Once you pop your customer will shop : - A study about pop-up stores

Abstract: Background: E-commerce retailing is the most rapidly growing shopping mode and has quickly gained a huge market share. The increased growth rate means that the competition among online based companies is growing. Therefore the challenge faced is how to be unique on an extremely competitive market and being able to reach customers in a jungle of information and communication. By identifying barriers and weaknesses in the existing online sales mode, new complementary tools might be found which can help online based companies to stay competitive, meet customers’ demands and deliver exclusive experiences.   Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe the new phenomenon pop-up store and investigate if it could be a complementary tool for online based companies to help tackling limitations inherent in e-businesses.   Methodology: In this study we conducted seven interviews with people that have been working with pop-up store concepts in some way. Two of the interviewees were consultants, one was a specialist on pop-up stores and the rest were Marketing Managers of well known Swedish companies.       Conclusions: This study showed that the three most prominent limitations inherent with e-business (lack of human interaction, communication, capture of visitors’ attention) could be overcome with a pop-up store.   Proposals for future research: It would be interesting to further investigate, in connection to this study, how customers have perceived the concepts and if they think that a pop-up store could increase their knowledge about an online based company and enhance their willingness to purchase through the web