Retail design; a brand game-changer.

Commical – Episode title: Retail design; a brand game-changer.

Published 03/03/2021 on Chasing Albert website, spotify and apple podcasts.

Marie 00:00
A business's physical environment can have a profound impact on brand, sales, customers and staff - even on the community - as my guest Jason Pollard explains. Jason is one of the leading service retail design minds in the Asia Pacific and co-founder of the multi-award-winning Public Design Group. He's an intelligent, considered man who works firmly from his values and has attracted like-minded clients from blue-chip brands, so naturally he is the perfect person to talk to about authentic, purpose-driven environmental design. Oprah, Steve Jobs, Andrew Denton - to me, these guys are masters of communication. The rest of us, well, mainly you, because I'm a pro, fumble our way through. Commical examines this funny little thing called communication that can either tear us down or make us soar. Join me. I'm an amateur comedian and a communication expert. Join me and listen, learn and laugh through the experiences of my very talented guests. Jason, thank you so much for coming on.

Guest 00:00
You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Marie 00:00
It's been a very long time since we've last spoken, and you've been killing it.

Guest 01:14
Well, that's very kind of you to say so.

Marie 01:16
There we go, Mr Humble. Jason, you've been doing amazing work with Bendigo Bank and Flower Power and a whole range of iconic brands.

Guest 01:27
Yes, well, I suppose if you spend long enough in the game, it's a bit like throwing the dice enough times. One day you're going to throw a six. I mean, we've been very lucky.

Marie 01:36
You're also very, very talented and have done some amazing work.

Guest 01:36
Thank you.

Marie 01:36
Is it just retail design? What is it specifically that Public Design Group does?

Guest 01:46
Well, it's actually even narrower than retail design. We've kind of specialised in service retail, which means we wouldn't really know how to design a fashion store or a restaurant or a bar. Even though we have, it's not our specialty. We're far more about service retailers - so telco, banking, even automotive to a point. The reason for that is that there's a very complex layer of intangibles involved, and also staff, and that whole relationship between the people - the human piece of the experience. So that's where we've really specialised: understanding how to build trust and how to get that whole brand relationship delivered through people when you're selling something that essentially isn't a physical object.

Marie 02:32
And your specialty is in the actual physical environment in which this transaction occurs, right?

Guest 02:32
Yeah. Well, exactly, yeah.

Marie 02:32
So what is it that people - take the brand out of it for a second - Public Design Group, you're thinking about the public here and what they want, right?

Guest 02:32
Well, that was why we named it that.

Marie 02:32
See how I very quickly decoded genius?

Guest 02:55
Very impressed. You'd be amazed how many people don't get it. I need a little explainer underneath it.

Marie 03:04
I can't wait to tell my husband, 'I told you I was smart.' I said to him, 'Have you listened to my podcast yet?' because he walked in last night laughing with headphones on. I said, 'Are you listening to my podcast?' and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, 'Are you John Cleese?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Are you Conan O'Brien?' and I said, 'No.' He said, 'Then you need to wait your turn.' He'll get there. This could be the one. So, what is it that people want from the retail environment?

Guest 03:36
Well, my first answer to that would be puppies. Puppies. Puppies. Okay, there's a reason why I say that, but the official answer is - and there has been heaps of research done recently - there are probably four main elements that shoppers are looking for. They want it to be experiential. They want it to be personalised and localised. And increasingly they want it to be authentic. When I say increasingly, I'm talking about brands looking at the future of their businesses and how they can relate to the millennial audience. Millennials are unequivocally focused on brands that have an authentic meaning and a purpose behind them. So more and more brands are asking, 'How do the next 10 years look based on that?' The reason I say puppies is because we did a flagship store for Optus in George Street a couple of years ago, and the client at the time, who was aiming the whole project at millennials, did this huge piece of research and came back and said, 'I found out what they want.' We were expecting a three-page report or something, and he said, 'They all want puppies.' I said, 'What the hell are you talking about?' And he said, 'I told them not to have any parameters or inhibitions. What would you love to see in the middle of the store?' And 60% of them said puppies. So there you go. That's what people really want.

