We are working on a major store development project and as part of the immersion phase we constructed a checklist to audit an existing retail experience. Essentially it looks at the experience you have created based on the key retail design decisions around exterior, threshold, flow, lighting, finishes, fixtures and communications.

As a retailer the obvious place to start is to audit your existing store format against what will create an optimised customer experience for your shoppers. This audit can then form the backbone of a internal workshop to align the business around the need for improvement and to generate innovations around your store format. This can then form a solid brief to pass onto a retail designer.

Here is the full checklist (apologies if it is a bit long, but I thought is was more convenient to have it one link):

1. Exterior

• Clear and identifiable visibility from street using consistent signage that works with varying building styles and consistent use of the brand.
• Architectural features create a strong street presence.
• Prioritised and layered signage viewable from varying distances using the “200’-20’-2’” principle.
• Clearly defined and inviting customer entry in best possible position defined with brand signage that reflects overall image.
• Visibility into store through windows for product viewing and/or key displays.

2. Threshold

• Clear space around entrance/threshold.
• Interest and experience within the environment to slow customers down.
• There are impact focal points throughout stores.
• Clear sight-lines to prime displays and navigation with reduced clutter on principle sightlines.
• Layered sightlines from low at front to high at rear.

3. Flow

• Store circulation is visible from entry defined with flooring, finishes, lighting or fixture layout.
• Merchandising display units are positioned to assist circulation and pull customers through stores.
• Low level promotional merchandising units are positioned around circulation routes to attract customer interest and purchase.
• The flow fits with the customer’s functional needs and complementary categories are positioned adjacent to each other based on customer journeys.
• Anchor products (large selling core product ranges) are located strategically, allowing customer visibility while pulling customers through the store.

4. Lighting

• General ambient lighting achieves a high enough level to attract customers and to provide clarity of viewing all products.
• Lighting is used in a theatrical sense to add vibrancy and interest.
• Feature display areas, focal points, circulation areas, shop-front and special product areas all use specialist additional lighting.

5. Finishes

• Inventive palette choices are led by sensory experience and desired brand out-takes.
• The palette is practical where form follows function.
• Use of sustainable materials and fixings where realistic.

6. Fixtures

• The number of fixtures are minimised and their functionality is maximised.
• Fixtures support the store brand, separate the space, direct customer traffic flow, or provide storage, seating, viewing options and product information, as well display merchandise.
• The fixtures create customer interest through design.
• Fixtures are emulating the product they help merchandise, providing a ready reference for customers hoping to locate a product or brand from a distance.
• The placement and functions of the counter and the space around it are clearly thought out.
• Fixtures provide the best environment to support the staff in their key tasks.

7. Communications

• Product, price and information ticketing signage is clear and well positioned.
• Brand and environmental signage delivers desired brand out-takes.
• Navigational signage is clear.
• Third party supplier branding is relevant and appropriate.
• Promotional messaging is relevant and appropriate.

I think the good thing about this list is that it works at all levels of the organisation. We’ve have used with the head of a retail store network and the store development team charged with renovating the network.

Last post i raised the idea of retailers allowing more physical handling of their products, especially expensive ones, so customers will bond with it. Clearly, this is a more difficult proposition for online retailers ie impossible.

So what can online retailers do that is as good as physically touching their product? It will vary from product to product but following are some examples that i thought were good.

1. Cavalier Bremworth - These guys sell carpet and buying carpet is a big decision that lots of people delay. One way to help persuade people into buying their carpet was to enable them to get a feel for each type with good quality imagery. This enables customers to see the texture in detail and help them get a feel for it. Customers can start trying to visualise what it might look like in their homes and get wedded to the idea and order a sample straight away. This enables the customer to begin the journey to purchase while they are hot on it. As an aside, personas played a crucial part in guiding Cavalier Bremworth as to what types of experiences their website would need to provide for their primary audience. My colleague Sherryn will take you through personas in an upcoming post.

2. Jag Air – Adrenalin inducing flights are the experience these guys sell. Click the link and you are confronted with the noise of the plane you are likely to be in matched with video footage of being on a flight. Being able to see and hear what the Jag Air experience will be like gives the potential customer a good feel for what is on offer. If you are an adrenalin junkie this should get you going.

3. Scott mountain bikes - Go to this site and you will be confronted with a magnifying-glass type tool that enables you to easily look over the bike and see the design detail that the bike consists of. The technology and features leap out at you literally. You can almost physically feel the R&D that has gone into making it. A great tool.

4. A diamond is forever - This is an interesting site that enables you to design your own diamond ring. Choose the band, choose the metal type, choose the diamond, choose the cut and clarity etc. I’d imagine once a potential customer has gone through that process they’d start feeling wedded (no pun intended) to the ring.

This was just 4 examples to give you a taste of what some companies are doing out there.

The bottom line is that it is almost possible to make your customers feel your product as if they were there or had it in their hands.

If you know of any other great examples of online product experience where you can almost touch it feel free to comment.

