gain awareness and interest in them. In some major markets it has been a successful PR gimmick, earning coverage on all forms of media for brief periods of time. Some people argue it is highly successful in gaining quick awareness because the media is interested in the concept. Others will argue differently. I am one of those people.
A few days back the makers of a dry pasta product suggested such a store for its return to the NY metro marketplace. They at one time successfully imported many different kinds of pasta into the U.S. but in the past several years that aspect of their business had shrunk dramatically. Now they are coming back to the market.
Because of the type of product I strongly urged the pasta maker ‘s marketing people not to do it because I’d recently had direct experience with two pop up store locations in Manhattan. I won’t name the organization, but it had financed a temporary summer store location at Union Square near 14th Street and Fifth Avenue and an autumn store on Manhattan’s West Side in the 70’s. They rented, staffed and decorated 1,500 square foot storefronts. Union Square is a busy commercial area. The Upper West Side store was located in a residential neighborhood. Neither were very productive, averaging about 100 to 150 visitors a day. Both became hangouts for local residents looking for freebies. When you added up the investment and divided it by attendance, the cost was expensive. The downtown store opening did get fantastic press coverage on New York and New Jersey market print and broadcast outlets. But actually visits were low. Neighborhood mothers and tots were using the uptown store as a hangout when I visited it on a Wednesday at 2 p.m. When you add up the turnout over a three-month timeframe for the downtown location, visitors (generously) totaled about 70,000—in a city of 7 million people. Hmmm.
What marketing people outside of major cities tend to forget is this—major cities are really collections of neighborhoods where the same people tend to come and go every day. Commuters, lunchtime crowds and residents are the same people every day (I went to high school and worked a block from the Union Square location). Pop up stores are not destinations. And because they are short lived they have no opportunity to build awareness—a critical factor for any retail structure. If you can’t afford to rent and staff in a very high traffic environment, don’t.
My counsel? Unless you’ve got something really remarkable, really rare and really appealing, stay away from pop up stores. Even if your goal is to get media exposure from them, the media is starting to go ho-hum to them because they’ve become commonplace. They were a good media gimmick while they lasted. Spend your money some other way—and get better results. And if you really do have something remarkable, unusual and exciting, you’re probably not going to need a pop-up store anyway.
By the way, I welcome observations or criticisms of my viewpoint. Would love to hear from anyone with a different opinion. Always happy to learn.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.