Marie 05:10
That reminds me of that famous quote. Was it Henry Ford who said, 'If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses'?

Guest 05:17
Yeah, exactly. He did say that. You're right.

Marie 05:21
Was it him? Disclaimer, disclaimer - please fact-check before you post about that.

Guest 05:29
Actually, that's exactly right. A lot of people talk about research and say research should start by asking customers what they want, and that's absolutely not what it is. In terms of what result do you want, it's actually: what needs do you have, and how can we think of a more appropriate way of addressing those needs? You never ask them what the solution is, otherwise you end up with stuff getting designed that's just nonsensical.

Marie 05:52
You'd be going in to get a mobile phone contract and come out with a Dachshund.

Guest 05:57
Well, exactly, yes.

Marie 05:59
So what is it that staff want from the environment in which they work? And does what they want even matter?

Guest 06:04
That's a really good question. That's an underhanded question as well, because I know exactly the point you're making there. But yeah, look, of course it does. Over and above things like nice lighting and warmth and security and all that kind of thing, what they really want is to be part of an organisation that has a purpose they can relate to. That whole shared common purpose thing is what matters. And this is not just about retail. This is about staff working anywhere, really, whether it's this or a shop or whatever. If, through the experience that you're giving shoppers, you can demonstrate purpose in the brand, that is by far and away the most profoundly motivating and effective way of keeping staff retained within an organisation.

Marie 06:04
Wow.

Guest 06:04
So yes, of course they need good salaries at market rates and all that kind of stuff - all the normal hygiene factors - but really, over and above anything else, the thing that gets them engaged is being shown a clear path forward, being shown that they themselves personally make a difference, and having that shared common purpose.

Marie 07:11
But how the hell do you even do that in a physical environment? You've got your work cut out for you, right?

Guest 07:18
Oh look, for sure. And we don't just do it for staff, we do it for customers as well. The whole evolution of our category over the last five years is this: traditionally, people would come to an interior designer or retail design company and say, 'Can you please design an environment or an experience that reflects our brand?' So when the designer sits down, the references they have are the logo and the brand kit of parts - the colours, the tone of voice, the personality, the photography style - and they think, 'These are my instruments for designing the store.' So they create this branded environment. It's basically a box that looks and feels like a three-dimensional version of the corporate identity. Now what we have is a very different thing. We have retailers who are deliberately making every one of their stores different. If you look at Harris Farm Markets here in Australia, for example, and Bendigo Bank, or Bailey Nelson, the optical retailer, or even Aesop, the health and beauty brand, all of their stores look very, very different, but they have a common theme that runs through them. And that theme is very much integrated to the purpose of the brand. What that means is that customers are actually connecting with that brand on an emotive level because they're thinking differently about it, rather than it just being about recognition. It's not just that cognitive thing of, 'Yes, I'm in the right place because there's the logo and there's the ad I saw on the telly in the window,' which is what it used to be. Now it's far more about, 'Why would I choose this bank, or this optical retailer, or this supermarket versus the others who have very similar products?' We're in that tight space now where the difference between a good brand and a great brand is the ones breaking away from the traditional way of designing and creating this new narrative, which is very much about what that brand means to me in my life and how it can make things better for me. What journey am I going on, and what shared purpose can I see in this brand that makes me feel good about it?

Marie 09:29
I was reading about the work you did with Bendigo Bank in Leichhardt, and I remember reading that part of what you guys did was introduce this concept of the LEO - the local engagement officer.

Guest 09:29
That's right.

Marie 09:29
And I remember thinking, far out, this is really out there, because that's not something you would normally hear of, particularly with a complete redevelopment of a local bank. Can you talk us through the process, using Bendigo Bank as an example?

