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Music, signage and atmosphere influence how long customers stay, how they feel, and how they perceive a brand.
In a competitive retail environment, these elements play a critical role in shaping brand identity and in-store engagement.
New Look has built a strong position as one of the UK’s best-known high street fashion retailers. With a strong promotional calendar, broad customer appeal and continued investment in store formats, our observations and suggestions could support and further enhance that positioning.
Music was present at an acceptable and consistent volume throughout the store, helping create a comfortable background atmosphere.
The playlist leaned towards safe, generic pop selections which felt neutral but lacked a clear sense of identity. While unobtrusive, there is an opportunity to use music more intentionally to reflect New Look’s fashion-led positioning and connect more strongly with its core audience.
For a trend-driven retailer like New Look, music can play an important role in adding energy, reinforcing brand personality and helping stores feel more current, relevant and engaging.
There were two digital signage screens positioned behind the till area, helping support promotions and visual communication at the point of purchase.
Beyond this, there was limited use of digital signage elsewhere in-store and no visible external screens. This creates an opportunity to extend campaign messaging and visual storytelling into more of the customer journey.
Digital signage can play a valuable role in highlighting seasonal ranges, outfit inspiration, new collections and key promotions - particularly in a fast-moving category where freshness and newness are essential.
Move beyond generic background playlists with a more intentional soundtrack that reflects the brand’s style-led identity and resonates with core shoppers.
Introduce regular playlist updates throughout the year to align with changing collections, campaigns and customer moods.
Introduce additional screens in key zones and storefront locations to amplify promotions, showcase styling inspiration and create a more immersive in-store experience.
Based on your brand, audience and environment, here’s an example of how your music could feel with Startle.
This playlist has been designed to reflect New Look’s accessible, trend-conscious identity - blending contemporary pop, soulful modern artists and confident emerging talent to create a fresh, upbeat and fashion-forward atmosphere.
The aim is to:
Choose from our library of over 100 professionally crafted playlists spanning genres, moods and sectors, or opt for curated soundtracks for your stores.
We offer simple, scalable digital signage to showcase campaigns, collections and promotions - making it easier to keep stores fresh, relevant and visually engaging.
With Startle Studio, you’ll have full visibility and control of all your stores’ schedules from a central platform, ensuring consistency across every location.
We’ve worked with premium multi-site retailers to create more engaging, brand-led environments that reflect the quality and identity of the brand at every touchpoint.
We partnered with schuh to help strengthen their in-store music experience across a large UK estate. For them, music plays an important role in shaping atmosphere, energy and perception at the point of purchase.
By aligning sound with schuh’s bold, trend-driven identity, we helped create a more consistent and distinctive in-store experience that better reflected how the brand wanted to feel in physical retail - energetic, relevant and culturally connected.
This included:
Startle have consistently been a great support to our stores. From their content management, music profiling and technical support, Startle have enabled us to create a seamless shopping atmosphere across our full store estate.
Marketing Manager
Book your discovery call to explore how music and signage could enhance experience, consistency and engagement across your estate.
On this call we’ll:
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