Japanese retail shifting to experience consumption

Asked by a March 2009 MyVoice Internet survey to explain their defection from department stores, they cited expensive products, “annoying staff,” and an “inability to shop at my own pace.” Consumers are favoring venues that satisfy needs beyond shopping, such as eating and entertainment.

via mckinseyquarterly.com

If you are interested in Retail, Japan, or the combination of the two read this quick article by Brian Salsber. It discusses the general consumer behavior trends of Japan and links it to online sales. Three points that were evident through his study:

1. The Japanese Internet retail market is growing at a rate of close to 10% 
2. The Japanese consumer is shifting their purchases from goods to experiences 
3. The Japanese consumer is increasingly sensitive to customer service.

What does this mean for the Japanese retailer? Internet retail and the cultural shift from product to experience consumption will detract purchases away from store fronts. In the contracted economy and low margin business model, retail, this will separate the chaff from the corn.

So what can a Japanese retailer do?

1. The shift from store front purchasing to surf and click is a great opportunity for retailers. Retailers must have a multi channeled approach to bring their products to market. Do not abandon the store front, but do optimize your web presence. Do not remove all face to face contact with you customer, but do give them another (easy) way of communicating with you.
2. A customer purchases your good because it helps them reach a goal. Remember that your product is part of a process, part of an experience. When displaying your product remind your consumer of this experience. If you sell running shoes, remind the customer that you help them lead a healthy life. If you sell TV's, remind the customer that you help them escape from reality.
3. Your front line is your brand. Do you know what your sales staff is communicating to the customer? Create frameworks to instill this brand in your staff. Have your staff instill the brand message, and feeling, into the consumer.

Follow Skype's example - entrench yourself in the user process

Your customers buy and use your product to get to a goal. Your product often adds a process that makes it easier/cheaper/faster to achieve what the customer wants, let’s take as an (simplified) example Skype.

Before

Goal: I want to place a call

After

Goal: I want to place a call

Skype looked beyond their own process and looked at the users process. What does a user go through when they are sitting at their desk wanting to make a call? In the old set up the user could:

·         look for a number
·         copy the number
·         paste the number in skype
·         click the skype call button

By integrating the phone numbers that can be found online with Skype they have effectively removed a middle step in the user process. The user does not have to manually dial the number into the Skype dial pad, and does not have to copy the number and paste it into Skype. In this new process the user:

·         looks for a number
·         clicks the skype call button next to the number

Skype has effectively removed two steps from the process, simplified the user experience, and engrained themselves more into the user process.

As a company, when was the last time you looked passed your own process? Is there a way you can eat away at the user process, to simplify it by integrating your product further into the user experience and process?

How to realize the imagined and imagine the realized

My favorite is the "Light Tricks" used in the movie "Wait until dark":

"in the movie, there's a part where Audrey's character breaks all of the light bulbs in her apartment and shuts all of her window blinds so she is hidden in complete darkness. As she goes around the place breaking bulbs, theater employees dimmed the lights one by one and eventually turned them all off completely, plunging the theater into total darkness."

via serviceexperienceexcellence.blogspot.com

By now we have all heard of the 3D movies and perhaps even seen one. Mike Dixon at Service Experience Excellence discusses a small example of how a movie was augmented by synchronizing the turning off of the lights to the scene in the movie. Dixon states how this made watching the movie a better experience, and in fact it did. This one example applies to any experience creation, any point where you interact with you customer.

1. The alignment of a small part of the real to the artificial or the artificial to the real results in a stronger perception of experience. A small alignment provides the thread that links reality to imagined. By having this thread you effectively bring reality and the imagined closer, enhancing the stimulation of senses and the emotions involved.

2. Augmenting reality, or augmenting the imagined does not have to take much effort. If you look at this example it only has to be a small link, a small effort on behalf of the experience creator.

Does your company bring reality and the artificial closer? How does it do that? Can you think of small, cost effective ways to enhance your customers experience in this mind set?

Four TED Talks for Experience Designers

From Microsoft comes two nifty product demos emerging from their Labs.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed off Bing Maps, with new technologies that allow you embed Flickr photos and even live video in “street view” mode.

Gary Flake walks you through Pivot, a tool for data analysis and exploration through realtime visualization.

In an earlier post, I referenced Daniel Kahneman’s presentation on experience versus memory, and now you can his talk. For my money, perhaps the single best presentation at TED 2010.

The recent TED Talk that most surprised me as relevant to experience design actually comes from TED India, and I think has been overlooked in the blogosphere. Sendhil Mullainathan talks about the “last mile” problem when dealing with social problems — convincing people to do what’s best for them, even when it conflicts with their mental models. A fascinating discussion of addressing psychological challenges to making positive change, and the one that I’ll embed here:

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 7:19 am and is filed under Conference Commentary, Experience Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

via adaptivepath.com

Love TED, Love adaptive path. Read, watch and learn.

Align your brand vision with your customer experience

Sure, the company’s ops department is responsible for ensuring operational excellence in the customer experience – but for most chains, competitive advantage is largely dependent upon the values and attributes which differentiate the brand. So, operations must be about more than delivering efficiency and quality. Aligning the customer experience with the brand vision is critical to establishing and sustaining a strong brand.

Furthermore actions speak louder than words and the research findings make it clear companies need help putting brand values and attributes into action.

One way to do this is to use a brand toolbox to inspire, inform, and instruct everyone in your organization how to interpret and reinforce your brand.

A brand toolbox is a collection of tools such as:

• a brand strategy users’ manual which explains the brand essence and positioning and the rationale behind them
• principles and guidelines for delivering brand values and attributes in day-to-day situations
• decision guides and process outlines to facilitate on-brand decision-making and behaviors
• virtual reality platforms which enable employees to practice using brand principles to deliver customer experiences consistent with the brand promise
• a forum through which employees can share their insights about how to bring the brand to life

Importantly a brand toolbox isn’t some yay-rah-rah feel good “invertising” effort which simply promotes the brand to employees. Nor is it a dense training manual which collects dust on a shelf. It’s a dynamic resource integrated into the company’s standard operating procedures.

via futurelab.net

When you promise your customers one thing, but give them something else, it is bad business.

Denise makes this point in her post on Future Lab (see excerpt above) and she gives some tools on how to align the customer experience with the brand vision. These tools are great, but only work if and when the company knows their brand DNA.

What makes your brand tick? Before you communicate your brand to your employees, have your employees communicate to you. As one of the tools, start with a forum through which employees can share their insights about how to bring the brand to life. Take this message and find the storyline, the narrative that makes your brand.

Then it is up to you to:

1. Clarify the brand story.
2. Communicate the story (using the brand tool box).

For more of Denise's thoughts visit her blog.

For more thoughts on Marketing Stories read Seth Godin's book: All Marketers are Liars.