Customers don’t walk into your store empty-handed. They arrive with aspirations already in motion, and companies that help customers reach those aspirations outperform companies that try to redirect them.
Recently we were thrilled to be contacted by a chain of home hardware retail stores in Latin America who understood this well ahead of their competitors. During the World Cup matches featuring their team, they asked us for a way to insert live score updates into their in-store music and messaging programs, professionally, at the moments that mattered most, including half time, and the final whistle.
Football has nothing to do with home hardware. That happens to be precisely the point here, and it is why this is such a strong entrant for our CUBE Best of the Year awards.
Getting it done
Of course, with CUBE’s software-defined AV architecture, automating this for their marketing team was straightforward. A software-defined AV app on the CUBE device in each store watched for score updates, and as soon as one became available, played it in the next gap between songs. Seamlessly, across the entire fleet.
No changes to their brand music and message programs. No changes to their workflows. The existing programming simply kept running, and the software-defined app found the gaps.
Why it’s forward-looking
The temptation is to look at this and think: surely this has nothing to do with home hardware, so how could it possibly benefit the retailer?
And that very thought demonstrates perhaps the biggest blind spot in business today.
This retailer’s request expresses a profound insight into the science of customer behaviour: the effect of which is to communicate to the customer “we truly care about you” at deep, non-verbal, subconscious level.
Put simply: when customers come to your establishment, they come with existing aspirations. And research shows that companies perform better when they help customers achieve those aspirations.
This brand very astutely realized that customers in their stores during those matches would want to know how their team was doing. And their willingness to satisfy that desire, with no obvious commercial benefit to themselves, and in preference to their normal promotional messages, paints a very clear picture to the deep subconscious mind of every customer in the building: we anticipated your aspirations, and we put you first.
Customers are smart. You cannot verbally say “we truly care about you” and expect to be believed without evidence. And there is nothing that demonstrates care so viscerally as showing understanding of a customer’s aspirations and accommodating them.
Companies that work with the science of human behaviour, and act on it, win. CUBE Group is in a unique position to help you apply this kind of behaviour engineering across your audio, visual and telephony contact points. Thirty minutes on an exploratory call with us is often all it takes to open the door to a radical improvement in your return on investment.