Claps and cheers: Apple stores’ carefully managed drama

“Steve Jobs wanted customers to understand the Apple store ‘with one sweep of the eye,’ as if gods standing on Mount Olympus,” Jonny Bunning reports for The Guardian. “Indeed, the outlets seem to speak for themselves. Bright, uncluttered, and clad in glass, they couldn’t contrast more sharply with the big-box labyrinths they were designed to replace.”
“Neither could their profit margins. Since launching in 2001, the instantly recognizable stores have raked in more money – in total and per square foot – than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world’s richest company in the process,” Bunning reports. “Yet the very transparency of the Apple store conceals how those profits are made.”
“The Apple store was explicitly designed as a brand embassy rather than a dedicated source of technical knowledge. As Ron Johnson, the former Target executive who came up with the concept, told the Harvard Business Review, ‘People come to the Apple store for the experience – and they’re willing to pay a premium for that … Apple is in the relationship business as much as the computer business,'” Bunning reports. “It might be expected that Apple store employees are, as their name implies, tech gurus with incredible intellects. But their true role has always been to use emotional guile to sell products. The Genius Training Student Workbook is the vaguely comical title of the manual from which Apple store employees learn their art. Prospective geniuses are taught to use empathetic communication to control customer experience and defuse tension, aiming to make them happy and relax their purse strings.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wait, Apple’s stores are designed, ultimately, to move product and the very people who staff them are trained to facilitate that objective?
Shocker.
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