Category: Consumer Electronics
Best Buy Deploys QR Codes to Enhance Shopping Experience
Best Buy adds QR codes to all their retail stores. 82% of consumers already use mobile phones during their shopping trips, so it’s critical that retailers understand and embrace this new shopping behavior. [Read More]
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Mini-Store Visit: Office Max
When you see something “not quite right” with a retail customer experience, one question that always comes up is if the mistake was in the design or the execution. Obviously one element of good design is that it can be easily executed in the store. If the fundamental flaw is in the design it means it’s going to be a flaw across an entire chain, while flaws in execution can be localized to one of more stores.
Walking my local OfficeMax this week, a few customer experience mistakes jumped out at me: (more)
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Future of Retail (as seen in 1992)
In 1992, I was part of a team at Blockbuster Entertainment that imagined what the future of entertainment retail might look like. We believed that consumers wanted "Songs" rather than albums, and that long before video on demand was a reality in 300 million homes, it would be practical in 4,000 retail stores. We were naive enough to build the proof of concept. This was 9 years before iTunes was launched and the content owners weren’t ready to give up their inefficient distribution model. This is the promotional video we developed for the concept… at least I got to meet Dennis Miller.
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We Can Eliminate Vampire Power at Retail
Vampire Power is the electricity that consumer electronics waste when they are plugged in and not turned on. In the case of handheld consumer electronics (such as phones and digital cameras), the wall chargers waste power, even when the actual device isn’t connected to them.
Recently AT&T began selling the Zero Charger that shuts itself off when a device is not connected. This made me wonder how significant vampire power is, so I did some quick math…
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IPad: Impressions after one week
How do you like it?
That’s certainly the most popular question, and a surprisingly difficult one to answer.
When someone asks how you like the new lawnmower you just bought, there is an implied context to the answer (the questioner has a lawn that needs mowing).
The challenge with the iPad is that it doesn’t have a single purpose, so you need to answer how you like it for a particular use-case.
So here are my early impressions…
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CES 2010 Recap: through the eyes of a shopper marketer
I’ve spent the past couple of months visiting clients and talking about key takeaways from CES this year, and I’ve promised to blog a quick recap. So, belatedly, here it is.
CES is the largest trade show in the US, it’s hosted in Las Vegas every January and it focuses on the Consumer Electronics industry. A number of blogs do a great job covering the products introduced at the show. Engadget is a great place to start. Here is a nicely organized photo library from the show.
My interests at CES are more about what retail designers and in-store marketers can learn from the show. (more)
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Clear Spot from Clear not so great
Here in Portland Oregon we are lucky enough to be one of the first two markets in the country to get 4G wireless service (WiMax from ClearWire aka Clear).
It’s interesting, that they have opened a number of retail stores with a distinct consumer feel (and certainly with expensive high foot traffic rent), despite the fact that WiMax is probably more of a Business to Business solution at the moment. WiMax claims download speeds of 6Mbps and upload speeds of up to 1Mbps, although like most wireless technologies your actual speed is highly dependant on coverage. At my office out in the suburbs of Portland, I get good coverage and 5Mbps downloads, but in my 4th floor condo in the heart of the downtown Pearl district, I barely get coverage at all, and when I do it’s slower than my AT&T 3G broadband card. Clear promises that they are adding more access points in my neighborhood, and that the dense, tall buildings are a challenge for the relatively directional WiMax signals. They have a variety of rate plans ranging from pay as you go, to $50/mo for unlimited mobile usage, which is the plan I have. (more)
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What’s Wrong with Apple Stores?
In a recent post about Microsoft’s new retail initiative, I suggested that that there are aspects of Apples customer experience that could be improved. Several readers responded, asked for more specifics thoughts.
Let me start by saying that Apple has the best dollars per square foot metrics in all of retail. They don’t need to apologize about their stores to anyone. Further, there are many elements of their experience that I love, including their signature architecture, genius bar, useful fact tags, category signage with decision tree suggestions, window displays and wireless CRM.
That being said, here are some areas that could be improved. (more)
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MS Surface goes live in AT&T Wireless Stores (a first hand account)
The PR folks at Microsoft have to be feeling pretty good. On March 26th Fortune Magazine and others reported that Microsoft’s often hyped multi-touch user interface product, Surface, would not be ready for consumers until 2011. Less than a week later, AT&T Wireless stores and Microsoft announced that Surface would be going live in select AT&T Wireless stores on April 17th (via Engadget, CNET, and BoyGenius). (more)
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EuroShop
Dusseldorf, Germany February 23-27. Euroshop is held every three years in Germany.
I always get a kick out of the fact that Europe has the largest retail show in the world with over 100,000 attendees and over 1900 booths and they call it EuroShop, while in the US we have a retail show with 15,000 attendees and over 900 booths and we call it GlobalShop. (more)
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