Tag Archives: emotion in retail

Making an Experience Sharable

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 Some words that we use frequently and automatically are taken for granted. Recreation is one of those words. I don’t mean the concept I mean the actual word. We think of recreation is an activity, but delve into the language and what emerges is the idea of re-creation. Recreation is activity worthy of remembering, or re-creating in our minds.

The aim of any interaction with a Brand should be recreational. The experience should leave a a positive residue that is worthy of memory, and sharing. We want the audience to re-create the good points out loud… one-on-one or with social media. Naturally when we enjoy something we want to share the experience. Things seem more real, more tangible, when we can see and feel the reaction of others. Enjoyment validated is enjoyment experienced.

We share positive and negative experiences because we are social beings, meant to live in groups and watch each other’s backs. If we could travel in time back to pre-history, I would bet that our ancestors would engage in stories about happening upon a field of berry bushes (positive), or the time they startled a mama-bear (negative). These stories inevitably become exaggerated and embellished as they are retold. The net result is that they teach others what to seek and what to avoid.

Research by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman speaks to the idea that we commit experiences to memory in specific ways. Kahneman’s discovery of our “experiencing selves versus remembering selves” tells us that an overall positive experience can be “ruined” in our memory because of one profoundly negative element. When we are in the moment we are engaged in consuming what is happening with our senses and responding. What Brands and experiences must connect with is the remembering self, that storytelling part of our memory that we can access and share. In Kahneman’s words, “what we get to keep from our experiences is a story”.

The challenge with Brands and experiences is to not only mitigating negatives, but to prime the story and make it’s retelling more likely, and more salient. Much has been written about “storytelling” and it’s role in brand and marketing, but I want to add a different slant. We want our Brand to be a mentor, the customer to be a hero, and a transforming journey, but what storytelling “seeds” are we planting in the customer’s head for them to share. How can the experience provide a memorable landscape, populated with signature events and landmarks that can be re-created and re-told?

These experiential landmarks are key to creating memorable, and therefore sharable experiences. And to be really sticky in the memory, they need to be personal. The trap of many experience designs is that they reach for the “big bang”. They offer an initial value in the ability to be the new cool thing. The first folks who visited a Rainforest Cafe had a story to tell, but it was about the newness of the experience and getting credit for seeing it before others. After that the experience stories became about the food or the prices and a downward spiral ensued. There was no more storytelling fuel as the experience wasn’t personal, it was  “mass”. The signature event didn’t refresh or connect one-on-one with individuals. It was one gigantic landmark; an event.

Effective landmark experiences add up to a story versus explode all at once. And they provide a memorable context for personal experiences to happen. They can be architectural spaces, exciting merchandising and displays, scents and sounds, but the common denominator is that they must be unique to the brand, and play a supporting role to a personalized interaction.

An effective way to to think about a sharable experience design is to test the story-worthless via scripting the story you want told. Work the story back to the design and keep refining. What contexts need to be created and what personal interactions need to be orchestrated? The goal is to get to that pre-historic moment where the delights and amazement of finding the berries crowd out the unfortunate encounters with bears.

Bill Chidley is a Partner and Co-Founder at ChangeUp. Creating Innovating Experiences that Drive Growth. http://www.changeupinc.com

Learning From Orlando: The Center Store Re-imagined

Disney World

Disney World

Attempts to invigorate the “center store”… that wasteland in the grocery and Supercenter… seem to be in limbo. A few years ago it was the hot topic at retail conferences and trade shows, but it looks like the topics of omni-channel and mobile/digital are now stealing the show.

But the truth is that the center store remains an automatic, list driven experience that doesn’t inspire or excite us. The perimeter of the grocery is still the sensorial star. Mobile coupons, a smattering of department reinventions ala P&G, Kimberly Clark, and Purina that appear to be incongruent, and the occasional curved fixture are cries in the dark. Beyond that, the center store is nothing but gondola runs ad nauseum.

Understandably the perimeter of the supermarket has received the most attention and investment. Grocers saw their expertise in “fresh” as a strategic advantage, and lever, over the Walmart Supercenter onslaught. But the playing field has become more equal now, 20 years later. The center of the store is still untapped potential.

