EP.69 Keeping Retail Relevant with Emotional Connections and Engaging Tech with Angela Gearhart, Founding Partner - Media Maxx Executive Practice Director - AAG Consulting Group

About Angela Gearhart:

Angela’s Profile: linkedin.com/in/angela-gearhart2024

Websites

• angelagearhart.com/ (Portfolio)
• mediamaxxcom.net (Company)
• greendogbotanics.com (Company)

ANGELA'S BIO:

Angela Gearhart, known for creating transformational brand experiences, tackles mission-critical challenges facing brands today. Where there is a gap between brands and their customers, they risk both revenue and relevance. Angela's deep understanding of consumer behavior and her ability to harness the synergy between marketing, sales, and technology, allow her to develop strategies that bridge the gap, igniting growth and fostering brand loyalty.

By optimizing the human-physical-digital experience, she enables brands to disrupt and connect across consumer touchpoints. During her tenure as VP of Connected Brand Experience at Sleep Number, disrupted the mattress category, driving the company's growth from $300M to over $2B, with her team earning over 30 retail design, innovation, and technology awards.

As a trusted advisor and influencer in the retail industry, Angela has earned accolades including recognition as a CSA Top Woman in Retail, Remodista Women2Watch in Business Disruption, Retail Innovator by Retail Touchpoints, and Design Influencer by design:retail Magazine.

Angela is a Founding Partner at Media Maxx, which specializes in accelerating brand growth through ecommerce partnership marketing and retail strategies. Additionally, she serves as Executive Practice Director at AAG Consulting Group, where Angela leverages her insights into buyer dynamics and retail technology landscapes to deliver effective positioning strategies for B2B retail tech firms. She also contributes her expertise to advisory boards for Retail Touchpoints, Goldstein Museum of Design, IRISCX, and Digital Signage Experience.

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

These dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

In this episode I talk with Angela Gearhart a retail industry leader who spent 20 years at Sleep Number Corporation as the VP of Connected Brand Experience changing the way co    nsumes shopped for beds by integrating relevant technologies to enhance the shopping experience and foster deeper relationships between the brand and its customers.

First though, a few thoughts…

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Off the top of our discussion, this is the sentiment that my guest Angela Gearhart expressed as we dug into a conversation about the nature of retail what it is really about.

No doubt, when you think about retail there is indeed buying involved, but it is so much more than that. In the exchange of goods and services there is an intangible factor to long-term customer life-time value… a relationship. 

Shopping is less about stuff than a deep interpersonal connection built on our need to be in social groups. The sense of belonging and that the relationship establishes context and meaning to our lives is key.

Is that too much to put on the back of a retail experience? 

I don’t think so. 

For millennia, shopping has been connected to the sharing of idea