The importance of brand participation and experience at retail

I realise that the Cambridge economy is fairly booming. According to official reports, Cambridge retail pulls in just over a £1 billion each year. In the run up to Christmas, the average retail footfall increases by 30% with people spending on average between 2-4 hours of their time shopping (according to a 2008 city government customer survey).

One billion is a hefty amount of money, and more importantly, it’s a hefty amount of man hours going into shopping as an activity as opposed to doing something more philanthropic, such as working up solutions to world hunger, or even using the time to improve ourselves and our lives.

Which brings me to the interesting observation three Cambridge stores; the Apple Store, Build-A-Bear Workshop and Levi’s. When you watch people in these three different retail environments, you see completely different behaviors.

When you wander into any Apple owned retail store, you immediately notice that people are not just looking at products, they are actively using them! Apple stores are now famous for perfecting Experience Shopping. The notion is that when you have a high-involved product like computers, the best way to sell them is simply to let people experience them in real life conditions. So Apple retail has counters loaded with Macs connected to an in-store wi-fi service that anybody can wander in and start to use.

You therefore see a lot customers dropping in just to check their email, twitter and Facebook accounts, or to surf the web and chat with friends over IM.

According to http://blog.holytornado.co.uk