Part of my enjoyment with this industry is the opportunity to get up on a stage and talk about it. I love the speaker circuit. I really do. I also love watching really good speakers. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs is a really good speaker.
I’m fascinated with Jobs’s presentation capabilities. On occasion, I have emulated Jobs’s presentation style, like using a photo instead of copy to tell a story. When the iPad was released last week, I thought I would watch his latest presentation introducing the iPad to the world. He’s a master storyteller and takes you on a journey each time he gets on stage.
At the beginning of the presentation, he gives the audience updates on other Apple products. Apple just sold its 250 millionth iPod since 2001. Nice. The App Store has over 140,000 applications available for download to the iPhone and the iTouch, and it just recorded its three billionth download (that’s nine zeroes, folks). Very nice.
Jobs talked about Apple’s 284 retail sores, with the most recent store opening in New York City, on the upper west side.
Commenting on the newest store, he said, “It is so wonderful to be putting these stores, with their phenomenal buying experience, right in the neighborhoods of our customers. It feels great.”
Wait. Hold up. Let’s hear that again.
“It is so wonderful to be putting these stores, with their phenomenal buying experience, right in the neighborhoods of our customers. It feels great.”
Pregnant pause…
I wrote it down because I just had to break this sentence apart. It struck me how a CEO and regular mountain-mover like Steve Jobs can say this about an update. You would think he would save his best material for the iPad. Not for me. To me that sentence was a smack in the face, a kick in the shin, a wow moment. (Actually, that was me falling out of my chair after trying to readjust while starting to write this post. Darn you, rolling chair on hardwood floor!)
The customer experience inside a retail environment is one of the reasons for my existence This little comment was music to my ears. I wasn’t using iTunes. Shame on me. Look at the words he used in the sentence:
“It is so wonderful to be putting these stores, with their phenomenal buying experience right in the neighborhoods of our customers. It feels great.”
Wonderful. “Wonderful” evokes feelings of whole, positive joy, that it feels good from his head to his toes to talk about this, that he’s intimate with the new store. It’s not what Apple does, it’s what Apple is. This is not a CEO of business, this is a CEO of passion.
Phenomenal. A powerful word with more impact in this sentence than an adjective like outstanding, fantastic, or terrific. The word makes the subject feel bigger, more magical. “Phenomenal” is a word used by a CEO who believes that brand engagement with a customer or consumer is yin to the yang of high-quality products that make customers unabashedly loyal.
Experience. He knows that purchasing a product doesn’t end at the register (or the hand-held checkout). It starts when the customer walks through the doors, and ends when the product has completely served its purpose in the lifestyle of the customer many years down the road.
Neighborhoods. He didn’t say “city.” He said “neighborhoods.” That evokes a feeling of community, of local flavor, that several of your neighbors work there, and you shop there, and at any time you may find yourself sitting out front in the hot afternoon sun while recalling the old days of the Apple IIc. Brilliant.
Our. With ‘neighborhoods,’ this little word completes the sense of community, as if you may see Jobs jump behind the counter and actually start ringing up items. Using that word, instead of “the,” sells the brand strategy that you (Mr. or Mrs. Apple Product Consumer) are part of a family, not just on the other end of a transaction.
Great. He ends with a simple sentence that means two things: It feels great to drop another license to print money in New York City, and the store’s presences itself makes the entire physical and mental experience of the brand great.
And listen to the inflection and emphasis of those words. He wants to make sure you get this.
The best part of this quote is that it’s not scripted. It’s a point he wanted to make, and there’s no doubt that he has mastered the use of language as part of the presentation, but this is an update, and therefore not as scripted as the rest of the show. This was a comment. Yet it comes across with such insane passion that you can’t help but believe that this guy wanted to drop each pane of glass into place by himself. He’s really excited.
To me, this is why the cult of Apple continues to grow as a brand. Apple is a viral brand that emanates from the pores of its CEO down to the guy at the Genius Bar who can fix your MacBook Pro by just staring at it.
I have yet to watch the rest of the presentation.
Don't be like that guy.
So here we are in 2010, the economy is starting to show signs of life after a flatlined ‘09. Retailers everywhere are continuing to modify their sales and value propositions to the customer. The competition continues to shrink while the customer continues to tighten the wallet and be more selective about where the money goes.
