Retailers are obsessive. About understanding people. About how people enter a space, where their eyes go first, how long they stay, what they remember, and whether they come back.

Zara’s success doesn’t come down to making great clothes. It engineers experience with the precision of a Formula 1 pit crew. Meanwhile, we live in, frequent and pass through places everyday that are designed with infrastructure logic: car parking, wayfinding signs, benches at regular intervals bolted to the pavement.

What would happen if placemakers borrowed from the retail playbook?

1. The decompression zone: don’t sell at the door

Walk into a Zara flagship and notice what they don’t do. They don’t shove the bestsellers in your face. The entrance is wide, calm, almost deliberately quiet. You’ve just entered the decompression zone, a stretch of uncluttered space that lets shoppers shift gear. You go from hustle and bustle of a high street to feeling like you’ve put noise cancellation on. High ceilings. Minimal product. The visual equivalent of taking a breath.

It feels counterintuitive right? That empty space could be used to merchandise. But this moment of pause increases the perceived value of everything further inside. It’s a move straight out of the luxury boutique playbook. The opposite of crammed in sale rails. It tells you you’re somewhere that trusts you to find the good stuff.

Places get this wrong all the time. Too many try to communicate everything at once – the map, the sales suite opening times, the snappy line about available homes, 3-4 USPs, all before a visitor has even oriented themselves. The result is a first impression that feels overwhelming when you want to be creating a welcome.

So what? When you think about your sales environment – where can you build in a decompression moment? How can you give people ten seconds to arrive? How can you emulate the feeling of a high end boutique by inviting a pause?

2. Scarcity creates urgency. Keep it moving, keep it new

Zara changes its collections every two weeks. Items are never restocked once they sell out. The result by design is a ‘buy it now’ culture where customers commit to purchase faster and visit more often, knowing it’s likely something new has arrived. Research suggests scarcity can increase purchase intent, and retailers build whole models around this idea. Exclusive collaborations, ticketed sneaker drops where you have to buy a ticket to even be in with a chance of purchasing a limited release.

Where places are products – introducing an element of scarcity into a pre-release or launch event can be a tactic. But for those places that don’t sell product, they can trade in experience. This is where experiences can be designed with rotation and freshness in mind. The same event in the same space each week isn’t variable reward, it doesn’t create urgency if someone feels the experience can be replicated another time. Instead designing a rotating programme of performances, art, pop-ups, food trucks. You name it…

So what? Audit your place’s traffic flow. Where are the opportunities to change out what people see if they’re passing by daily, weekly, monthly? What gesture can you do to signal that things are always changing, staying fresh? Behavioural economics tells us the brain responds more powerfully to experiences it might get than to ones it’s sure of. Design for that uncertainty.

3. Scent is a memory, and an underused tool in place branding

Of all the senses, smell has a direct route to the limbic system, the brain’s centre for emotion and memory. Meaning instead of needing processing, a scent bypasses rational thought entirely, hitting us almost instantaneously. That’s why a scent that reminds us of someone can feel an almost visceral experience.

The hospitality industry understood this years before most. Westin developed a signature scent (white tea, vanilla and cedar) that became synonymous with its hotels globally. Hyatt Place introduced its own in 2007 and still uses it across nearly 300 properties today. The Four Seasons Chicago blends local violets and water lilies with clean citrus. A more homemade approach was found in Chicago where the team at an Aesop store made ‘sidewalk tea’ – lotion diluted with hot water and poured on a paving slab outside. Once the water evaporated the scent in the lotion diffused into the air. It drew people in and created sales.

The science of scent triggering memory is worth knowing. A study by Rockefeller University showed people are 100 times more likely to remember a scent over something they see, hear or touch. We remember just 1% of what we touch, 2% of what we hear, 5% of what we see, 15% of what we taste and 35% of what we smell. According to the Sense of Smell Institute humans recall smells with 65% accuracy after an entire year versus our ability to recall images sinks to approximately 50% after only three months.

