Have you ever wondered why, when you go into a convenience store, you normally buy your Coke in a can, but if you go to an upmarket bar, your Coke is invariably served from Coke’s iconic glass bottle? In this Vlog, Grant explains the difference and how it applies to your business.
Have you ever thought about, that when you go in a corner shop, you buy your Coke in a can, but if you go to an upmarket bar, your Coke will get served in a bottle?
Because, actually, the delivery mechanism isn’t just a delivery mechanism.
It often changes the customer and the nature of the product or the service.
An interface, for example, the web or retail store, isn’t just a delivery mechanism for your product or service.
It actually changes the nature of that product or service and the customer who is accessing it.
For example, there may be a sales training company who are highly successful at delivering face-to-face training.
They, therefore, decide to take it online to reach so many more people.
However, the sort of people that are willing to travel to a venue to get the training face-to-face will be very, very different from those that are willing to access it online, and they may be looking for different needs and requirements.
When Amazon started opening retail stores, do you think it was simply to access the same customers that use their e-commerce platform online?
Of course not.
Not only does it open a different marketplace, but it needs to have a different offering because the people that are going to walk into their offline retail stores are not necessarily the same people, with the same requirements, that use their online service.
This provides companies with huge opportunities where they can repackage and repurpose their offerings to reach new people with new needs.
However, you have to be careful, because you can’t just take your offline face-to-face sales training, put it online and expect it to work.
So don’t think of the distribution channel as simply an interface to access different customers.
It actually becomes part of the offering in and of itself.
So that is why Coke is served in a can in a corner shop and in a glass bottle, in an upmarket bar.
The context is different.
Some of the clientele are tell are different and, therefore, the offering experience itself has to differentiate – and Coke does it with the packaging.
There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English
