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October 16, 2008 In Transcripts By Advent

xmt-008: Interview with Robyn Waters [transcript]

[This is a tran­script of the free audio pro­gram, Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. The audio ver­sion of this con­tent is avail­able at: Episode 008: Inter­view with Robyn Waters]

Voiceover:

Wel­come to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

[music]

Todd Austin:

Wel­come to this episode of Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. This show is about the the­ory and prac­tice of using expe­ri­ences to engage audi­ences with the authen­tic nature of a brand or com­pany. We believe that it may be the most pow­er­ful tool mar­keters have, but it′s also some thing of a mystery.

My name is Todd Austin and I will be your host for this episode.

Episode 8: Inter­view with Robyn Waters.

The 2008 Event Mar­ket­ing Inno­va­tion Tour recently made a stop at Nashville, which was the 6th of nine cities on the tour. The Event Mar­ket­ing Inno­va­tion Tour pulls together the lat­est ideas and best prac­tices in event and expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing for a half-day sem­i­nar. This year′s keynote pre­sen­ter for all nine stops on the tour was Robyn Waters.

Robyn is the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of Trend, Design, and Prod­uct Devel­op­ment for Tar­get. She is the author of two books: The Trendmaster′s Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Cus­tomer Wants Next,  and The Hum­mer and the Mini: Nav­i­gat­ing The Con­tra­dic­tions of The New Trend Land­scape.

She is also a con­tribut­ing author (along with Tom Peters, Seth Godin and Mal­colm Glad­well) for The Big Moo. We caught up with Robyn about an hour before her pre­sen­ta­tion. The fol­low­ing inter­view took place in the hall where she was about to speak.

Todd Austin:

So, Robyn, this con­cept of design has fol­lowed you around like a puppy. Guys like Seth Godin and Daniel Pink either talk about you by name in their books or they talk about the work that you did at Tar­get. How has design become so impor­tant, how did we get here?

Robyn Waters:

Well, I can give you a lit­tle bit of a back­ground. When I came to Tar­get in 1992, it was a $3 bil­lion retailer dis­counter, it was an also ran. Wal-Mart was 10 times big­ger; K-Mart was three times big­ger. We had a very vision­ary CEO, who looked at the num­bers and said, you know, there is no way we can win on scale, economies of scale, cut­ting expenses, we need to truly differentiate.

And so what he did was, inno­vate, reframe a unique space in the retail land­scape between a dis­counter and between a high-end depart­ment store. There­fore Tar­get cov­ered out the space: upscale dis­counter. In order to achieve that, for a dis­counter to go into the mar­ket to buy goods, the goods that were out there weren′t trend right, they weren′t well designed, they weren′t great qual­ity, so we had to do it a dif­fer­ent way.

And what we ended up doing is cre­at­ing an inter­nal design depart­ment, so that we would have exclu­sive design-driven trend-right prod­uct. Peo­ple often ask me what is the secret to suc­cess, what made Tar­get “Tarzhay?” And there are three things. It′s the idea that the com­pany wanted to bor­row on their depart­ment store her­itage and be trend right. Notice I didn′t say trend for­ward, but trend right.

The sec­ond is they were going to be guest focused and guest is in the tra­di­tion of Dis­ney. So, trend right means what are the trends, research them out there, but then trans­late them, trans­late is the key effec­tively for the guest, but design was a secret sauce. Design was the tool that we used inter­nally to cre­ate exclu­sive prod­uct, based on that trend research, based on know­ing our guests and track­ing the trends around the world and then trans­lat­ing them effectively.

And so, we became really the first bas­tion in the US for what peo­ple now call demo­c­ra­tic design or cheap chic. And we had peo­ple whose mod­els we can fol­low, IKEA was doing at in the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries. So we didn′t inno­vate that whole idea, but we applied it to retail for the first time.

And so as the head of the design depart­ment try­ing to design, I lit­er­ally hired the first designer and hired the 100th designer and there has been many more hired since then. So, that was a 10-year period, three bil­lion to 42 bil­lion in 10 years, Tar­get to “Targe” in 10 years because of great design.

Todd:

What are some exam­ples of some of those prod­ucts that came out of that design focus?

Robyn:

There is a story about a sippy cup. It was designed by Philippe Starck. It was one of 5p prod­ucts in a Starck real­ity design pro­gram. Unlike any other sippy cup you′ve ever seen, it was on a pedestal, it was made out of clear plas­tic to look like cut crys­tal and it had lov­ing cup han­dles and it retailed for $3.49.

When the buy­ers first saw this pro­to­type pro­posed design that Philippe Starck rec­om­mended, they looked at it and they go, no way, it′s not what a sippy cup looks like, you know, why would you put it on a pedestal, what­ever. And what Philippe Starck did was demon­strated that good design is about more than function.

