With each trend comes a drawback; even in marketing.
Look at the customer experience for instance. This concept does make a lot of sense and I firmly believe it is a source of success for all companies, whatever the business, be it in the B2B or B2C sector.
The problem is actually that the customer experience, which finds its origin in the academic world and which was later popularized in business books, turns today to be commoditized. What a pity. Look around you: from the smallest shop to the biggest retailer, you are promised, as a customer, to get an experience. It can be a “brand” experience, it can be a “food” experience (a very common motto), it can be a “travel” experience, you name it. But what does it mean? Does it actually mean something to those who chose the slogans to be put in golden letters in front of their stores, shops, website? In most cases I doubt it.
While in NY I went to one of the few malls of the city on Columbus Circle. On the 3rd floor you can find the Samsung store which is pretty unique since you can not buy anything. But it is true that you can “experience” the products (read “use them”) in their environment. The store resembles the Apple store but doesn’t succeed in appealing to senses the same way. I couldn’t feel part of the community like when I was in the Apple flagship store on 5th Avenue. Samsung tried to create small clusters within the store to have products in their natural environment (for instance kitchen or TV room) but it gave me the impression of an environment à la IKEA. Apple managed the experience better by SIMPLY having all attention of the customers focusing on the products displayed.
What seems to be also a crucial element of the experience are employees (OK I admit that was an easy one). Managing the employee experience makes part of the job since it will impact the customer experience too. Once again take the example of Samsung. With the exception of the phone and tablet corner (which was obviously copied from Apple) the other clusters failed to deliver from an employee experience perspective. Few and cautious employees watching TV and not looking for the eye contact with the customers, forgetting to smile. For those of my readers who live in Europe (especially in France, Belgium or Germany) it may all seem very normal as the service culture is deficient in those countries (I remember for instance a disastrous experience at Vandenborre, the equivalent of the French Darty, where I lost 10 minutes in an empty store while all 5 salesmen were watching TV, laughing and making jokes while I was desperately waiting to be served).
My take:
Before you promise an experience to your customers make sure that it is a positive one. All too often brands do not deliver on their promises because they do not care about what the customer really deserve to experience and do not master all the facets of it. More on the Vandenborre experience in a next post.
Posted in Marketing.
