An illuminating commentary by Ron Johnson, Apple’s former senior VP for retail, from his new vantage as the CEO of J.C. Penney.
It would be easy for him to hold forth his laurels, rehashing the “business secrets” of Apple’s retail success: the lighting, the placement of service areas, signs, etcetera.
Wisely, Johnson advises his HBR‘s readers buy posing questions about broad business goals: what do the customers need? What sides of your business’ relationship with customers do you need to develop through the store?
For Apple, the stores provide customer support nonpareil. Here Apple make a silk purse of some of consumer computing’s worst weaknesses – their opaqueness, their inability to demonstrate to you specifically what they can’t do, their lack of self-understanding, especially of their limits. “face-to-face support”, writes Johnson, is “the very best way to help customers.” Through their stores, Apple turns the sales cost of retail selling into customer and technical service advantages that their competitors can’t touch. One that people are “willing to pay a premium for”, in fact!
Product support is not every business’ opportunity – or need. So, Johnson boils it down further: any retailer is “…focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better.” He coaches readers to discover how retail can best support their business’ goals: “…create a store that’s more than a store to people.” “There isn’t one solution”, he points out. “…the retailers that win the future are the ones that start from scratch and figure out how to create fundamentally new types of value for customers.”
One function of Apple’s retail experience that is applicable across any business is investigation of their customers. For Apple, that’s user research in it’s simplest form: their needs, feelings, budget, intentions, mental models, you name it. People walk in, pick up an Apple product and the staff starts asking them to open up. You couldn’t design a slicker survey or focus group of observation process. “… Their job is to figure out what you need…” Any good retailer does this every day as a matter of course with every customer. Bureaucratic businesses – large retailer like Apple and J. C. Penney, definately have to constantly, mindfully fight against their tendencies to be opaque, disinterested and impersonal with customers. So for their ilk, explicitly building this function into their retail process is key to effective retailing. Not incidentally, paying attention to what the customer wants is good service!
What I Learned Building the Apple Store
by Ron Johnson, Monday November 21st, 2011
Harvard Business Review Online Forum “The Future of Retail“
