BLOG

There are differences between men and women. For better or worse, my habits and desires are influenced by my manness. The same is true of all men. There are just certain ways that we do things.

For instance, the next time you are at a gas station, stay for awhile and watch different men and women pump gas. There is one fascinating difference. When women finish dispensing all of the gas into their car’s tank, they remove the nozzle and put it back on the pump. When men finish dispensing their gas, they shake the nozzle to make sure there aren’t a few drops left, then they put it back on the pump. Sound familiar? Men are applying their personal experience with other nozzle-like dispensing devices to a process that doesn’t require the same treatment. When it comes to pumping gas, what is a totally natural behavior for men because they are men, is totally foreign to women. Though I wonder if we put a roll of tissue next to the pump if they would wipe.

Most men will never buy makeup. Buying makeup is a distinctly woman-focused experience that would irritate and confound any man. Simply put, the majority of men go shopping because they have to, and the majority of women go shopping because they want to. There are certainly other big differences in the way men and women shop, and retailers know this and use it to their advantage. On this I think we can all agree: Buying makeup is optimized for the way women shop.

It must work very well, because it is the same at EVERY department store in the world. The makeup is arranged and presented by vendor, typically in a 10-ft. square glass counter with packaged product displayed behind the glass, sample and other interactive product displayed on top of the counter, and a single register in the center. There are anywhere from 4 to 8 people selling makeup, some behind the counter and some on the outside, often applying makeup to women sitting in chairs. This is a highly interactive sales process because the people working there are not selling makeup, they are selling beauty. Women desire significant education on this topic and appreciate the interactive sales process. It is not unusual for a makeup counter to be swarming two or three women deep on weekends, nor is it unusual for a woman to spend an hour or more on the total purchase experience. Twenty minutes or more can easily be spent between the time a purchase decision has been made and the actual payment takes place because the process is optimized for selling, but not for processing payment.

I know this because I recently was a victim of this shopping experience. Our office is across the street from the mall in which there is a Nordstrom. Yesterday at lunch I went to Nordstrom to buy lotion for my face. For as long as I can remember, before I go to sleep at night, I have washed my face with whatever soap was made available to me, then I have applied whatever form of moisturizer was made available to me. Several years ago, the cosmetics industry started marketing products to men. So my soap is now a more expensive variety that comes in a tube instead of in bar form, and I have developed an affinity for a particular type of lotion called “M Lotion” by Clinique.

Whatever. This is far from an indication of my metrosexuality: I travel often and I needed a minimum amount of personal hygiene product, and some ex-girlfriend some time ago introduced me to this product and it sort of stuck.

Here is the problem for me and all men: This product, “M Lotion,” is available at the Clinique makeup counter. Usually I buy it online and it comes in the mail. Alternately, I can sometimes get my fianceé to buy it for me whenever she is going to be at the mall. In rare cases, perhaps once every two years, I have to go and buy it myself at retail. This is a very bizarre experience because it is not optimized for a man.

Dear Clinique: Here is some advice. To effectively sell this product to me, there should be an accessible product display from which I can select my product. The product itself or the box it is in should contain sufficient information for me to make an informed purchase decision. Interactivity should be low, but a non-aggressive salesperson should be available to answer questions. The time gap between purchase decision and payment should be as short as possible, as efficiency is my ultimate measure of shopping success. Finally, it should not be merchandized at the women’s makeup counter at Nordstrom. Mixing me in with the teenage girls, milfs and perky saleswomen achieves one thing: Discomfort.

So that was my recent shopping experience. I happened to glance at my watch when I walked up to the counter. It was 27 minutes later that I was walking away with my $36 purchase of two tubes of M Lotion, mentally calculating my hourly rate derived from my salary to estimate the all-in cost of my experience and vowing never again to repeat the experience.

Here is the really interesting part. I got a “Gift With Purchase.” This is the makeup industry’s way of introducing new products to consumers to drive upsell at the next shopping experience. My Gift With Purchase contained the following:
- Rinse-Off Foaming Cleanser
- Turnaround Concentrate Visible Skin Renewer
- High Impact Mascara
- Colour Surge Bare Brilliance Lipstick
- Colour Surge Impossibly Glossy
- Clinique Signature Key Chain
- Cosmetics Bag

(None of these Gifts is remotely useful to me, though it seemed like a lot of crap to hand over on a $36 purchase.) The salesperson’s job is to hand out a Gift With Purchase as part of the purchasing process. Her job is not to visually estimate the applicability of the Gift to her customer. And so I walked away with this dainty bag of useless crap, drawing at least one awkward stare from a fellow shopper.