A study has confirmed what you all may have suspected ie that customers are more likely to buy a product if they can touch it. Apparently, touching a product gives you an increased belief in your perceived ownership of that product. This makes sense when you think about it as it is basic human reaction. Even 5 year old kids do it – they touch something and then they think it is theirs.

Interestingly the study also went on to confirm that once a customer has touched the product they are more likely to pay more for it. Now this is something for every retailer to think about. Make your products touchable as much as you can. How many retailers can you think of where you can have a physical product experience? Apple is great. Body Shop is pretty good. Department stores are not so great – ever touched a TV in Farmers or Bond and Bond? What if you could? Would you feel that you had some perceived ownership of it?

What if Department stores spent less energy thinking about the customer journey through their store and concentrated more on enabling the customer to have a physical experience instead? This study would indicate better business success would result.

It seems to me that one of the main reasons we cannot touch a lot of product is that the store owners do not trust us to do so and thus those owners design their retail outlets for the untrustworthy. If they trusted us more maybe they would sell more because once we touch it we feel we own it so why would we damage it? Are the untrustworthy the majority? I wouldn’t have thought so. So retailers, let’s look at allowing more appropriate touching.

This touching thing is all well and good but it doesn’t help online retailers much – that’ll be my next post.

I have just spent three hours trawling through a clients market research reports.  All nine.  All bursting with customers self report around their preferences and behavioural likelihoods.  What I am struggling to find is the insight; something that inspires innovative thinking and gives clear direction in creating a strategy, a plan or a design application.

The thing is, market research is evaluative.  It leaves you in a place of absolute knowledge of the now, the status quo, but leaves you rudderless in determining your future action points.   What distinguishes a customer insight from interesting customer information is applicability.

Business is about knowing what to do.  Sitting amongst seemingly safe place of abundant market research can actually be a dangerous place of inertia. If your research fails to be generative and give clarity of action then, well, it’s just interesting information.

So how is it that an insight can possess such potency of application?  Empathy. True insights are moments of truth, a brief opening into someone’s personal world.  It is the ‘of course’ moment when you experience their subconscious everyday behavioural habits or totally get how they go about creating meaning in their world.

How do you know you have an insight?  If you can describe a person’s mental model, their value system or experience goals you most likely have an insight.  If this inspires you and generates a multitude of directions for your business, then it is most definitely an insight.

One of my more favourite insights is into the world of fast food.  Eating chicken off the bone is a private moment.  Now customers are not going to tell you that, but we can learn from the families who take their 30 piece pack to a hilltop and eat in their car.  Sales are not down because of the product.  Create an environment for your customers to discretely gorge themselves in and they will, again and again.  ‘Of course’ you say, ‘so obvious’, but for how long have customers been forced to eat their chicken off the bone in open plan brightly lit fast food restaurants?

Look back over your research reports.  Do you get that ‘of course’ insightful moment which ignites innovative action, or do you just have some interesting information?

I’ve been reading the odd post recently on this topic and it has got me thinking about how valid a random act of kindness actually is in terms of a marketing and brand awareness-raising tool.

It seems obvious that being on the receiving end of a random act of kindness is surprising, unexpected and well, nice. Generally, these acts leave you feeling good (and no doubt the giver feels good too) and in a frame of mind where you are more likely to be receptive to products or services from the same origin in the future. Equally, you will be more likely to tell others about these random acts and increase the profile and brand equity of the company who did the random act. Talkability (as my colleague Sherryn names it) is surely a highly attractive proposition to any company.

So why do we not see more of them? Why don’t companies hold a little budget back from advertising (or Marketing or Comms or It or HR) and apply it to a random act of kindness?

I think companies and their marketers underestimate the power and value of these random acts. They think of them purely as a cost and worse, a new type of cost. Probably one that hasn’t been budgeted for and thus is never on the table for discussion.

I’m not sure what you think but i reckon the value of the likely positive press and profile, increased customer loyalty and subsequent increase in brand equity would make it potentially as valuable as anything else that is in your marketing budget for this year. 

Like any new type of marketing it needs to be well considered though. For starters it has to be genuine and spontaneous not managed. I’d imagine it would be dangerous to over-leverage it too. Let the talkability happen naturally. 

It certainly seems to be an idea that should be considered seriously.

As a consultancy doing work across many types of projects and with many and varied organisations, we are exposed to the good and the bad of how organisations run what we call customer-facing business improvement projects. These projects are looking to generate improved business performance by designing a new or improving an interaction at key touchpoints.

Recently, we’ve started to collate some thinking around how to optimise these projects. We’ve drawn on our own learnings as well as  intelligence from a broad spectrum of smart thinkers around this area: Adaptive Path on feasibility and impact trade-off scoring and linking behaviour and financials, Cooper on personas, De Bono on lateral thinking and Blue Ocean Strategy team of Kim and Mauborgne on evaluating innovations. This isn’t a dialogue about project management, it is seven easily implementable ideas on what we believe every business should build into these customer-facing improvement projects.

