Page 253 - The Apple Experience

satisfying a core subconscious need.` According to Pradeep, “Superior
shopping experiences are those that enable consumers to walk away not only

having absorbed a lot of information, but having extracted insight that

becomes part of an educational experience. Education is more than

information. It is distilled insights that can be used on an ongoing basis.”
5
Pradeep also believes entertainment plays a key role, in addition to

information and education. “A huge benefit of modern life is the luxury of

being entertained while we shop. This is such a compelling feature of the
experience that we seek it out whenever we can. The combination of

shopping (which the brain more or less equates with hunting and gathering)

and entertainment is enormously powerful.”
6
The Apple Store is fun. It’s entertaining. And that’s the way Steve Jobs

wanted it. At any given time you can see Creatives teaching a customer to

edit a video, a group of seniors learning to use an iPad, parents and their

children learning to make songs together in a youth workshop, teachers
taking kids on field trips to learn and create things, children playing games

on an iMac in the “family room” section of the store, while others are

attending an event in the Apple theater. Apple likes to say that people come

to shop but they return to learn. Apple has turned the boring sales floor into

a playground for kids and adults. Jobs and Johnson didn’t just “reimagine”

the retail experience, they blew it up and started over. According to Johnson,

“The retailers that win the future are the ones that start from scratch and

figure out how to create fundamentally new types of value for customers.”
7

Just booked my first Apple One to One session for tomorrow so I can become a

Keynote Jedi. —Dean W.