April 18, 2009

Making A Mess

Give this article from Get Elastic a read. In particular, enjoy this quote:
  • My first retail job was selling shoes in the mall. When the mall was “dead” and the store empty, we would begin to make a mess. We’d pull shoe samples off the shelf and throw them all over the floor. The idea was people browsing the mall are more likely to enter a store with activity than one where the sales girls are leaning over the counter tapping pencils and blowing bubble-gum.
Somewhere in our "best practices" world, we stopped trying to sell, we stopped trying to create demand.

Modern e-commerce would never disrupt the online store in the way that a retail employee would willingly make a mess of the physical store.

Best of all, this stuff can be tested. We can "make a mess", and then see if making a mess increased sales.

3 comments:

  1. one example of this online-

    i received a marketing email apologizing for site issues caused by promo demand, and extending the length of the promo offer.

    except i never received the promo offer initially and suspect the site might never have been down.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whoa, this site took the challenge literally :-P

    http://www.arngren.net/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Haha, that site really did take that literally. I kind of like it though. Seems like there might be a little bit of order to that chaos, well maybe not...

    ReplyDelete

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