04/21/16
Better Has No Finish Line: Unstores
Samsung is among the retailers creating experiential spaces that don’t dedicate precious square footage to stockrooms. Photo Credit: Samsung via Ad Age
As marketers and brands we are all trying to find unique and better ways to intersect our prospects when it’s most relevant for them. The best brands understand that this effort is never complete.
When it comes to creating relationships with customers, better has no finish line.
‘Unstores’ as Brand Billboards
The showroom or ‘unstore’ is the latest iteration of this valuable practice that lies at the heart of advertising. On the surface, Samsung’s new unstore in the middle of Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking district looks like a loss leader or worse, an exercise in foolishness, to many marketers. I know from experience that it is a loss leader, but that doesn’t diminish its value for building a brand.
Back in the mid-1990s I helped pioneer this trend for Gateway. Our ‘Country Stores’ were never intended to be retail stores. Just like Samsung’s flagship unstore, there was no inventory on hand; you couldn’t buy a computer and walk out with it. But you could experience the technology. You could touch, see, and feel the impact it could have on your everyday life.
These experiential showrooms let consumers get comfortable with an unfamiliar and expensive technology, which we knew was essential to driving adoption. Over time, they evolved into retail stores but that was never the intended design.
This experience helped me see how an online giant like Amazon would one day open retail stores and reminds me now that retail giants like Walmart and Target will have to adapt their selling model to thrive in the consumption transformation being forged by Millennials and Gen Zers.
Marketing is More Than Selling
As marketers we need to support sales, but our role goes beyond getting someone to buy something. We aim to win hearts and minds in a global marketplace. Consumption patterns will change just as drastically over the next 20 years as they have from the 1990s until now. In this digital age, brands can’t neglect the need to form emotional relationships with customers.
The best brands in the world understand that connections with consumers must be emotional to endure. For some shoppers, that emotional connection can happen online; others need to reach out and touch your brand to connect with it. Still others want to hear your voice.
So what does all this mean to you as you build your brand and strive to grow your business in this evolving global marketplace?
Know the Voice of Your Customer
It means you have to know your customer – who they are, what they want from you and how they experience your brand from initial exposure through every, ongoing operational touch point. Not only do you have to make yourself available on every channel, which may mean opening an unstore at some point and being committed to viewing it for what it actually is – a marketing expense; you also have to pay off your advertising with operational excellence; just one critical misstep anywhere along the line can mean losing a potential brand advocate and all their connections forever.
At OBI Creative, our signature service has always been the o.VOCTM – an objective and independent evaluation of the experience between a company and its customers that we use to drive marketing strategy and effective creative work for our clients.
Time and again we’ve seen that the path to transforming prospects into promoters for brands begins and ends with knowing and satisfying customers. For Samsung, and soon others, that path includes an unstore. What does it mean for you?
What’s your take on unstores? Would you feel engaged or frustrated if you went into a store, fell in love with something and couldn’t walk out with it? What brands do you love and why?