Guest 09:59
So basically, we have these types of conversations with most of our clients these days. We don't talk about designing a shop. We talk about the experience. How are people going to have a completely new way of thinking about you, and how can we reinvent your category so you can be a pioneer in a very different way of doing things? The built environment is just one component of what we do. We also look at how the business can realign around this new model. We look at how marketing and brand and all the other components of that business can join in the singular journey to move in a direction that's more relevant to the future of the category and the future of customers. So invariably we end up talking a lot about staff, staff roles and the human side of the experience. There's physical, human and digital, and all three of those elements have to be aligned. They all have to be singing off the same hymn sheet of what that purpose is. So when you look at a bank like Bendigo Bank and you look at what most people in that bank are trained to do, they're trained to be bankers, whether they're tellers or loan experts. Each one of their environments is full of people like that. And we come along and say, actually, as a community brand, you need to be demonstrating your purpose, not talking about it or making promises about it. In fact, the first thing we told them to do was burn all of their posters, because that's just talking. What we need to do is demonstrate, and we do that most effectively through people. But your people are not community-driven people. They're bankers. Primarily they're bankers who work for this sort of brand that talks about community, but it doesn't really make it meaningful to them in their day-to-day roles. Sure enough, every single time we came across someone who we thought we could retrain, they couldn't do it. We needed somebody who was deliberately not a banker and who didn't have a sales imperative as the most important thing in their mind. So we said, what you need to do is get somebody out there on the streets talking to all the local businesses about how they can use our space - this community space that we created - in order to further their own business. One of the things the LEO does in Leichhardt is a Saturday morning thing where there's an outdoor green patch of grass in the middle of the branch. She'll go to the local primary schools and bring them in with their parents. She'll go to the local bookshop and get books on loan, and she'll go to the local performing arts school and get first-year students to come and read those books to pupils from these schools. They have this event called Jackanory - taken from the old English TV program - and the kids absolutely love it because they're being read stories by performing artists.

Marie 09:59
That is so cool.

Guest 09:59
At the end of the day, you're talking to three schools, one performing arts school and a bookshop. They're all businesses. They all need bank accounts. They're currently all banking with other banks. But at some point along the way, those conversations that we've now started with those potential customers have started along a very, very different theme to banking products. They're actually building trust in a far broader context to do with community integration. It's a slow-burn way of pulling customers into your brand idea before you've earned permission to talk to them about their banking needs, and it's proven to be outrageously successful.

Marie 13:27
How can you define if it's successful? Don't we have to wait 10 years and see if this bank starts to make a shitload more money?

Guest 13:33
That's a great question. So the first branch that we did in Norwood, in Adelaide, there was a 75% increase in foot traffic, and there was a sustained increase in high-value sales. The most that we'd ever got from a bank before that was about 18 or 19%.

Marie 13:53
Wow, that's insane. The question I want to ask you is: did you have to calm the client down with the idea of perhaps throwing flyers at people and selling to the mums that are there on that Saturday morning immediately?

Guest 14:09
It was a big transition for the bank. These people had been doing the same thing for decades, and the reason it was successful is because the thinking and the strategy were based on conversations that took place at a very high level in the bank as an overarching approach. One of the manifestations of that came through to the way staff protocols had to be adjusted, roles had to be adjusted, positions had to be integrated - all kinds of stuff. So there was a really sound reasoning and understanding as to why everything needed to be tweaked in the new direction. Basically, if the staff weren't on board, they got relocated to another branch. It is funny: when we push the boat out quite far - not just with the bank but with a lot of clients - this is always a sticking point. When you go to a staff team and say we're going to do things very differently now, if you don't have a really, really good reason and a robust narrative to demonstrate why they should be doing that, they're never going to do it. But the integrity of the thinking comes from a new strategic direction, and their role in delivering that is typically very clear by the time it gets to that point. So yes, it was fun, and it was challenging, but it works. It works because this new role, as we said, is not a sales role; it's an integration role to do with community.

Marie 15:34
So is this something they'll roll out at other branches?

