Which would you rather have?

When a customer wants to know how a product will make his or her life better, time is almost always included as a factor in that question. Will this product organize my/save me/give me time? Money comes and goes, but time is something no one gets back. As such, there is an implied value of time in our lives. Often we feel that we need to take advantage of it as much as possible. (If you have kids, you definitely know this.)

In a recent Stanford study, authors Jennifer Aaker, the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Cassie Mogilner discovered that, “…referring to time typically leads to more favorable attitudes—and to more purchases.” In one case study, they found that advertising stressing time (“Spend a little time and enjoy C&D’s lemonade”) was more attractive to customers than advertising that stressed money (“Spend a little money, and enjoy C&D’s lemonade”).

Understanding the connection between a customer and a product helps you build better advertising. If the advertisement conveys time as a benefit to the customer when using the product, the customer may take the next steps on the path to purchase. In a market downturn where price is already the hot topic, this may be that extra incentive in a customer’s path to purchase.

You can download the fascinating research paper here.

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"Hello. Your satisfaction is our number one goal. Honest. Really."

In 2006, an executive with Best Buy sent a memorandum to all Best Buy store employees. It explained that the only content allowed on screens in the store was content approved by corporate. It was to be followed for several reasons, most notably that the “6-60″ demographic might not take kindly to the latest R-rated movie release playing in its entirety, or that the big game be broadcast in the store, and along with it the competitor’s advertising during the breaks.

To my knowledge, not a single employee read the memo. To this day, I still see this activity going on. Does that make it wrong?

Store employees want programming that does three things for them. Depending on your situation, these may have a different order of importance:

• Sell the product.
• Energize the employee.
• Speak to the customer.

Recently I wrote about a department full of blank screens. Some comments and e-mails concerned the apparent apathy of the employee I spoke with. Sadly, the apathy was real. The employee didn’t care any more about those screens than he cared to answer my questions. I kept thinking, “These have been out for a week. Did anyone call corporate? How about the manager or GM? Did anyone care?”

Instead of trying to figure out why the employee doesn’t care, I see an opportunity. The challenge is to provide the employee with a vested interest that will foster care for the program and a proactive attitude, especially when situations like blank screens occur. Below are four plans that can help engage the employee in the broadcast of your environment’s program.

YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING?
Employees see the program every day, all day, and they see what customers like and don’t like. Create an email address every single employee has access to and solicit feedback. When you get the feedback, read it and respond to it. In some cases, just being heard is a huge win for the employee.

It was a suggestion from a store employee to me that helped support my desire for Closed Captioning on the HD Program in all Best Buy stores in United States. To this day, Best Buy remains the only retailer in the world with Closed Captioning on an in-store closed-circuit program.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
If employees have a hand in the production, they will have pride in the broadcast. There are three ways to give them ownership:

1. Ask them what would be good for the program. Is there a big, burning question that all customers have about a product? Can it be answered in about five words? If so, then make a piece of content that answers that question. Then, give them credit for providing you the details needed to create the content.

2. Have them help you write the playlist. A little more underwater footage for the HD program? A little more Tiger Woods golfing for the gaming department? Let them help you think about what works.

3. Perhaps one of the strongest methods of employee engagement is user-generated content. With technology zooming at full speed, employees are now capable of creating content as easily as the big shots on Madison Avenue (and sometimes just as good). Present to your employees the opportunity to submit content for the network. Give them guidelines and have them to fire up the camcorder. The pride an employee will take in seeing her stuff on the store’s program for a few days or weeks can be immeasurable.

TEACH OUT
A terrific way to maintain the relationship of “were all in this together” between corporate and retail is to show the store employee the numbers. Invite them into the corporate strategy and show them the reason behind what you put on the screen. If you can explain that broadcasting a certain ad at specific times results in sales lift, they will understand the strategy instead of looking at the screen and asking, “Why is that on the TV?”

After building a playlist, distribute it to the employees before the program goes live, and allow access to the playlist during the broadcast. Just knowing what is coming can give the employee the advantage to start and build a relationship with the customer.

For example, if a customer is shopping for a new food mixer, the employee may know of content on a program that speaks directly to the particular line of products the customer is interested in. Those moments where the employee and customer spend more time together, talking and possibly waiting, will help foster the relationship.

It can also provide benefits when you program a spot that may not be right for the environment, and it gives opportunity to the employee to notice this and suggest it be questioned before anyone sees it.

COMMON GROUND
The right content at the right place and the right time means optimal customer engagement. We know this.