That popcorn smell at Disney? That’s there to prompt you to buy snacks. Rolls Royce influence potential buyers by extending the ‘new car smell’ throughout showrooms, playing with the subliminal. A study by Nike showed scented environments increased the desirability of shoes for 84% of people, and those positively influenced were willing to pay 10-20% more for the products in question.

Yet most places smell of nothing. Or worse.

So what? A signature scent for a place isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. The science shows it’s not a decorative flourish you want to use scent for – it’s the ability it has to anchor memory and influence emotive decision making.

4. Friction-free flow

For years, IKEA’s one-way labyrinth was considered retail genius. And for IKEA’s purposes, it was. The ability of a store to draw you in and take you from shopping for a specific item to shopping for shopping’s sake is known as the Gruen Effect (after architect Victor Grue. Staging goods in a dramatic way or designing flows for moments of shopper excitement helps to draw consumers away from their logical list and encourage emotional impulse decisions

By contrast, you’ll often find retail models that prioritise ‘free flow’ i.e. the very opposite of herding customers around a pre-defined route. Allowing them to explore looks organic, but it can actually be a brand treating the floor like a live data experiment. Using tools like RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), heat maps and analytics, retailers can refine layouts based on real consumer behaviour within hours. They’re the ultimate conductors of the dance, and we don’t even know we’re waltzing.

This is deeply relevant to placemaking. The concept of desire paths, the unofficial routes people beat across a space, ignoring the paving is the urban planning equivalent of heat-mapping. People vote with their feet. If you watch carefully, they’ll tell you exactly how they want to move through a space, it’s your job to harness that rather than fight it. Layer in ease and then work out what you can place along the way that increases the likelihood of them interacting with something you need, or would like them to.

So what? The best places reduce friction – both physical and cognitive. So think about mapping a place that’s legible and easy to navigate on a first visit, lowering the cognitive load. If you then need to tweak and improve you’ll know you’re continually designing for flow, and the dwell time will follow.

5. White space as luxury, a lesson by Muji

Muji’s art director Kenya Hara once described the brand’s philosophy not as minimalism but as emptiness: “Muji’s path is different from simplicity. ” It seems the brand is much more about improving the way we live with its signature ‘empty vessels’.

Its space design mirrors that. A ‘quiet radicalism’ comprising spatial restraint, zones that mirror the layout of typical homes and material honesty that encourage touch. Walk into a Muji store and you feel trusted to browse and find what you need on your own terms.

Muji earned the equivalent of $4.4 billion in 2024. Restraint, it turns out, scales.

The lesson for place brands is pointed. Our instinct when activating a public space or designing a customer journey is often to fill it; more stalls, more signage, more events. But density like this doesn’t leave the customer or visitor time to breathe or explore. Research from McKinsey consistently shows that brands designing for how someone feels outperform those chasing transactions by double (think Sephora and Starbucks).

So what? Next time you’re reviewing a masterplan or a lobby design, ask: what have we left empty? What have we trusted the visitor to discover? The most thoughtful retailers have learned that what you remove can be more powerful than what you add.

Our take

Retailers are some of the world’s most rigorous experience designers. They test and refine physical space with a discipline that most place brands haven’t yet adopted. The good news is, the tools are available to everyone – flow mapping, scent, surprise, restraint, they just need translating.

The best place brands are built by people who understand that how somewhere feels is the product.

Sources:

Mintel: https://www.mintel.com/insights/retail/why-scent-marketing-makes-sense-for-brands/

The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/08/scents-smell-retail-shopping-marketing

Mood media: https://us.moodmedia.com/scent/scent-research/

Vox: https://www.vox.com/2018/10/17/17989684/ikea-gruen-effect-unplanned-purchasesUrdesignmag: https://www.urdesignmag.com/zara-retail-design-strategy-2026/

Archi Design: https://worldarchidesign.com/news/mujis-quiet-radicalism-innovations-in-space-texture-and-invisible-design/494

Dezeen: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/12/13/kenya-hara-exclusive-interview-muji-us-expansion-brand-aesthetic/

Globis: https://globis.eu/the-muji-way/

CX News: https://www.cxnetwork.com/cx-experience/news/customer-centric-companies-achieve-2x-revenue-growth-says-mckinsey