1. Prioritise a specific set of customers in a channel using feasibility and impact trade-off scoring. This will avoid a generic ‘everything to everyone, nothing to no-one’  focus. In every channel some people are more important and more malleable than others, you need to focus on these people and king-hit the opportunity.

2. Establish the link between key financial metrics and customer behaviours.  This is great thinking from Adaptive Path around identifying the specific customer behaviours that directly affect the business’ financial metrics in that channel.

3. Use ethnographics to enable you to go ‘deeper’ into the mindset of customers. Ethnographics is the art of observation and gets around the issue of what people say they do and what they actually do do as being sometimes a tad different.

4. Use personas to model the target customer, their needs and goals around the specific behaviour from the insights. John Cooper created them to put the user at the centre of software development, but they can be used for development work in any channel. They are superb for getting affinity with the customer from all stakeholders.

5. Visualise the whole journey and prioritise touchpoints in the channel from a customer’s point of view.  We’ve created a journey map that in one page brings to together the stages of the journey, the customer’s emotional state, the value drivers, the prioritised touchpouints and a sense of competitive vulnerabilities or advantage at points across across the journey.

6. Use creative thinking tools that get to ground-breaking opportunities. De Bono was a pioneer thinker around the limitation of the human brain to generate breakthrough ideas and how the use of thinking tools help the brain break free from conventional thinking and move onto truly lateral ideas.

7. Judge ideas on both feasibility and impact in the context of a limited pool of resources. More Adaptive Path trade-off scoring where a group can get to prioritised ideas very quickly ensuring they’ll both work and can be done.

If you want more explanation around any of these our white paper on optimising customer-facing business improvement projects is available here.

Jetstar’s recent one page apologetic newspaper advertisement to the public of New Zealand didn’t quite do it for me. I’m sure it was published at great cost with the best of intent but i think the money could have been better spent much more effectively elsewhere.  So let’s examine how Jetstar could have done better.

My major premise is based on basic human factors. Jetstar customers (past, present and future) will effectively have a personal relationship with Jetstar. They will expect to be treated humanely and receive great service. They expect to be respected by Jetstar as human beings at a personal level. And they in return will pay for this. Customers who have taken the time and effort to complain have started an even more personal relationship. They have given up their time and emotional energies and proactively communicated with Jetstar. Their feedback is invaluable to Jetstar improving its ongoing performance. A two-way channel of communication is open and working.

But then Jetstar chooses to use a one way channel to communicate the apology. There was no chance for the customers to give feedback, no mention of a website link that might enable the two way communication to start up again, no attempt to contact the database of email addresses it undoubtedly has, nothing. We are sorry, please don’t write us off in the future – end of discussion.

So here’s what i would have done:

• Created a specific apology webpage where customers could continue the conversation and help re-establish the relationship. Customers could simply post feedback, ask questions, maybe receive a small token of appreciation for making the effort to start up the relationship again – 20% off next trip – something.
• Accessed the email database and sent all customers a personal message of apology.
• Started a competition for all customers as a way of saying sorry. $X,000 worth of travel vouchers, hotel vouchers, petrol vouchers – whatever. 
• A special prize given to the top 10 customers who got affected the worst.
• Listed what was going to change going forward to give the customers confidence that lessons had been learnt and were not going to be replicated again.
• Adopted a proactive tone and manner rather than an apologetic one. “yep, we stuffed up and we are sorry but it is not going to happen again, no way. We will do everything we can to provide you with the customer experience you deserve and that we are known for in Australia.” 

Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. Customers will purchase more off you if they have a two-way relationship with you and you have a proactive manner when things go wrong.

In retail, selling to someone with an unusual product need can be a hassle. They want products that your ‘regular’ customers don’t, which is therefore a stock hassle and ties up your operating capital.

What about ‘regular’ customers, who occasionally  want you to give them a whole new level of service, say when they’re in crisis, or desperate? In these times they don’t have complex product needs they just need a level or style of service which isn’t normal for you. What do you do with them? Read the rest of this entry »

I was having a coffee this morning with a couple of clients about a potential project we could be involved in and during the conversation the importance of customer insight came up. We talked around how for a very large investment, like this project, you would want to base your thinking on some pretty sound customer insight (not to be confused with customer research!).

As we were talking, I raised the idea of longitudinal insight gathering. I define this as touching base with same person across the development part of a project in order to obtain insights that can optimise the development process.

Coincidentally, when I got back to my desk and and Google reader I came across a couple of blogs that caught my attention around the same area.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being a frequent flyer i’ve been following with interest the introduction of Jetstar to the New Zealand market. I don’t think i’m being libellous in saying it hasn’t got off to the best start. The most common complaints have been the strict adherence to the 30 minute pre-flight cut off time, bad customer service in handling the cut-off time, lost luggage, lateness, rescheduling and the inability to land in visually difficult conditions.

Is it fair enough for customers to criticise Jetstar? Are they right? Read the rest of this entry »