Let The Good Times Roll: Discussing CRE Entertainment Opportunities At Bisnow’s May 29 Event
The hospitality and retail sectors have been incorporating immersive experiences to attract visitors and keep them coming back, ranging from hotels creating unique activities and programs to retail spaces including pop-up shops.
For architecture and engineering firm HFA, making an experience memorable means designing spaces with a deep knowledge of the target audience in mind. Through its concept design service, Matchstick, HFA creates layouts based on how users will move through and interact with the space.
Nicole Poole, HFA’s vice president and hospitality and entertainment lead, will be attending Bisnow’s Chicago Retail, Entertainment, Sports and Tourism event on May 29 and participating in the panel titled The Evolving Retail Experience.
In a conversation with Bisnow, Poole discussed how the sports entertainment, hospitality and retail sectors can create memorable experiences and how HFA collaborates with its clients’ stakeholders through Matchstick to create unique spaces.
Bisnow: What are some of the current opportunities in the sports entertainment sector to create enjoyable experiences for customers?
Poole: For some of our clients in this sector, it's about creating unique, immersive experiences that customers can't get anywhere else.
One of HFA’s clients is a baseball-themed group that created a soft pitch system. It’s meant to be approachable for people who just want to have a good time with friends and may not be ready to go straight out to the baseball field.
Those types of concepts are starting to come online more, especially with the rise of golf entertainment and pickleball. It takes the idea of competitive sports and meshes it with a social experience.
When you're playing competitive games, it's all about the game. However, groups are taking the classic games that people love and are familiar with and putting them into a social entertainment environment so that people can have a good time eating or drinking while playing and sharing in an experience with friends. It's interesting to see what some businesses are creating for their patrons to make them want to stay at the facilities longer.
Bisnow: How can these immersive experiences within sports entertainment translate into commercial real estate sectors such as hospitality and retail?
Poole: A great way to get people back into the spaces is to create a customizable experience for customers.
For a hotel or a restaurant, hospitality groups should think about how they’re bringing forth amenities and experiences that people will enjoy during their stay and will be a lasting memory.
With retail, many developers are trying to figure out ways to get people to come into their spaces. One interesting connection between retail and entertainment is when retail groups create community events to draw crowds back to their centers.
For example, an event may revolve around creating awareness of a brand that’s launching a new product or service and wants to make a community experience around it.
Bisnow: What is HFA’s approach to creating experiential entertainment spaces?
Poole: Through Matchstick, one of the first things we do is conduct an interview with all the stakeholders to understand their goals. The interview is a series of questions to gain insight into their customers and their patrons, with some examples being, “Do you know the demographics of the area you're going into? Who do you see coming into this space? What are they doing here? What aspects can bring them back into the space?” and so on. We use the information to understand what these individualized groups need for their experience.
From there, we create patron profiles, which is a day in the life of the target customers. As an example, with a mineral pool concept we’re working with, we studied how people might journey through a property that has multiple buildings and thought about what different individuals were looking for. Were they coming for a spa experience or just to soak in the mineral pools? Are they going to visit the retail station as they were leaving the property? The profiles take the demographics and tie them into building design and programming.
Bisnow: What are you looking forward to most about attending the Chicago Retail, Entertainment, Sports and Tourism event?
Poole: I’m looking forward to meeting up with other professionals, hearing more about the new concepts coming out to the market and their observations on what types of places people are gravitating toward. I’m also always interested in seeing new developments in Chicago and hearing about what’s up and coming from the panels.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to attend the event by registering and purchasing tickets.
This article was produced in collaboration between HFA and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.
Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.
