'High streets need to be shape-shifting and able to adapt', says expert Kate Hardcastle
A retail guru has described how high streets need to be “shape shifting” in order to suit a changing world and busy lives, claiming we’re in a period of evolution.
Kate Hardcastle, a global authority on consumer behaviour from Yorkshire, has worked all over the world advising organisations including Disney, Marks & Spencer, and EVRi on growth, technology, and customer strategy.
She told The Yorkshire Post: “It’s not the end (for the high street), it’s the evolution. Everything touches the high street. It isn’t a sector that’s just specifically about the act of opening a door and selling anymore. It’s so intertwined with life. Retail’s not dead. It’s even bigger than it ever was.”
What people want is a high street that reflects something as vibrant and engaging as a social media feed, something “shape shifting, that can easily evolve and adapt”, she said.
Offering a diversity of experience is key - somewhere to shop (independents as well as national brands), to live, to work, to play sport, to eat and drink, to engage in leisure activities.
“Consumers do not live life in sectors,” Kate notes. “You don’t get up in the morning and go ‘right, it’s grocery shopping time - I expect to do that in this environment. Now it’s clothes shopping time, I expect to do it in this environment’. People want a blended life and they want a blended high street that suits and sits with it.”
“It’s absolutely about an abundance of everything,” she continues. “But it also comes down to who are the people shopping and visiting there? Who are the people that live there? What are the trends there?
“I don’t like the homogenisation of high streets, the cookie cutter style. You want to feel that when you go somewhere, you are there. What I want to see is a celebration of place as everything.”
Kate’s words to The Yorkshire Post come just weeks after the Government announced a multi-million pound package to “turn the tide on ailing high streets”.
It pledged a £150million cash injection into struggling areas that lack essentials and suffer with boarded up shop fronts and said more details on the High Streets Strategy would be announced in the coming months.
“It will help turn the tide on decline and restore a sense of pride people feel in their high streets and local area – which serve as a vital meeting point for communities,” the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said.
Last year, the Centre for Cities think tank published guidance for policymakers in a report exploring the varying performance of high streets across the country.
It noted that “a struggling high street is the outcome of a struggling economy, not the other way round”. “So any policy interventions to save the high street shouldn’t start with the high street itself, but the wider economy, and where it locates in a city,” it said.