Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

This week I had the opportunity need to visit the Apple Store in Regent Street. My MacBook Pro was suffering from battery fatigue. In other words, it just switched itself off after ten minutes when running on battery. A known problem, and there was a recall. Since I was in London anyway, I decided to go into the store and get a battery swap. This involved booking a slot at the ‘Genius bar’ where you can get technical support for your Mac. I was booked in for 8pm, but like any surgery arrangement did not get seen until 8.30ish. Now in most circumstances, waiting over half an hour (and apparently they were running 3/4 hr late at lunchtime) would be very frustrating, but a visit to the Apple Store is different from visiting most other shops. Indeed, the ambiance is especially created - no sense of ’sales’ but one of lifestyle experience. Customers, I think that’s what you can describe them, were sitting around or standing at the wide desks, logging on to the wireless network and, I suppose doing things - checking email, surfing the net, work, whatever. At the Genius bar, the geniuses were solving problems with hard drive failures, system updates, giving advice on memory upgrades etc., and not a whiff of frustration from customers, quite the opposite genuine gratitude to the staff despite having waited so long. The person next to me had been in three times that week, and was gushing with praise for the staff.

Apple’s strategy in these stores worldwide is to create an experience where their customers felt part of their brand. They treat them in a special way, value the fact that they have bought the product, and by doing so, into the lifestyle statement they perpetuate. This enables them to enforce systems that would perhaps be frustrating or unpalatable in other circumstances. The most interesting thing about the store is that what they have created is a learning environment, with facilitators, one-to-one personal training and workshops throughout the day. Customers come to learn, and as a result buy.

It made me wonder if educators could get similar ‘buy-in’ by students to learning. A good store, manages precisely the environment in which we buy, and a good school should manage the environment in which students learn. But it often goes further than that. Most Apple purchasers will never visit an Apple store, but if they do, they are probably not surprised that it is a different shopping, or technical support experience from the normal. It all comes down to setting the expectation high - “promise big and deliver bigger seems to be the only reliable strategy“.

Image credit: Esti Alvarez

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