When Magic Matters

Watch Jon Irick discuss this topic in Ziba Design's latest video, “Retail Renaissance.”

The three keys to staying on top of retail discussed here previously – storytelling, testing and service – should be considered fundamentals. The next step? Real omni-channel retail. This is a sore subject for many businesses because omni-channel got off to a bad start as a complex, stressful must-have. In many cases, “omni-channel” only functioned as a stand-in term for “digital,” but omni-channel means seamless experiences that span all consumer channels, physical and digital.

Sound far-fetched? Consider Apple hiring Angela Ahrendts from Burberry, with her explicit charge to unite online and brick-and-mortar retail offerings at the most valuable brand on Earth.

Or think of what Disney has been working toward for years, and now stands to realize, with the recently introduced MagicBand. This personalized, wearable technology takes the place of a ticket and handles in-park payment for food or souvenir purchases, as well as (possibly) allowing Cinderella to spontaneously greet your children by name when they arrive on the steps of her castle. And Disney says that even wider, deeper integration is coming.

The MagicBand is as close to perfect as integration of digital and physical gets, today. Highly choreographed delivery and a consistent narrative extend everywhere guests look and to everything they touch in person and online, whether they’re planning at home, en route, or in the midst of a visit to the Magic Kingdom. Regardless of who you attribute the idea to – Arthur C. Clarke and Charles Fort are both contenders – the basic premise here is “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Yet magic isn’t homogenized or undifferentiated, and “seamless” shouldn’t be, either. Too often, lately, omni-channel has ended up diluted into endless-aisle e-commerce, actually failing to deliver much in the way of experience, and it still represents less than 10 percent of retail sales. Not all of this retail evolution will be consumer facing, and not all of it will be sexy; it’s going to take a lot of hard work on backend operations to bring that number up, making magic your customers will never really see. They’ll know it’s there, though, when they experience it.

Storytelling, whether you’re selling peanuts or whole lifestyles, is the warp to strong delivery’s weft. Put them together and you’ve got the fabric of cross-threaded retail omni-channel. Without a clear sense of narrative, derived from authoritative handling of ownable value propositions, brands today are lost. Making magic will require nuanced attention to everything from messaging, to presentation, to staffing.

Focus on finding your magic, and delivering it with no seams, regardless of channel. Disney seems to think the answer lies in a wearable device; iBeacon indicates similar ideas in Cupertino. Regardless of how things manifest technologically, what omni-channel really means is true integration: physical, digital, and whatever comes next. 

Jon Irick is a creative director at Ziba Design.