What if? What if the center store was an experience and not a task? I want to take a few moments to jump-start the topic. And I want to be a bit unorthodox. So, let’s talk about how we can learn from Orlando Florida.

In the 1940’s, Orlando was a swampy, humid town in the relative center of a state already known as a tourist destination. The only thing notable about Orlando was that it had an Army base. That was probably the only reason to visit Orlando.

Then, all the attention in Florida was fixated on the coastline. The great beaches, sun and surf fueled the investments in Miami, Daytona, Naples. These were the produce departments, delis, and bakeries of the state. They are sexy. The center of the state was just the leftover land in between the coasts. But look at Orlando today? There are more direct flights to Orlando from points elsewhere in the US than any other city in Florida and is annually the most visited American city.

The reason is vision and investment. Walt Disney had created Disneyland in southern California in 1955. He had an even grander vision for an eastern version that would be closer to the majority of the American population, but coastal property was expensive. The center of the state was economically irrelevant, so it was cheap. But it had traffic and infrastructure. Disney World opened in Orlando in 1971, and since has been a magnet for other development, including Universal Theme Park. The place attracts people, and the people spend.

Orlando is a great analogy for what could happen to the center store with vision and investment. With today’s additional pressure for retailers to stay relevant in the face of Amazon same-day delivery, the center store must create value beyond inventory holding power. Of course it needs to be easy to shop for shoppers on a mission, but with 50,000 items and only 500 in the average household, couldn’t space be re-imagined? What if it wasn’t a sea of gondola shelving, but a collection of themed spaces that flowed into each other, like the “worlds” at Disney? What if you could learn about how the products can fit into your needs best or solve a problem versus check off a list?

With breakthroughs in mobile technology, in-store networks, and especially mobile payment, the grocery may not even need a single entry/exit anymore to funnel shoppers through the checkouts. What could this do for convenience that could shake up the entire center store layout?

Let’s see what we can learn from Orlando as the evolving future of retail demands fresh thinking. The store could be the best of both, with great beaches AND a fun exciting destination in the center, creating a destination experience that no eCommerce retailer could match.

Honoring the Toaster: The Ultimate Customer Experience Mentor

The humble but indispensable toaster

The humble but indispensable toaster

Being a consumer today is a lot harder than ever. How we do the things we need to do every day is changing at a dizzying pace. Simply interacting with all our devices, our car stereos, the ATM, stores, and even healthcare providers require us to learn and relearn the means by which we get the results we want. This learning requires an investment in time and energy, usually only to have an “upgrade” result in us having to start nearly from scratch. Usually the upgrades have the motive of simplification and/or added functions, but many seem to change for the sake of change… except the toaster.

When is the last time that you needed to relearn how to use a toaster? As an appliance, toasters are perfect in their functional transparency and clarity of purpose. They are comically simple. In fact, we take these wonders of the industrial age for granted.

When I think about approaching a customer experience challenge, I think about how I would “toasterize” it. Toasterizing requires some creative thinking in metaphors, but it can uncover what is providing a great experience versus what is superfluous and driving customers crazy.

Here are the reasons why I believe a toaster represents the ideal experience.

  1. It manages expectations. It says what it is and does what it says. An orange is orange, a fly flies, and a toaster toasts. Enough said.
  1. It cannot be easily substituted. If you don’t have a toaster, you probably will forego toast. Toaster ovens are overkill.
  1. The operation is intuitive. I think I was only shown how to operate a toaster once in my life and I did not have to be shown again.
  1. The inner workings are not mysterious. You can actually see the thing doing its job. The little wires inside get hot and look hot, and the bread turns to toast in front of your eyes.
  1. The process is sensorial. You can actually tell the moment the bread turns into toast by the toasty smell.
  1. The user settings are direct. Toast the bread longer for dark (or burnt) toast, shorter for light toast. If the toast is too light you can push it down for more time. If you burn it its your fault.
  1. The time it takes to do the job is consistent and reasonable. The sub-conscious knowledge of how long the toaster takes allows you to multi-task effectively.
  1. It does one thing and is not insecure about it. The toaster is one of the elite appliances that can set out on the counter full time, so it has a big ego I’m sure.

