This article originally published in Self-Service World magazine, March 2007.
I just did something that never fails to make retailers happy: I bought something.The video game console I bought is tangential to the real story. The real story is that the point-of-decision is the only place a company can effectively reach today's younger buyers.
The protagonist in the story (yeah, me) is a representative of a demographic increasingly distanced from traditional media. In my case, I watch TV shows only on DVD and don't have cable, except cable Internet. I get all my daily news from the Web and I rarely check my mail because all my important correspondence comes to my Inbox.
I also have learned the hard way, many times, never to trust a kid in a golf shirt when it comes to buying anything worthwhile. Ever.
Most of this story unfolds on the Internet where for months I spent evenings and weekends Googling tech specs and product reviews. When I'd narrowed my search, I set about playing with kiosks as I visited retailers.
Though I originally wanted a new computer, a ton of online research changed my mind. So, in the stores, I walked right by the computer aisle and on to the gaming section.
The Wii demo kiosk actually turned me against buying a Wii. I was leaning heavily toward buying one, but at the kiosk I couldn't try the motion-sensing controller for myself, and the kiosk only ran a static video of a school marm, hands in front of her, calmly explaining the benefits of a Wii while it cut back and forth to faceless graphical bubble men playing tennis.
I'm not paying $250 for mom-friendly Pong with pixel shading.
So that narrowed it down to an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. The PS3 soon was ruled out by a scathing review in the New York Times (which I read online). At this point I was beginning to think again about gaming PCs — until I came to the Xbox 360 kiosk.
In case you ever wonder, having a screen high atop a kiosk really does work. At first I didn't even play the demo. I watched the screen while a teenage girl and her little brother played "Madden '07." When they stepped off, I started thumbing through the menus and played a few demos while a middle-aged woman stood behind me and watched the screen just as I had.
And that did it. The controller, the console, the kiosk and the graphical user interface created an experience that met or exceeded all my expectations. Also, the environment was right. The kiosk caught me in a happy mood, and it caught me in an emotive atmosphere. Even better, nobody was standing there trying to sell me something.
In all, it was a textbook example of a retail store using self-service in an energized environment to impact a hard-to-reach consumer at the point-of-decision. But it leaves one crucial question unanswered: Which first-person shooter should I buy?