He filled it full of grape juice and he tipped it over and noth­ing spilled. So he said see it′s func­tional, it works. It′s func­tional, it′s inex­pen­sive, we can retail this for $3.49, but that′s not why you should buy this design. And he took out a pic­ture of his daugh­ter, he had a lit­tle daugh­ter who is two years old and he said here is why you should buy the sippy cup.

And what he was say­ing was that this lit­tle girl, who­ever used this sippy cup should feel like a princess when she drank from her sippy cup, just like mom and dad did when they drank their Veuve Clic­quot Cham­pagne from a cut-crystal Water­ford cham­pagne flute.

So it wasn′t about the cup or even the design of the cup, it was how that design made that lit­tle girl feel and that is the essence of design with heart. So that was one prod­uct out of thou­sands in the years that I was there.

There was a very famous toi­let brush cleaner from Michael Graves that made a full color spread in “Time Mag­a­zine.” We had a Coach′s Whis­tle Teaket­tle from Michael Graves that retailed for 24.99 that was in every hot design mag­a­zine around the coun­try. So it was every­thing from garage stor­age and orga­ni­za­tion to kitchen tow­els, to bed­ding, to dorm room sup­plies, even food. There wasn′t an aspect within Tar­get that the design strat­egy wasn′t applied in order to cre­ate more design-oriented products.

And it is the whole essence of their brand promise: expect more, pay less. You could expect more trend, more design, more qual­ity, more fash­ion. Then you pay less for it, but not just less for it than if you were buy­ing at another dis­count, but you could get the same thing, the gold plated charger plate at Tar­get for half what you pay at Crate and Bar­rel and it was made in the same fac­tory. So that was a big part of the success.

Todd:

You are the keynote speaker at all nine tour stops for the Event Mar­ket­ing Inno­va­tion Tour. This will be sixth of those I believe that you are about to do today, what is the con­nec­tion between design and event marketing?

Robyn:

I am pre­sent­ing a talk called “Design with Heart” and I found so many great ideas and so many exam­ples of great design with heart in each of the six cities that I vis­ited. And by that I mean, there is a per­sonal, emo­tional con­nec­tion to the audi­ence, to the clients with me as the guest speaker and I have seen tremen­dous differentiation.

There has been a con­sis­tency of the qual­ity of the event, very high qual­ity, beau­ti­fully designed, but every one is dif­fer­ent. And it is really kind of a para­dox, they are alike but they are dif­fer­ent. And each one is dif­fer­ent because they take the heart and soul of the essence of who their employ­ees are, what their mis­sion is, who their clients are and they have applied them beautifully.

I have been in a 16th cen­tury church in the mid­dle of a farm field in Philadel­phia. I am here at the Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. I have been at pro­duc­tion sites and ware­houses that have been turned into beau­ti­ful… I have danced with a robot. It has been a really great amaz­ing visual inter­ac­tion of great design turned into a great expe­ri­ence. It is design­ing a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence by using the emo­tional prin­ci­ples connecting.

Todd:

If you were to give us a state of the union of how far we have come in event design, what would the short answer to that ques­tion be?

Robyn:

I think phe­nom­e­nal. And I think that there is so much an indus­try can do to the indus­try at large out there, because I go and I speak at a lot of events. Many of them are same old same-old. They are inter­ac­tive, they are just some­one on a stage presenting.

And what I have seen are so many great tech­niques and ideas to involve the audi­ence, to get them to par­tic­i­pate, to inter­act with them that there is just so much pos­si­bil­ity for an indus­try and com­pa­nies like this to deliver that out to the big­ger pic­ture. So it is just been outstanding.

Todd:

Robyn, if folks would like to find out more about your work, find out more about the books you have writ­ten and the research you have done, how would they do that?

Robyn:

I have a web­site, it is www.rwtrend.com. I′d like to say that I have a free monthly newslet­ter called Trend Counter Trend and if you click on “Robyn′s Newslet­ter, ” you can hear from me once a month.

Todd:

Sounds great, thanks for your time.

Robyn:

Thank you very much.

[music]

Todd:

We hope you enjoyed that brief inter­view. The con­tent Robyn gave us in that inter­view was a pre­view of what she cov­ered in her full pre­sen­ta­tion and it is our intent to give you that full pre­sen­ta­tion as the next episode of Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

In the mean­time, we have posted links to some spe­cific resources related to Robyn and to the Event Mar­ket­ing Inno­va­tion Tour on our web­site. You can find those listed under Episode eight at www.experientialmarketingtoday.com.

And as always, we appre­ci­ate your input and feed­back. On that same web­site, there is a tool for post­ing your com­ments or you can send us an email using the address feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com or you can call our voice com­ment line and leave a mes­sage. That num­ber is area code 615–690-6796. We look for­ward to shar­ing Robyn′s pre­sen­ta­tion with you in the next episode and we hope you will join us.

Voiceover:

Thanks for lis­ten­ing to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

[music]

Authored By Advent

Advent partners with organizations to help them visually express differentiation.