Do you love new tech gadgets but are secretly totally intimidated by them and really have no idea how they’d actually function in your life? Well, you’re just like us!
And that’s one of the reasons that Target created Open House, a new experiential retail store in the heart of San Francisco.
Target Open House – part retail space, part lab, part meeting venue for the connected home tech community – is a 3,500 square-foot ode to IoT. I-O-What, you ask? IoT = Internet of Things. Also referred to as “connected” technology, the products like Nest and automated dog feeders that connect everyday life items to the Internet and let us humans have total personalization, convenience and efficiency.
Feel smarter already? Good.
We, too, had to quickly get up-to-speed on IoT when Target’s Experiential Marketing team in Minneapolis asked Blind Society to be an extension of the Enterprise Growth Initiatives & Open House project team to help with grand opening ideation and strategy.
Now open to the public, Open House features a transparent, acrylic “house” complete with acrylic furniture that allows guests to experience vignettes that demonstrate in unprecedented ways how multiple connected devices can work together to create real-life solutions. Instead of simply showing how a smart baby monitor functions, for instance, Open House connects it to other, sometimes surprising, products like a lamp and even the coffee maker and speakers. Visitors can see how a baby’s stirring prompts soothing music on the sound system and a pot of joe brewing in the kitchen.
Like any good branding and design agency, throughout Blind Society’s ideation we kept the Target brand at the core of each idea. The magic of Open House is that through Target’s brand lens, the often intimidating IoT products are humanized and more approachable to the everyday consumer. We knew that each aspect of Blind Society’s strategy and recommendation needed to encourage engagement, personalization and interaction. And that’s exactly what Open House is doing.
Next time you’re in the Bay Area be sure to stop by Target Open House and make yourself at home.
See what Mashable and Forbes have to say.
