Tag: Authors

Now that more and more are ordered or experienced online, the only trips we make are special trips.

If your brand or your service or your place is not worth a special visit, it is unlikely that the customer is going to come anytime soon.

Exceptional customer experiences are the only sustainable platform for competitive differentiation. In an in increasingly commoditised world, riddled by a SOS(Sea of Sameness), your best product or service is CeX(Customer Experience).

You enter a bookstore by design in a mall or as you get to your gate at an airport, what you will see are prominent displays of books which are ‘ bestsellers ‘. Books which are not booksellers(or were old bestsellers) occupy shelf space in an alphabetical order that go by the authors’ second name.

This is creating an experience for that almost extinct category of readers or buyers who come to a book shop knowing fully well the name of the author and the book|s she or he has written.

There is a scant regard for making things memorable, quirky, inspiring. Nothing that says ‘ Weekend Must Reads ‘, ‘ Fiction For The Young (that adults would enjoy) ‘, ‘ Must Read Books You Have Never Heard of Let Alone Read ‘, ‘ Page Turners From A Different Era ‘ , ‘ Great Reading for Non Readers ‘…

There is no attempt at personalising the experience. The thinking seems to be that shelf space has some shelf life and nothing more needs to be done to add life to the store experience. In such a scenario, why would you give up the convenience and frictionless experience of shopping on Amazon and haul your way to a physical bookstore? There is no special incentive.

Sticking to a mindset that helped you flourish a couple of decades ago is a sure fire way to go out of business. Re-imagining is not a choice, it is a compelling necessity.