Book Excerpt: Chapter 12 Physical - Why Test Driving Is Still Important Even in a Digital World

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 12 which focuses on Physical Presence. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

You look around—the music is flowing from everywhere. Surely there must be speakers embedded in the ceiling and the walls beyond the ones under the dark drapes in this home theater. Suddenly, the host interrupts the show. Pardon me, he says as he plucks the speakers from the wall and undrapes them. They are faux logs of wood! Then he restarts the show and the music flows again. As he walks out, he promises there are no hidden speakers in the ceiling or walls.

This is no home theater. It is the Bose store at a mall. Bose as in famous for its audio technology. It is showing off its VideoWave entertainment system with an impressive screen (46-inch CCFL backlit), and its even more impressive in-built seven speaker array. It also packages its Phaseguide radiator technology that targets sounds in different areas of the room. Sure, you could watch the demo of the product at home on YouTube, but it does not come close to matching the richness of the sounds and colors in that in-store experience.

Welcome to a baffling trend: Even as Amazon and Netflix threaten all kinds of brick-and-mortar, consumers have shown they want to test-drive high-tech products like they do cars. They want to look at optional add-ons; they want coaching and service. But they don’t want it to be like the high-pressure experience that comes with buying a car. In fact, Steve Jobs captured the consumer sentiment at a show in early 2001 “Buying a car is no longer the worst purchasing experience. Buying a computer is now No. 1.”¹

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The website helpfully provides the GPS coordinates as N41° 53.655 | W87° 37.450. Very appropriate as they point to a store of the navigation company Garmin. That’s 633 N. Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s swanky Magnificent Mile. The website also provides a 360-degree sweeping video of the store, but you have to step in the store if you want to touch and feel the entire Garmin product line under one roof. Garmin has a very wide variety of navigation units—specialized marine ones, others for pilots of private planes, and of course plenty of devices for autos, hiking, and other uses. The store has another advantage. You can walk in and rent units for as few as three days.

Walk into the Citi Union Square branch at 14th Street and Broadway in New York City, and you will think you are in an Apple Store. That’s because it was designed by the same firm, Eight Inc., that also helps design Apple Stores. The 9,700-square-foot store “features six interactive sales walls; image ATMs; free online access and wi-fi for customers; 24/7 access from the ATM lobby, to customer service experts via videoconferencing; and a private seating lounge for customers of Citigold, Citi’s premium banking service.”³

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Add Best Buy’s emphasis on after-sales service with a unit called Geek Squad and projects like the Remote Service Project. “We’d launched Geek [Squad], and we wanted to maximize the availability of the 18,000 Geeks. We wanted to improve their productivity, which would improve the service to the customer and improve the time that the consumer had access to their product, so that when their PC went down, instead of losing it for a week to 10 days, we were now [shortening] downtime to 24 hours: That’s a massive breakthrough. [The Remote Service Project] also meant that when you go into the store and you want your PC repaired, instead of [having a long wait time because of] that particular store having a backlog of work to do, we now have a remote capability that identifies that backlog and [can assign] the work [to another] store remotely. And so it really means that we can level out the work across the enterprise, but above all, deliver a great experience for the customer and maximize the up time of the capability of the product that they’ve sourced from us.”¹³

Best Buy has also become a venture capitalist investing in a fund focused on digital media startup investments like games and mobile applications. An executive was quoted, “We’re trying to change what the solutions are for our customers and change the direction of our company and get involved a lot more in what’s happening in digital entertainment as an active participant, rather than a passive participant.”¹⁴

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Over 230 million visitors entered one of Apple’s over 300 stores around the world in 2010. They spent plenty of time and money there. Many also spent plenty of time outside it as crowds snake for hours with every new product introduction. Many visit the store as they would a museum. The Fifth Avenue store in New York—the glass cube—is now considered one of the most photographed sites in the city. The store at the Louvre in Paris is poetically symbiotic. It’s hard to tell where the world-famous museum with the Mona Lisa ends and where the Apple store starts.

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The Apple experience is making several companies think about owning their own storefronts. Google is opening Android stores with the first in Australia. Microsoft has been opening its own stores across the western part of the United States.²⁰ “Getting that direct customer feedback is what we’re learning and getting from our stores,” says Microsoft as it looks to open another 75 stores over the next few years. Nokia has opened and already closed many stores around the world, including a flagship store in London.²¹

In the meantime, medical device companies are finding it difficult to ignore Walgreen’s. The pharmacy chain has over 7,500 drugstore locations and close to 6 million daily visitors to its stores,^22. Walgreens is increasingly tech savvy, and so are its customers. So, diabetics can find supplies for their OneTouch Ping (a glucose meter that transmits data wirelessly to the insulin pump at the patient’s belt level) or a Novolog, a prefilled insulin pen, at Walgreen’s. Walgreen’s has a voice-activated refill system. You punch in your prescription code and wait for a text message when the order is ready to pick up. Many branches have a drive-through with chutes like banks do where you can send your credit card and receive the medication. Its website makes refills even easier, since you can pick off a list of previous prescriptions. In the mobile age, Walgreen’s has added Refill by Scan, which allows you to scan the bar code from a previous prescription using an iPhone or Android phone.

Companies like Toro or Stanley Black & Decker, with their own versions of smart products for homes and lawns, cannot afford to ignore a Home Depot, with over 2,000 locations around the world. Home Depot aisles are filled with many technology-rich products. They include a remote-controlled Hunter ceiling fan, a Filtrete wi-fi thermostat, a Ridgid 7,000-watt generator, a Ryobi Duet Power Paint Tool system, a Rain Bird irrigation system (to program lawn sprinklers), a Dyson vacuum with “root cyclone technology,” a Char-Broil grill with infrared heat. Home Depot caters to an increasingly tech-savvy contractor and do-it-yourself customer base. Indeed, it is one of the first retailers pioneering mobile payments.²³

Home Depot employees are themselves increasingly tech-savvy. Walk up to an employee and he or she can punch codes into Motorola handhelds and tell you the exact aisle and bin number for the item you are looking for. The Motorola also functions as a walkie-talkie, indispensable in the big stores, and as a scanner, and can be used to send requests for bar codes to be printed.

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

Heh - I installed a Westinghouse remote controlled fan that self adjusts its peed and duration according to the ambient temperature. And it is virtually silent. Acquired in Spain no less. Made in Germany.