Small Data by Martin Lindstrom

Author:Martin Lindstrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Case of the Missing Hand Cream

How Selfies Smoothed the Way for an In-Store Fashion Revolution

As far as products and brands are concerned, the world is no longer local. Two or three decades ago, tourists could come back from visiting a country 3,000 miles away assured that the souvenirs they’d brought home with them in their suitcases—the Sumatra-Indonesian Barbie Doll, the wooden salad tongs from Botswana with animal carvings, a sweater from French Gap with a neck zipper—were not only one-of-a-kind, but could be someday directly linked back to memory and experience. Today, there are few objects that tourists can store in their suitcases that aren’t already available somewhere, from someone, online, detaching the treasures we find while traveling from the context of experience.

Still, just as there’s a wide array of Western brands and companies that Russian and Asian consumers would be surprised to discover exist, some stores and brands remain unknown to a majority of Westerners. I’ve already mentioned Picard, France’s frozen-food chain, but it’s also safe to assume most US and European natives have never heard of Mr. Bigg’s, a Nigerian fast-food chain with over 170 locations across that country serving local delicacies including moin moin and ofada rice. What about NTT DOCOMO—not AT&T, or Verizon—which controls approximately one-half of Japan’s wireless market? Won Hundred is an up-and-coming Danish menswear company, and a Chinese eyewear chain with the breathtaking name of Helen Keller sells frames and sunglasses at 80 Chinese locations.

It’s also fair to say that few people outside of Europe are familiar with Tally Weijl, a leading Swiss-French fashion label headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, whose logo is the silhouette of an extremely pink rabbit.

Tally, as its tween and teenaged female clientele calls it, has approximately 1,000 stores in 30 countries including Ireland, Italy, Holland, Poland, Germany, Greece and Russia. Similar to H&M or Forever 21, Tally’s low prices are similar to Target’s price points. So why did Tally Weijl need to bring in a branding consultant? The chain had a problem—namely unused, unsold merchandise. For years Tally had succeeded again and again in hitting the fashion nerve—the perfect length, the trendiest style, the hottest color—but the company’s warehouses still overflowed with millions of dollars’ worth of unsold inventory. Nor did the teenaged girls I interviewed in my preliminary Subtext Research seem to enjoy visiting Tally’s physical stores. The spaces were dense, cramped and disordered, they told me, and overloud techno music pounded from overhead speakers, as if the fashion and jackhammer industries had merged beneath one roof. It was sensory overload, and not in an exhilarating way.

Why were twenty-first-century adolescent girls so fickle about fashion? Was it a worldwide problem, one caused by customers of all ages reluctant to pay full price for clothes they knew they could buy online instead at a discount? If the Internet had transformed the role of the bricks-and-mortar retailer and the definition of “social”—which it clearly has—were there any new ways of successfully combining the offline and online

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