Yes, I ultimately got what I was looking for, but not in a way that made me happy at all. In fact, the experience made me specifically decide to avoid the experience in the future, simply because the product isn’t being merchandized in the way that it should be to optimize sales. The entire approach to merchandizing was either created by a woman or by someone who really really really understands how to optimize a shopping experience for a woman.

This made me think of the way mobile products are merchandized.

Open your phone and try to buy something.

I handed my Sprint Samsung A920 to someone on our team here and asked her to go buy a ringtone. She pressed the “Menu OK” button, which took her to the menu. She couldn’t figure out where to buy a ringtone because none of the labels mapped to her mental concept of the place where ringtones get bought. She tried “On Demand” because that seemed closest, as in “I demand a ringtone.” That’s not where it is. After a few other short explorations of menu items, she backed out entirely to the native state. The native state on all handsets are almost totally useless. This one is above average and maps the soft keys to Favorites and Contacts. Later we found out that the Favorites menu actually has a “Get New Ringers” option, but she never clicked on that because “Favorites” communicated to her that it was a collection of things she had already bought or items that she had assigned.

And so she pressed the right side on the 4-directional button. I asked why. She has a Verizon Wireless phone, and on VZW, pressing to the right takes you to Get It Now. On my Sprint phone, the directional button is called the “launch pad” and they are assignable. It apparently comes with the right button assigned to the Sprint music store. While I watched over her shoulder, she scrolled through songs, previewed and bought what she thought was a ringtone. It downloaded to the phone and we listened to it. “How do I make it my ringtone now?” she asked. “You don’t,” I said, “because that is not a ringtone. That is a song.” She went back to the main menu and tried, in order, Tools, Web and Media Player, none of which are the correct path to buy a ringtone. “I can’t figure it out,” she said.

Finally she clicked on My Content, which has a link called “Ringers,” which she scrolled right past trying to find ringtones. I asked why she skipped over Ringers and she said she thought that was the place where my existing ringtones would be since it was under “My Content.” In fact, that is where you buy ringtones.

Then I handed her my Boost phone, a Motorola i855. This handset has a hard key on it that looks like a page with text on it. This is roughly the same icon that is on her Verizon Wireless phone that takes her to their WAP portal. She clicked around on every other key in vain, including clicking the “up” button on the 4-directional pad which bizarrely takes the user to a brief glimpse of what looks like a content menu where you might buy stuff, but then takes you to a “reboost” menu. Then she finally tried that one button that invokes the very clean and clear content menu, where “ringtones” is clearly spelled out. It takes you to “tonez” where the first option is to buy new ringtones.

Then I handed her my VZW LG VX7000 and she immediately clicked on the directional pad to get to Get It Now, and on that menu the first option is “Get Tunes and Tones.” That was easy enough, but then again her personal phone is on VZW.

So I handed her my Cingular Nokia 6102. She clicked on MediaNet. That’s not it. She clicked on Games and Apps, which takes you to a menu that says “Buy Games” but not “Buy Apps.” She backed out and clicked on Cingular Mall, which made her wait for about 30 seconds. Why is that? Is it downloading the entire catalog every time? From there it was relatively simple to get to ringtones.

And that’s just ringtones. This is the most mobile-relevant data product you can buy next to voicemail, and it is merchandized way under water where consumers cannot find it.

I repeated this process, asking her to buy our product, Rabble. Similar frustration ensued.

WHY is the mobile experience merchandized in this way? WHO are the network operators selling to? Is there a category of consumer that prefers very difficult shopping experiences?

It should be said that data evolved from a voice-centric environment and that none of these devices were built with data in mind. But wait a minute – that’s bullshit. We’re past the voice/data hump. Every device that is in the market today was on the drawing board 18 months ago, and we were well into the middle of the mobile data explosion 18 months ago. So why are these devices still so incredibly difficult to use for one of their primary purposes? Why are these devices seemingly built to confound consumers and actually prevent them from buying content and other valuable services? Why are these devices still primarily voice devices when data is at least 10% of revenue and growing at most network operators?

I think the answer is simple: The entire approach to merchandizing was either created by an engineer or by someone who really really really understands how to optimize a shopping experience for an engineer. Failing that, I can say with confidence that the entire approach to merchandizing mobile content was NOT created by a person who understands consumer shopping habits.

