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It’s about the experience, not the price

November 23, 2011 | Online Marketing

In a post on the Harvard Business Review blog, the former head of Apple's retail stores explains what he learned in building the stores. With a few adjustments for different types of businesses, those lessons have a lot to teach any business.

Ask a seasoned entrepreneur how to increase sales and you'll likely hear such terms as up-sell and cross-sell. In other words, they try to encourage the customer to buy more. So it might be surprising to hear that Ron Johnson, currently CEO of J.C. Penney and, more notably, the man who made Apple's retail push the phenomenal success that it is, has little regard for such techniques. What built Apple stores into the most successful retail concept in history wasn't business as usual.

Why do so many flock to the Apple stores to make their purchases? It's because of the experience. Start with the design - like the products themselves, it appeals. People like to walk into the carefully considered architecture and bask in the ambiance.

More importantly, they deal with employees who are paid salaries and told to focus on "building relationships and trying to make people's lives better." Consumers can go into a store and experience what it's like when what they want seems more important than what the business wants. The staff is knowledgeable and trained, so they can actually be of help:

So the challenge for retailers isn't "how do we mimic the Apple Store" or any other store that seems like a good model. It's a very different problem, one that's conceptually similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn't ask, "How do we build a phone that can achieve a two percent market share?" He asked, "How do we reinvent the telephone?" In the same way, retailers shouldn't be asking, "How do we create a store that's going to do $15 million a year?" They should be asking, "How do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers' lives?"

Get the full story at Harvard Business Review

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