In an effort to attract customers, retailers are becoming more category and product agnostic. Walmart’s consumer electronics department is beginning to look a lot like Best Buy’s layout. Best Buy adopted a red theme for their new Musical Instruments department. It looks a lot like Guitar Center. Amazon just takes on everyone with unrivaled inventory. The customer has two choices to make: Click-and-order, or brick-and-mortar. And if the customer can get the same product from any number of retailers, the brand experience becomes the deciding factor for the customer.
The most valuable thing a retailer can own is its position in a customer’s mind. At the retail level, digital signage augments that perception by bringing the brand to life.
A digital signage network is an investment in your brand, not a line item on your P&L sheet. You build it to create a differentiated experience, not to show an ad a customer can see on her TV at home, online, or in another retailer’s space. Running ads for the sake of revenue denigrates the brand equity you have built for the customer experience. The network has a higher purpose at the intersection between the brand and the customer.
Your digital signage network allows you to consistently deliver your brand proposition, withstanding the ebb of market forces, product sales, and incremental revenue. This reflects in a customer’s choice between you and another retailer. Relying on revenue to drive the programming or the experience will force you to rethink your strategy every time the market fluctuates.
With a customer’s ability to deselect messaging as she moves through the retail environment, it is critical that your brand engages her instead of becoming a casualty.
Black is the new green.
Last Tuesday before Thanksgiving, James Bickers asked for my opinion on Black Friday, given my experience working for a retail giant. He used a couple of the quotes in an article he wrote about the souring of the public on the notion of Black Friday (a great article, by the way), but I thought it would be fun to reproduce the whole e-mail here and follow up since last Friday:
Within Best Buy, we never really did much from a corporate level regarding [digital signage] network or store design. The stores themselves and their immediate territory/district managers handled a lot of the noise. We helped out where we could, and we built a circular that was to go out and we were all told very clearly that the deals were confidential and should not be leaked. More on that below.
Overall, I took two things from my experience:
1. Best Buy (and other retailers) let the customers make a bigger deal out of than it really was. Corporate definitely paid attention, but the customers themselves are what drives the advertising. Nothing says “Black Friday” better than video of customers waiting all night outside your store, eagerly anticipating that one gift they have given up hours of their sleep to nab at a low, low price. No single product for any price can match that imagery.
2. The harder we worked to create an environment where we were not supposed to talk about it (the “leaked deals”), the more we seemed to see the deals leak. Again, you’re playing into the hands of the customer on purpose. By leaking deals, you get them to wait in line at your store. Once in line, they stay there. They won’t give up their number in line for another deal anywhere else. They have made the commitment.
Over my time with Best Buy and since, I have seen the customer change because it is no longer about the deal, it is about the event. That’s why customers are not seeing the deals. When you see news stories leading up to Black Friday about teams of women and men who build game plans on attacking certain stores (like a military exercise!), you begin to see that the stores have less power over the event than the customers do. Waiting in line is now fun to [do]. Retailers, Best Buy included, simply play into that. It doesn’t really matter what you put on sale or how much inventory you have. If you can get a line of people out your store, you’ll get sales. And, if you don’t get what you waited in line all night to get, you’re probably going to buy something else. There’s no way you invest all that time and walk away empty-handed.
Thanksgiving morning, I passed by the local Best Buy around 9:00 a.m. I saw a line of people about 50 long or so, complete with tents, chairs, and perhaps a little tailgating going on at the cars parked nearby. They were already in line for the store to open over 18 hours from that time. Thanksgiving night, I watched the news and saw footage of a mall south of Minneapolis where there were thousands of people out shopping at 5:00 a.m. One shopper said, “It just something you should experience once in your lifetime.”
There’s that word: Experience.
We’ll see the results of Cyber Monday later this week, but these two days are clearly less about finances and money and more about a cultural event. Some retailers are reporting a modest increase from last year. However, the National Retail Federation still believes the overall numbers will be down. Did all these retailers move their bottom line into the black? Hardly. But, they don’t need Black Friday any more like they used to because so many of them have been pushing deep discounts around campaigns for a long time now. The margins on products are so thin; the retailer must push low prices all year long to remain with the pack.
The only thing black about the Friday after Thanksgiving is the night sky that everyone shivers under waiting for the store to open.
