Meet me at the local shop: designing community anchors for customer engagement

Abstract

Design plays a vital role in facilitating community-building by triggering interpersonal social interactions, enhancing a sense of attachment, and connecting individuals. This study aims to identify how local creators are currently casting community anchors for their customers and explore design opportunities to further enhance these practices. First, a literature review is conducted to establish the significance and concepts of ‘local creators’, ‘community anchors’ and ‘level of customer engagement’. Subsequently, 40 practical cases are thematically analysed to identify which and how local creators cast community anchors to engage customers for community-building. Consequently, fourteen types of community anchors and five ways of anchoring the community anchors are identified: ‘Exploiting Locality’, ‘Village Well’, ‘Sparking Interest’, ‘Digging Interest’, and ‘Local Activism’. Based on these findings, this study discusses design implications and implementations to enhance local creators’ practices of creating community-anchored experiences so that they can have a greater impact on their regions beyond individual businesses. This study has significant implications in that it provides a foundation for customer experience design to create communities around local shops.