buena vista

The future of marketing and advertising etc.

Good thoughtful post from planner Paul Isakson via Armano. Of course experience and relationship is the space where folks like IDEO and Engine are implicitly playing, even if they're talking explicitly about product and service innovation.  As Engine say - Better Services, happier customers.

Of course, notes Armano, the hard bit will be actually delivering, as many of the cornerstones - collaboration and a user-centred approach fly in the face of the skills and business model of traditional marketing and advertising.

Speaks nicely to this blog's 'moving from décor to core'. Anyway... check Paul's presentation...

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Service Design, face-to-face

Thanks to Aviv at Engine for the 'Inside Apple Stores, a Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful' piece in The New York Times. An interesting article that picks up from my recent post on Alex Frankel's book; Punching in: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee.

Bricks and mortar experience stores need to work super hard to succeed in their fight for wallet share and Apple have clearly managed a certain special something. The numbers speak for themselves.

There are some service fundamentals demonstrated at (but not exclusively) Apple, that in the retail environment are most often delivered by real people;

• going off-script,
• building trust,
• developing relationships (James and I at IDEO used to talk about being 'Relationship Designers')

No mean feat for a company that has redefined consumer product and service experience is such a short space of time, which is now teaching the retail establishment a thing or two just when that same establishment is getting to grips with 'e-commerce'.

The conclusion? Just when the high street is running scared and pouring more resources online, it seems there is still plenty to innovate around in the physical retail space, highlighting the importance of people in face-to-face service delivery.

(photo Suzanne DeChillo/New York Times)