The same can be said for the employee engagement. If you’re targeting a certain demographic, there’s a chance you have staffed your department to cater to that demographic as well. Program segmentation (dayparting, geography, departmental, to name a few), if technically feasible, will create a discussion point if both the employee and the customer have something in common with it.

Too many times I have seen content produced and deployed where one of the two parties has no comprehension of the subject. It creates an awkward situation.

By no means should these guidelines exhaustive. In my experience, they are tried and true methods of employee engagement that can make a huge difference between creating an optimal customer experience, or wandering through a department of blank TV screens.

What else works in customer engagement?

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That led me to a familiar needs-based store after my flight. Yet my compulsion to see how the store treats digital signage easily overcame my need to mow the hair off my face. I headed to the home theater department and saw this:

Could it be that the store did not switch to digital?

I had to ask the twenty-something employee manning the deserted department. (For aural sound effects in your head, please add the “DUN DUN” from Law and Order here.)

Me: I see all your TVs are out.
Emp: Yeah, they’ve been out out for a while.
Me: How long?
Emp: Umm, about a week.
Me: A week? Have you seen any change in traffic through the department?
Emp: Actually, not really. It kinda comes and goes.
Me: Have you seen a change in TV purchases?
Emp: Oh yeah. We haven’t sold any TVs in a while.

That’s all I needed to hear.

Empty. That’s how the department felt. Empty. And that’s how any environment feels when a screen utilized for digital signage is not working. It feels like a massive chunk of the experience is missing. And that is bad. Bad. Bad.

After justification for everything I have been doing in this industry came to bear, I took my pride to the man-shave-area to pick up a small canister of my favorite shave cream.

They were out of stock.

(DUN DUN)

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Home Is Where...

Last week, while at a local electronics store, I saw a man, maybe 30 years old, browsing in the computer software section. He was wearing headphones attached to some device in his pocket. It struck me that he was wearing headphones in a retail environment. What was he listening to? Science Fiction? Music? A podcast on computer programming? And would the sound coming from that device affect his behavior in the store and, ultimately, his purchase for the day?

With technology, we have changed from media consumers to media customers, controlling every aspect of how we digest it.

This places special emphasis on the programming strategy of a digital signage network, and as we acquire and play content from external sources, we are starting to create experiences beyond the bubble of a brand or product.

We need to understand the strategy of endemic.

CORPORATE AND THE ENDEMIC ‘R’EVOLUTION

“Endemic” was the corporate buzzword a few years back when retailers were trying to figure out a brand’s relationship among environments, products, customers, employees, and the culture that this mix created.

When reviewing content, I would ask myself, “Does this fit in the store? Does this help the customer make a decision?” When thinking about the store, we would ask ourselves if what we were doing was endemic to the to the brand.

Technology has provided retailers with the opportunity to create a stronger bond between the brand and the customer. Digital signage forces us to rethink the idea of endemic because it combines multiple channels of information including content from outside the native environment. In turn, this forces us to comprehend the psychology of a brand’s influence on the customer’s lifestyle, not just what goes on inside the store.

Therefore, when thinking about the experiences we generate, we must ask ourselves, “Is this endemic to the customer?”

THE ENCONOMY AND THE CUSTOMER SHOPPING SHIFT

The current economic situation has exaggerated the customer’s shopping behavior and the retailer’s focus on that behavior. Because the conglomeration of retail and technology has never been greater, the effect on revenue has never been as significant.

Retailers must work doubly hard: They must sell the products people want to buy both in the store and on the web. But, more importantly, they must foster a culture that people want to engage in and evolve.

The customer builds the brand, not the retailer.

For example, if I own/operate a bookstore and know that my core customer demographic loves Subaru cars, should I start advertising them even though I don’t sell anything related to Subaru?

Yes. You need to relate to your customer and your consumer. Digital Signage plays a key role as an enabler, a device that moves the customer from point A to point B, whatever those two points are: From sad to happy (emotional engagement), from the back of the store to the front (navigation), from reality to fantasy (perception), or from money in the wallet to money in the till (impact/ROI).

THE AUDIENCE LANDSCAPE AND STRATEGY

We used to think of our audience as captive: A group of people stuck in a store with no alternative but to stare at the big shiny screen and all the pretty things it said. (If you’re thinking about Apple’s “1984” ad right now, you’re not alone.)

Rob Winston, Senior Accounts Manager with Arbitron Out-of-Home, says the audience landscape is changing, and I agree. Customers are no longer captive; they are much more selective about what they receive. Mr. Winston asks, “In this audience landscape, how do you create engaging, effective content?”

