Shoppers at the Pantaloons women?s festival, She is U. Picture by Rashbehari Das

Simple sales are pass?. The retail space is abuzz with interactive forums designed to engage the customer.

Discussions, chats and interactions have become increasingly popular tools to hold shopper attention. While cerebral destinations like bookstores including Landmark and Crossword could seem like obvious venues for such events, department stores like Pantaloons, Westside and Shoppers? Stop are also using innovative platforms as buyer bait.

Issues on the anvil could be purely lifestyle related ? like hair care and makeovers ? or purely serious ? like healthcare and child rearing.

Pantaloons, hosting a women?s festival titled She is U for the third year, has included serious talks and workshops along with the usual line-up of fun, games and prizes to be won.

?This is entirely a customer-relationship building exercise,? explained a Pantaloons spokesperson. The serious note has been added in the form of panel discussions and seminars, which have turned out to be crowd-pullers. A talk on fitness and a makeover session last weekend saw, according to officials, a ?decent audience coming in?. A session on how to handle young children last Saturday was the biggest hit so far.

?Both parents and kids found an open forum to discuss their problems and share experiences. With a child psychiatrist handling queries from the audience, the session was all the more helpful for a host of parents,? the spokesperson added.

The store is planning to wrap up the fortnight on Saturday with a discussion on how working women can strike a balance between home and office. While retailers feel there are other ways of boosting footfalls apart from events, there is no denying that interactive meets help customers feel at home. It also gets busy-bee shoppers to spend more time at the store on a single visit.

Crossword, the national bookstore chain, which has held workshops for children in the summer, recently hosted a music festival with musicians from Calcutta and other parts of the country coming in to perform. ?These add value to customer?s visits to the store,? explained Sidharth Pansari, owner, Crossword. The add-on culture has been built into the framework of the chain as a whole, he clarifies. ?Ours is not just a bookstore, it is like a community centre for people to meet, so we keep having these events to keep people interested,? he said.

With players fighting to be heard above the din on retail street, the fight for customer loyalty has become the scene of some wily warfare. And till now, at least, the Calcutta consumer has emerged as the apparent beneficiary.