Originally spotted on the Retail Focus twitter feed.

Here’s a nice little eBook, courtesy of Elateral.

Just the right thing to get those juices going for your New Year’s to do list. Of particular interest is the four principles and seven imperatives and some good links at the back of the book. Happy reading.

Here’s the download link. (You’ll need to give up your email address).

Of particular note is the immensely long home page, scroll all the way down to read a huge amount of information. We’re still getting comments regularly about designing ‘above the fold’ so it’s refreshing to see a client that understands that scrolling is probably easier than clicking through and keeps customers on the home page longer before they make their choice to enter the store. Think of it as the decompression zone that we build into stores in the offline world so customers can get used to crossing the threshold before deciding where to head.

Also worth noting is the launch. A particular time and date backed up by a twitter campaign (the more tweets the greater the discount) Lucky 10 to get the ball rolling on launch day.

Finally, retail design is all about the details. Nice to see a message about free shipping right there in the checkout button which you can see when you hover over the Shopping Bag button.

Also worth looking at his flickr group of the café. The Rapha website’s not too shabby either and a nice video on Monocle.

These days there’s no reason not to have a shop, a pop up shop, a twitter, a facebook page, a van, go to festivals, write a book, a photo essay, a magazine, have a loyalty card, a website, a microsite, a tumblr, a flavors.me, print a t-shirt the list goes on. Brands that market themselves as authentic and have an idea win. Those that buy off the shelf and stick their logo on, fail.

Update: just came across another piece about Rapha here on everydaylife.style loads more to explore on there too.

More on The Escape Pod’s blog.

Originally spotted on Brandflakes for Breakfast

Also available is The Word of Mouth Manual (Vol II) available from your blog of choice … Word of Mouth Manual

Yesterday my wife’s friend called her to tell her she was on her way to the local Boots because they’d called her to tell her it was in stock but to be quick! I’m not sure if they got any that way but later we moved onto ebay where there seems a healthy trade selling the product around 50% above the retail price. Meanwhile stock levels are so low they’re advertising the fact and customers are being steered towards other similar products one of which is also at a limited stock level.

All of this without TV advertising (not counting the horizon TV programme of course) selling a £16.75 product by word of mouth with a buzz through mothers who meet at a local primary school every morning. They all have permission to talk to each other and be influenced by each other, which is why many of them wear crocs as well. They all have permission to have a conversation and although television creates a subject for the conversation, tv advertising seems not to unless it really stands out and I can only think of a couple that do at the moment. Conversations like these with implicit permission happen all the time and if I wanted to sell a product or service this is where I would start, the virus might be slower to spread but I suspect it would have a longer lasting effect.

Thanks to Brandflakes for Breakfast for this.