Here’s what probably happened: Every carrier has a handset czar whose job it is to buy handsets with the greatest feature set at the lowest cost. The handset manufacturers try to differentiate their products while still meeting minimum functionality requirements by innovating in the areas of:
industrial design (Nokia: “let’s not put a ‘back’ button on the phone”)
UI (Motorola: “let’s make the thinnest phone with the most counter-intuitive UI”)
Media formats (All OEMs: “look – we created another proprietary sound codec”)

…and the list goes on, bringing positive innovation in some areas and negative innovation in others.

Then the network operator further differentiates the product by integrating their custom experience, like Boost’s menu button or Helio’s coolio circle menu interface. Sometimes they go so far as to offer their own custom-built UI, which is sometimes better than the OEM’s and sometimes not. The operators further integrate their data experience, which invariably is powered by a different vendor and therefore invariably offers a completely different experience to subscribers across the board. Note that I didn’t say a “better experience,” because no consumer thinks that their mobile phone is exceedingly easy to use. The net result is that when a carrier adds a new subscriber, they force the new customer to learn an entirely new UI, nomenclature and set of conventions, essentially starting out with a negative experience. (Not to mention high CSR cost: “How the hell do I access my voicemail??”)

The limitations of the carriers’ vendors’ mobile data solution generally leads to a confusing experience for customers because 1) not all content fits into the predefined categories and 2) the shopping experience is so convoluted that a customer cannot easily find anything compelling to buy anyway, and the only semblance of assistance in this regard is a category called “What’s Hot,” which is the most tenuous example we have today of true mobile merchandizing.

On top of it, because the mobile data experience is inherently separate from the device experience and in fact built on top of it rather than being integrated into it, the user is presented with a dichotomous experience that is really two worlds in their pocket: The native handset world and the wild and wacky online world, and nary the twain shall meet.

The result of such an approach are examples like the LG F9100 that had a beautiful slider design with a full keyboard that couldn’t be used with a downloaded messaging application like Mobile IM. Really? So wtf do I need the keyboard for? RETURN. And now Cingular doesn’t carry that device anymore. Who’s to blame? I dunno, but don’t get mad about your customer service expense when you are pushing picture sharing applications that cannot access the camera on the phone.

What I do know is that this all comes down to merchandizing and nobody does it well. BUT THEY COULD. Where’s my Gift With Purchase? When I buy JAMDAT Bowling, give me a free month of Bejeweled, too. Cross-promote, cross-sell, merchandize and manage the shopping experience.

T-Mobile 5
Last week, T-Mobile launched their “5” product in two test markets. One is San Diego, because I saw it in the T-Mobile store across the street, and the other is Portland. This is the first real innovation I have seen in the mobile space in a long time. Like Alltel Circle, T-Mobile’s 5 allows users to identify a small number of people to which they have unlimited calling, regardless of network. Pretty cool, but Alltel Circle requires you to set it up on the web.

T-Mobile 5 has a slick and simple interface right on the handset. On your active desktop, you have icons representing your 5 friends. You can even replace the icons with little pictures of their faces. You scroll to the person you want to call and click call. Or send an sms. It’s like your PIM is an iceberg and the tip of it, your five friends, sticks up out of the water and onto the native state of your handset, putting this most-used feature right at your fingertips.

This is massively innovative because it is actually merchandizing communication. Rather than the functional approach found on every handset on every carrier around the world that silos communication into functional verticals called “voice” and “sms” and “mms” and “IM,” T-Mobile is taking a consumer-centric approach that combines an active UI that is easy and fun to use with the core communication functionality of the handset. Simple innovations in the future would include data integration, so you could communicate in whatever way you choose with your defined 5 at the tip of your iceberg.

So how hard would it be to introduce other active-desktop communication-based applications? Not very. In fact, why the hell hasn’t this happened already in a big way? The network operators are in the business of providing communication, after all. Making it easier to communicate and effectively merchandizing this functionality to subscribers should be the number one goal of any carrier.

Simply put, as an industry we now run the risk of finding ourselves selling makeup to men: The consumer mobile communication experience is not being properly merchandized. As new forms of communication evolve on the internet, these must be brought to the mobile consumer in a carrier-friendly but mobile-relevant context and presented to users in a way that they can adopt them without suffering through the pain of finding the “buy” button on their phones. The good news is that the innovation is starting to accelerate. The next big opportunity in the mobile space is communication applications. This means applications tightly integrated with the core handset functionality. The last mile to making it all truly valuable is effective mobile merchandizing.