I’ve never owned an Apple product*.

I don’t normally just tell people that – I don’t think it’s a particularly cool or interesting detail about myself. But a recent visit to the Samsung Galaxy store in Tokyo’s Harajuku made me realise why that’s the case. And it has nothing to do with brand preference (full transparency – I do currently have a Samsung smartphone).

It’s about the moment that you convince the customer to do something – try your product, follow your brand, enter your store, trust your recommendation. Ultimately, to buy.

And the Tokyo Galaxy store has one of the best convincer moments I’ve come across. It works because it’s an actual example of experience-first experiential retail. By that I mean you want to take part in the experience and the product is the means of access.

Experiences customers would pay for

See, the third floor is home to a criminally underadvertised collaboration with teamLab, an international art collective founded in Tokyo that’s known for its interactive digital art installations.

If you’ve never heard of it, know that visiting one of teamLab’s digital art experiences is one of the most recommended things to do when you visit Japan. You can’t avoid seeing the teamLab name if you do even a cursory search for recommendations of things to do in Tokyo.

People pay money to visit teamLab experiences. They queue for them. They post about them on social media.

Samsung charges nothing for the one in its store.

When I visited they were running a version of a teamLab experience that’s in Fukuoka and has just been added to the expanded teamLab Planets space in Tokyo. Based on the concept of Catch, Study, Release, you use a smartphone to ‘catch’ different digital animals, unlock information about them, and then ‘release’ them again.

Staff give you a Samsung phone pre-loaded with everything you need to interact with the exhibit and then you can spend as long as you want in the space.

It’s a brilliantly conceived bit of experiential theatre that does exactly what Samsung needs it to – it puts its product in a potential customer’s hands.

During the experience, the visitor gets a sense of how Samsung’s phone feels in their hand – the size and weight of it. They aren’t conscious of this, because they aren’t actively testing the product, but the seeds of what it might be like to own that product are burrowing into their brain somewhere. 

And in Japan, where Apple absolutely dominates the smartphone market, Samsung needs to find ways to convince people to give its products a go. Just laying them out on a table and asking people to come in is not enough.

Now, I’m not saying that anyone walked out of the teamLab experience and bought a new Samsung phone there and then. It takes more to change hearts and minds than that.

What they did walk out with is a great memory. It’s something that they will tell their friends and family about. Samsung will send you some of your photos from the experience if you want, which means you can tell everyone about it online as well.

And everyone left with a touchpoint for a brand that they may never have considered interacting with before. Something that can be built on.

Too many experiences are for the brand not the customer

This is why I couldn’t help but think of Apple after I left the store. Because for all of its beautiful looking flagships around the world, Apple’s stores have never given me a good enough reason to put their products in my hands. 

To me, the brand’s stores are designed for those who are already in the Apple community or are visiting with a strong intention to buy. Even the Today sessions it runs in-store are aimed at people who have an Apple product and want to get more out of it.

This is good, valuable stuff. And given the traffic Apple stores get, it’d be fair for you to say that Apple doesn’t care whether I visit or if I use its products or not. 

Except, that if brands continue to focus on growth above all else, then Apple does need new customers like me. There’s a whole ecosystem of products they could sell to me – if they could convince me to give them a go.

This is why I think a lot of experiential retail spaces end up as demo stands or advertising screens that customers don’t care about. Because they’re built on the idea that the customer wants to interact with the product. That they have enough curiosity or interest to walk into the store in the first place, let alone engage with an experience that is largely a vehicle for showing off a product or feature. An experience that is for the brand rather than the customer.

For some brands that’s true. Customers may already be convinced by what they’ve seen online, influencers, advertising, trying out a friend’s product. But many overestimate how invested customers are when developing experiences in stores.

You can see this in the Galaxy store as well. Lots of ‘soft’ experiential elements built around features – some of it fairly well done, some less so.

Like using several floors for interactive pop-up collaborations with popular pillars of Japanese culture, such as Hello Kitty, One Piece and J-Pop bands. These looked great but no one other than me was visiting them (maybe because I was there on a weekday).

To counter this, the staff give you a little stamp card when you first enter the store and if you engage with the activities on every floor and get a stamp for each you get to have a go at the in-store capsule machine.

The prizes are low budget and low stakes, but it’s a nice little idea to encourage visitors to visit the entire space. Only that still didn’t convince everyone to go to all seven floors. 

But then you also have an in-store experience that genuinely entertains the customer, that they would pay money for, and that they just happen to access through the product. And guess what – that’s where all the in-store traffic was.

That’s the convincer.

*It’s possible I’m a unicorn.