The toaster’s more modern cousin, the microwave, is indispensible but a horrible experience that is tolerated versus enjoyed. (Bring to mind any service providers you may have?). How does it work? What do the frozen dinner’s instructions require from me? Will this food now burn me when I open it or eat it? Add your other complaints here… Would you rather toast that dinner if it only took 2 minutes?

Improvements on the toaster are barely non-existent. Sure there are some fashion concessions, and I have seen one that burns a Hello Kitty face on the toast, but the inner workings are the same. The toaster has reached appliance nirvana.

For such a humble gadget, the toaster is a master at delivering what we want from it, and therefore has become indispensable. It delivers great value and we give it a place in our collection of must-have objects. I find that the toaster test is a great way to casually evaluate your experience on the 8 points above. Ultimately the toaster is simple and intuitive and a great experience role-model. So the question is… is your customer experience a toaster or a microwave?

Bill Chidley is a Partner and Co-Founder at ChangeUp. Creating Innovating Experiences that Drive Growth. http://www.changeupinc.com

What Would You Pay to Shop at Your Favorite Store?

How much for your time?

How much for your time?

The thought of paying to shop is a ridiculous idea, but we all do it. We pay with our time not our cash. If we think about store experiences this way… as products people buy… it can change how we should innovate retail experiences.

The thought of paying for a retail experience came to me as an epiphany while I was on a panel discussion on ‘bricks and mortar retail in a digital world’ at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year. The question from the panel leader was about the challenges retailers face creating loyalty. My response was “I pay $79 a year to be loyal to Amazon”. It’s true. If I am willing to pay to be an Amazon Prime customer I am going to certainly look there first for the merchandise I want so I can benefit from my membership. The enticement to become a member was ‘free shipping’, and the math seemed fair, but now by brain dilutes the cost over the entire Amazon experience and I feel value beyond the shipping savings. I can’t imagine NOT being a Prime member.

This pay-to-shop model is not new. It has been around at least since the dawn of warehouse clubs. Costco, Sam’s, and BJ’s are all acutely aware that they have to provide member value, and filter their decisions based on this foundation. They know if their members are not perceiving an annual savings AND a great experience they will bail. The issue with the club operators is that the added value is not “environmental” in the form of store design, but believe me when I say they put an equal amount of energy into the design of their  store experience via curated assortments, adjacency and operations, the treasure-hunt atmosphere, and exciting seasonal merchandising.

Amazon Prime and Club stores are monetary costs, but when they choose a retailer shoppers are still weighing the cost of their decision, but with the currency of time.

I have a client friend who ran dealer development for a major equipment manufacturer who once said to me “When someone asks me what a tractor costs I tell them it costs what we sell it to the dealer for. What they pay is that plus the value the dealer adds in the sales and service experience.”  Forget the Prime and Club models and think in terms of how your store, your department experience, and your category solutions deliver an experience that is worth 10 or 30 minutes versus 10 or 30 dollars. This can be a transformational way of thinking about innovation in retail.

A time/value framework can be a simple one for approaching both how a store delivers today and how it could be delivering more tomorrow.  For known value items like detergent and milk the assumption is that price parity or better must rule. But for other wants and needs that are not price sensitive, and certainly part of a “reason to visit” a retailer, ask how the experience of shopping before, during, and after the trip can be worth more than the “stuff”. How can it make the shopper feel smarter, more attractive, more hip, more…something. The goal is to have an emotional end-benefit that is constantly and consistently delivered in the experience and reinforced through communications. The result is the shopper driving…or clicking past competitive retailers to get to their preferred store.

Today the seamless store experience and the digital experience are the “how”. These are the vehicles, but like driving a car they are made up of smaller experiences like acceleration, cornering, and braking (and cupholders, and a great stereo, and power seats) that make the experience a joy. Try thinking about the value you are getting for your time the next time you shop. We all do it subconsciously already, just become aware. It just might lead you to a new way to innovate.