Stores need to offer customers brand experiences if brick-and-mortar portfolios are to maintain their relevance, executives said during a discussion at the Financial Times' Future of Retail Summit in London on Sept. 19.

The overriding sentiment among participants was that while stores still hold significance, shoppers increasingly want to experience brands in ways they cannot through online platforms.

"If you want to look at the world of the store going forward, it's absolutely got a place in U.K. retail," said Robbie Feather, commercial director for Argos, a U.K.-based online and in-store retailer owned by J Sainsbury Plc. "But what we need to do, as retailers, is really understand what our consumers want from a physical estate."

Luxury brands, food retailers and discount stores were the sorts of categories that would continue to benefit from a presence on high streets or in malls, Feather said.

"If I take luxury brands, for example, your store is probably less about selling products and more about inspiring your customers, and it's about brand value, the essence of your brand," Feather said. "So I can't see a world where luxury retail won't exist in physical format."

Seth Ellison, the president for Europe at jeans designer and retailer Levi Strauss & Co., said he believed the convenience and speed offered by pure online players presented good opportunities for other retailers to reassess what they wanted to offer.

"Where [Levi's is] headed is more towards experience," Ellison said. "We've done a lot in the last year or two around customization, personalization. ... There's never been a greater time to be a brand and invest in storytelling. Brick-and-mortar retail isn't going to be in the next few years what it was before. It's going to be experience-centered."

One of the initiatives taken by Levi Strauss has been to install a facility at its store in London's Regent Street where customers can print their own T-shirts.

"The ability to create traffic when you do create [an] exciting experience is incredible," Ellison said.

Separately, an executive of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. emphasized the need for creating a seamless experience for purchasers.

Terry von Bibra, general manager for Europe at the owner of e-commerce sites Tmall and Taobao, said many retailers were missing the point by focusing too heavily on which channels they were present in. Brick-and-mortar store operators tended to focus on how they could digitize their businesses, while online pure players tended to ignore entering the arena of physical stores by believing it was too costly and old-fashioned, he said.

"Both sides of the equation are missing the point," von Bibra said. "The point is, our consumers have long since taken on this as being a seamless thing.

"No consumer wakes up in the morning and says 'I want to buy some new socks online.' A consumer says 'I have a want or a need that I associate with a particular retail brand or retail outlet that would help me address that need effectively, efficiently, at the right price with the best experience that I happen to care about.' And they seamlessly put aside the idea of offline and online, and we should do the same."

The Hangzhou-based company, which had 466 million annual active users in its marketplaces as of June 30, has invested in physical stores in numerous categories. The investments include consumer electronics retailer Suning Commerce Group Co. Ltd., shopping mall Intime Retail (Group) Co. Ltd. and supermarket Hema.