I'm sure we've all had both good and bad experiences as we've been out shopping this season and one thing is clear to me, the experience you have at retail can play a significant role in whether or not you buy a product. I wrote about part of our experiences looking for an e-reader here, but the experience got a little more frustrating for us. We finally went to the Sony store, where after waiting a while for someone to help us, the store employee we spoke with actually sent us somewhere else to get the information we needed. At this point, we had probably been to six stores to get this information and being sent to yet another place could've sent us to another product. While the woman who did eventually help us was incredibly helpful, patient with our questions and understood how we wanted to use the product, the path to this person was harder then it should've been.
I've had a number of discussions about retail experiences the past few weeks and one thing is clear. Overall, we're pretty disappointed by what's happening out there. It seems odd that at the one place where the consumer engages the brand, can be the one place where we put the least resources.
I'll be doing additional reports on the state of holiday shopping this weekend and would love to hear your retail experiences, both good & bad.
If we're moving toward an augmented reality that enables always-on and everywhere deep access to information, companies, people, products, places and services - and facilitates interacting with them - we're heading into territory that creates an unprecedentedly rich interactive marketplace. So much so, it will up-end how we think about marketing products and services, it blurs the line between personal and commercial and challenges the fundamental structure of the established marketplace.As Polinchock said of traditional retail, "Physical retail experience has to deliver more than price and product." If retailers don't evolve to compete with applications such as Amazon's iPhone app that allows you to enter a brick and mortar, take a picture, price compare and purchase online, they will become "stupidly expensive websites." To survive, physical stores will have to provide some valuable service or experience that can't easily be found online. In Polinchock's view, it's a matter not of creating just brand awareness, but "brand utility."
As marketplace gets truly interactive, creating brand utility will mean more than providing easy access to context-relevant, valuable information and facilitating transactions. When marketing gets truly interactive I believe it hits escape velocity from the realm of linear transactions and practical utility into the realm of co-creating a story. Polinchock hinted at this by saying people are now searching more for meaning - than possessions, presumably. I'd take that a step further and say that what people are really starting to look for is to be part of a story that resonates with them and provides a satisfying experience. To the extent brands can connect with the marketplace on that level, they will successfully evolve.
Massively Networked: What happens as marketing gets truly interactive? .