Brief 5: Wickes Colour Selection live brief - Initial thoughts and ideas

At the end of the talk last week from The Elephant Room, Will and Shannie proposed a live brief for Wickes that involved reimagining the customer experience for selecting colour and to create a journey to replace the current approach that's in their stores.

The task goes as follows

To disrupt the market to significantly increase the store's footfall and attract new customers to Wickes by:

- Concepting and delivering the best and most simple way for customers who are shopping colours in store.

- Helping customers choose a paint colour scheme and get them to the tin that they need in the most intuitive and straightforward wat of any retailer in the UK.

Considerations

- It's about shopping colour, not tins.
- It's about schemes, not just individual colours.
- It overtly caters to the different ways customers shop colour.

Initial Thoughts

My first thoughts on this was that the colour selection process needs to be catered to the individual consumer as each person is different to the next; they have different needs, different ways of shopping etc. One thing that Will mentioned after his visit to the Wickes store was that there is no one expert in store that can help and give advice to the customers; instead, the journey seems to be more do it yourself style. This could be problematic as often people may arrive in the store not 100% on what works, how things work and so instead require advice to help them along their journey. On the other hand there will also be consumers who arrive in store knowing exactly what they want or at the very least a good idea of what they want and just need pointing to the correct place in the store.

Initial Ideas

A method of generating ideas that I learnt from Abraham from the Pop Up Agency last week was to empty the brain of ideas onto post-it notes and then between a couple of other people you swap and expand upon their ideas, making the whole process a lot quicker without the need for judgments on these individual ideas. 

Between me and Jon, our ideas consisted of:

- Small showrooms that would be examples of already existing colour schemes

- A room that would have LCD screens as walls as a means for the customer to pick and choose colours in real time to decorate their rooms with.

- A VR experience that would allow for a similar effect as the previous idea, to give the customer confidence in what they're choosing will work. This eliminates the worries of having to imagine how colours would work together and instead shows them first hand how they work.

- Local experts or artists could come in each week/month to change their recommendations of what works well within a room which gives the store a more updated, interactive experience for the consumer.

- An interactive game that could help involved more families to get involved in the whole experience of choosing colours for their home.

We established that some aspect of this brief, at least for those who need it, is about giving the customer the knowledge and ultimately the power to craft their home they way they would like to. So throughout this process of choosing colour, maybe there is an element of giving the customer a better understanding of what colours work well and why. With the potential of also educating them on what else within those rooms work well with colour schemes because colours aren't the only aspect of decoration. By this, I mean things such as lighting, furniture etc. all things which affect the look and feel of the room depending on what colours they're accompanied with.