Planning and Implementing Pop-up Activities: The Pop-up Experience

The Pop-up Experience is when and where the major physical interactions and engagement between brands and consumers happen. The existing academic literature discusses various factors involved in the creation of customer experience. For example, Verhoef et al. (2009) posit a conceptual model of consumer experience creation in a retail context, which suggests that any strategy for managing customer experience should incorporate the following elements: social environment, service interface, retail atmosphere, product assortment, price, customer experience in alternative channels, the retail brand, and customer experience over time. Given that pop-up is an aspect of retail activity, many of these experiential components in a more general context resonate in the specific situation of pop-up retail activities. However, it can be argued that there are differences in nuance and emphasis arising from the inherent ephemerality of pop-up. Thus, in a pop-up context specific elements identified in the research that need to be considered at this stage are: the social environment, digital engagement, store atmospherics, product assortment, and promotion.