There are myriad methods to finding the right mix for an engaging experience. No single equation works for all environments. In my own research, I have seen the spectrum of endemic and non-endemic advertising. One customer said, “Don’t sell me Budweiser if I can’t buy it here.” The idea of placing non-endemic content comes with reluctance due to fear of alienating a customer.

The way to find out what your customer wants is to do two things: 1) Ask; 2) Try. But, do not assume a priori. Some of the best responses from customers came when they didn’t know what was next.

WHERE THE HEART IS

Endemic and non-endemic messaging encourages the need to consider culture: The idea that customers are made up of more than a product, that they prefer the influence of other factors when making a decision, factors that originate in their lives outside of the store.

When building an effective Digital Signage strategy, you must ask, “What is endemic to the customer?” Do you promote experiences and merchandise that you don’t sell because it’s what the customer wants to see and hear? If you work at a video game retailer, do you put a Coca Cola commercial on your program even though you don’t sell the product? Yes, it generates revenue for you in ad sales; and yes, it’s an untapped market for the advertiser.

But the value goes much further than revenue. It creates an experience and an environment that the customer wants to be in.

You make the customer feel at home.

EVEN THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING

At the electronics store, I continued to keep my eye on the gentleman with the headphones, wracking my brain wondering what he was listening to and trying to figure out if I could tie that into what he purchased, which appeared to be a role-playing computer game. I timed my approach to the register to end up in line right in front of him. He continued to wear his headphones through the transaction, and after he bought his software I asked him what he was listening to.

He said, “Nothing. I wear them so no one will bother me.”

You can purchase the doormat in the picture here.

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The answers are at the bottom of the post.

Al Wittemen is the Managing Director of Shopper Marketing with TracyLocke. In Mr. Wittemen’s book, How To Store Walk, he describes how humans navigate:

As humans we navigate through our day visually scanning the world around us and making subconscious comparisons. Regardless of where we are, we scan the world through three distinct lenses: 200 ft, 20 ft, and 2 ft to make sense of what is around us and to easily complete tasks.

Retailers understand these navigation principles and design their in-store environment and marketing/merchandising strategy around three corresponding propositions. The three propositions and key attributes for each are explained in [this diagram]:

Quote and graphic used by permission.

By understanding how a customer perceives an area of a store, we can see where the influence of a digital experience has the highest value. Let’s look at a home theater department from those three lenses:

200 Feet: Area Proposition: Low Emotion, High Information At roughly 200 feet, you know there are TVs in the back of the store and they’re turned on. That’s about it. The content on the TVs is not meant for storewide comprehension. However, collectively, the TV wall does a great job of saying, “Hey, we’re back here, come check us out.” With the height of the TVs on the wall, they work as well as the overhead signage for area proposition and store navigation.

This is about 100 feet from the back wall. There is not much difference between 200 feet and here.

20 Feet: Category Proposition: Way Finding, Navigate Choices At 20 feet there is very little, if any, brand differentiation. It is in this distance range where the content performs the most important role in three main areas: Branding, Emotion, and Enabler. Between 20 feet and two feet, the customer narrows the search to a set that is perfect for his or her lifestyle. As is said in retail, this is where retailers, “win the last 10 feet.” This is where digital experience is the key driver for the decisions.

Two Feet: Product Proposition: High Information Drives Choice, High Emotion By now, the customer has narrowed the choice to two or three brands. But look how small that brand logo is. Even at two feet, all the logos are shiny little letters at the bottom of the frames. Is the customer still shopping by brand at this point?

Winning the Last 10 Feet
The content must be a tour guide to help the customer narrow down the choices and physically move from 20 feet to two feet. The experience should be an enabler, a conversation point between the employee and the customer.

The content is part inspiration and part information. Depending on the strategic purpose of the screen, the percentages waver in those two categories. If your goal is to show how the TV is ideal for the customer’s home theater lifestyle, you’ll rely heavily on content that inspires. In a convenience store or point-of-transit area, the strategy is more toward informative; the content is bite-sized information that can influence a viewer while in that area, or walking by the screen.

Knowing the purpose of a digital experience in your environment is only half the battle. Knowing the lenses (or distance) through which your customers can digest that experience is critical in winning the last 10 feet. Combining both when building a strategy for your experience will differentiate you from your competitor.

TV TEST ANSWERS: a. Insignia; b. LG; c. Panasonic Viera; d. Pioneer Kuro; e. Proscan; f. RCA; g. Samsung; h. Sharp Aquos; i. Sony Bravia; j. Toshiba.

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