Virtually out of the Game
So Game have announced that they are ready to take bookings for customers to have a go on the new Playstation virtual reality headset. A £349, desirable, affordable and accessible entry point into consumer VR.
But there’s a catch. Game are asking customers to pay £5 for the privilege of a ten minute session on the kit in-store.
As a retailer I find this act of staggeringly clumsy foot blasting genuinely depressing; it’s as if Game’s management team have awoken from a coma and think they are in 1992; as doctors mill around them quietly whispering to trade relatives ‘For godsake; don’t mention the Internet or athleisure’.
It is a decision that is amongst the worst I’ve seen in modern retailing; it is the direct equivalent of saying to a potential diner in a restaurant ‘you’re welcome to eat with us but the cutlery and plates are stored in an explosive vault buried deep in the bowels of hell. Protected by many fiendish layers of puzzles and traps, each more devious than the last; you will have to face your most base fears before returning to enjoy your dinner.’
And the customers’ response? ‘Nah mate, sod that, I’m going to a restaurant that isn’t run by a lunatic thanks.’
Modern retail is completely predicated on a fine balance of reducing purchase friction and increasing shopping reward. One of the major sources of that reward in physical retailing is the opportunity to put product in the hands, hearts, heads and minds of possible customers. But put friction barriers in front of that reward and customers will simply flow around it, bypassing the clunky old school retailer.
We’ve heard direct reports of embarrassed Game assistants explaining to customers that the charge is because of one thing or another; among these are:
Sony told us to do it (unlikely)
Because demonstrating it means a staff member will be tied up, which costs money (tied up in generating massive buzz for the store, OH NO!)
We might get too busy (heaven forfend such a problem)
Sony haven’t supported our launch (if true, then Sony deserve the same opprobrium but Game still have to get on and suck that up)
And my absolute favourite: the cost of the wipes to sanitize the headset after each use is too high (insane)
I am simply staggered by this one; a retailer has a potentially massively lucrative new category to sell, an attractive and accessible product within it to launch and up goes a gigantic slice of purchase friction. Thing is, I do understand where the idea to charge has come from, I get the pressures and logic that sit behind it. But equally it feels like one of the final sickly farts of a dying old school irrelevance. Game; you could be so much more than this but you have to make it both incredibly easy to shop your stores (by being low friction) and give customers real reasons to come into them (by being high reward). But maybe your set-up just cannot accommodate this sort of modern thinking?
