Marketing as Service Design: The Supermarket of the Future

Thinking about the future of marketing, I’ve been struck over the past few years by the idea of marketing as service design. Specifically, how might agencies partner with clients to produce, as Mel Exon says, advertising good enough to pay for? Digital strategists – having one eye on the consumer and another on the future – are in a unique position to deliver ideas that create real value by baking innovative technology directly into clients’ service offerings – generating effective engines for business growth in doing so.

Unfortunately, the promise of these kinds of ideas has outpaced action, and we only have a handful of case studies that exemplify what this type of marketing might look like. So, I got to thinking… how might we apply current technology to improve the grocery buying process?

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Where are we now?

Supermarkets operate in a highly fragmented, mature market landscape where individual players ruthlessly seek competitive advantage and depend on constantly improving operational efficiency in order to survive. Despite this, the consumer-facing shopping experience hasn’t changed fundamentally in decades.

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4A’s Strategy Festival Talk

Last month, I was honored to be asked to speak at the 4A’s Strategy Festival, which is run in conjunction with the Jay Chiat Awards, now (I believe) in their second year. My brief was to answer the question: 

What inspires you to be more agile? Who does things faster, better, smarter … and what can they teach us? 

…so I spoke for 5 minutes on teenagers. Obviously.

Let me just say that this project was immensely rewarding. Not only did I learn a whole lot more about agile in the process of writing the deck, but presenting my thoughts was a very agile learning experience in itself. I’m definitely going to try to do this again sometime soon - perhaps at SXSW or a TEDx - to apply my learnings from this experience. I might even take an acting or public speaking class in the meantime!

Here’s my deck:

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Tesco’s Subway Supermarket

Check this out — a really awesome idea from Cheil Worldwide.

I love how the agency stepped outside what we tend to think of as “traditional advertising.” This is more than just an ad. It is a business solution to a business problem that hits the mark strategically, tactically, and creatively. Here, the agency actually created a new sales channel for its client by thinking creatively about emerging technology and consumer behavior.

More than making us smirk or think of a brand in a new way (as good advertising should), Tesco’s subway supermarket actually solves a problem in my life – a problem I might not have been aware of before seeing the solution (as Steve Jobs said, “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want”). It is something truly new and truly interactive, and therefore truly memorable. It delights by surpassing my expectations of what a product in this category (supermarkets) is meant to deliver on, and it makes us think that Tesco really cares about making their customers’ shopping experience better.

I think we will start seeing more and more work like this come out of ad agencies. Just as people are better judged by what they do than by what they say they do, advertising that delivers on a brand promise in and of itself is more effective than advertising that simply relays a brand promise creatively. Importantly, seismic shifts in the way consumers interact with media are now allowing marketers to create unique and engaging experiences – like this one – that stand above advertising in print or on television.

It is the agencies that can think creatively at the intersection of technology, strategy, and consumer behavior, and who aren’t afraid to develop products for their clients, that are best able to produce groundbreakingly effective work today.

Update: posted this on my agency’s blog today :) - http://jaygrey.com/tescos-subway-supermarket/

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