EP.86 THE TRANSFORMATION ECONOMY with Joe Pine, Author, Founder of Strategic Horizons, LLP

ABOUT JOE PINE: Joe’s LinkedIn profile; linkedin.com/in/joepine Websites: strategichorizons.com (Blog) StrategicHorizons.com (Company) strategichorizons.com (Personal) SHOW INTRO: Today, EPISODE 86… I talk with Joe Pine Joe Pine, an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike... *                     *                          *                          * I’ve been in the world of retail place-making for a few decades. 3 would qualify as ‘a few’ I guess. I took a detour for a few years in the late 20-teens, shifting from retail design into the play space of hospitality – a wonderful diversion. The transition was transformative to be sure. I got to re-imagine what I knew about customer experience place making in terms of retail stores and turn my lens towards another fascination – hotels. The interesting thing that emerged was the recognition that in the world of retail everyone, brands, and retail designers and architects alike, were all going on about experience.  Now this in and of itself was curious because I’d been designing stores for a couple decades, and I couldn’t recall one client who had ever come to the game and said – ‘hey lets create a really miserable experience for our customers…’ ‘…Let’s make it hard to understand the assortment, hard to read the labels, bathe the product in bad lighting, have people walk the store not being able to find the thing they came in for, etc…’ Not one. Ironically though, while many clients never asked for that, we have all had the experience of that exactly being the case in many stores we go to. So no,… creating a bad experience was never the strategy. We retail designers always sought to create places where positive experience was key. The stuff was important to be sure, but the experience - the emotional residue of the retail interaction - was what was critically important. The stuff was supposed to deliver on what it purported to do, fit well, wear well, not break down, taste good, make you feel better, whatever… it was supposed to work. Otherwise why buy it? In some cases, the stuff just had to deliver on its practical, functional level, it didn’t need to give you more than that. It was a commodity that lived up to its promise. In other cases the stuff delivered on function but gave you oh so much more on an emotional, socio-cultural, psychological, spiritual, level… and all of that is about brand relevance and emotional impact of owning the thing – what it says about you. It’s like looking at the difference between a paper bag which you could get for about 5 cents and a Birkin bag for which you’d drop $50,000. They both provide the same functional use – they carry other stuff – I think we could make a pretty sound argument that that is true. But now the Birkin bag, well… it is supposed to offer you so much more about who you are, and what tribe you run with and a host of other non-tangibles that deeply connect us to a brand. Things way beyond function. And if the paper bag got wet and fell apart, well… you could be confident that for the price of the Birkin bag you could literally get a million replacements. The interesting thing about the stuff, or services, in retail places whether a commodity or something altogether magnificent and magical was that in either case we had to wrap it in positive experience. Mess up the experience and you’ve damaged the relationship. And repairing that rupture can take some time.  So, experience matters because the overt and subtle messaging that accompanies a shopping trip is important in fostering the long-term connection between a customer, product (or service) and the brand. The value proposition that determines my choice of one brand or retailer over another can’t just be they have lots of whatever it is at low prices. Price point and SKU count are not differentiat