Guest 15:38
Yeah, they are. We've done five of them now, and last November-December we opened their flagship branch in the middle of their own town in Bendigo, which is like, my goodness, you've got to know you're doing the right thing if you put it on your own doorstep. That's a really clear indication that they're happy with it. We've also done a slightly dumbed-down, more cost-effective version of the whole thing, where we've picked elements of it and they've gone into more remote locations. At the end of the day, that model has to work as well. It can't just be a poor cousin of it. Making judgments as to which elements stand up on their own to tell some of the story, but not all of the story, is just as critical. There's a whole tier at the top which we're calling the innovation sites, which work as hubs. So you might have one, and then you might have five or six grade-two sites that are actually working with it as a hub.

Marie 16:32
What impact does the local community have on the way the branch is designed? So you've got a model for it now that you've got approval from the top. Does that model shift based on the community in which the branch sits?

Guest 16:49
Great question, and yes, it does, absolutely. Traditionally, like a lot of brands, a lot of banks and a lot of retailers look at segmentation in terms of customer type. They look at demographics, they look at geography, they come up with personas and say, 'This is Julie James and she's a 43-year-old mum with two kids, and let's have a look at her needs.' They do the whole empathy mapping and all that kind of stuff. The way we now look at segmentation in terms of the bank is: where is this community in its cycle? So if you take somewhere like Leichhardt, 10 years ago it was a bustling, hugely cultural, beautiful Italian place where everyone wanted to be. It had a bustling nightlife. It had this very strong Italian flavour running through it. And now all of that's disintegrated because of the lockout laws. So all the great restaurants and bars are shut, there's a huge influx of people coming to the area, the old guard have become very disenfranchised with it, and it's quite fragmented. Most of the retailers there are really struggling. So we go in as a bank and say, we're not going to be the silver bullet. We're not the knight in shining armour. But there must be some people in this community who are already trying to fix this problem, so we go and look for them. We find them, and it turns out one's the local publican who's a local hero, another one's the mayor, another one's the principal of the performing arts school. And we say, what are you guys doing, and how can we help? How can our brand and our role and our space help you achieve what you're trying to achieve? So it's never a self-gratifying exercise. It always has a level of integrity to understand how we can help that community if it needs help. Whereas Norwood in Adelaide, on the other hand, is an upper-middle demographic community that has absolutely no concerns whatsoever. Everyone wants to live there. House prices are through the roof. Businesses are going great. So we didn't need to do that. That was a very different equation, where we were talking to the local girls' grammar schools and saying, 'Would your choir like to come and practise in our space on a Friday night? We're going to open all the doors and windows, and people on the street are going to walk past and hear the most beautiful music.' And they said, 'Yes please, we'd love to do that.' We've had some stunning results from both branches, actually, but the way we look at how we're going to do it is nothing to do with the wealth of the people who live there. It's to do with the community spirit and where it is in its cycle, because invariably communities are cyclical.

Marie 19:14
You talk like this about Bendigo Bank and it makes me want to work there. But I can see that purpose. I can see exactly what you mean when you talk about bringing purpose to the actual environment. You as a banker are still doing the exact same job, you're going to the exact same place, but all of a sudden your working experience is richer, and you feel much prouder of what it is that you're doing, and you feel connected to your community. It's actually really beautiful.

Guest 19:44
I mean, even with us - we've been doing this for 17 years now - and most of the clients we work with sell products or services and it's a transaction. Yeah, there's customer loyalty involved and all that kind of stuff, but for us it's been quite transactional in terms of our relationships with customers over the years. They've been good; most of my clients are good friends now. But the purpose side of working for Bendigo actually gets you out of bed in the morning with a spring in your step. We've actually got small fledgling retailers in every single one of these innovation sites - in fact, in every single branch - who are selling their product from the front of the branch. Because of the high foot traffic, they're getting great exposure and the leg-up they need to go to the next stage. They don't have to bank with the bank. They don't pay any fees to the bank for doing this. This is just the bank's way of demonstrating that it is supporting the community by backing the small-to-medium enterprise businesses in town, and it's been hugely successful for them. We get feedback from these retailers saying, 'This is awesome. Thanks ever so much. Couldn't have done it without you. Had the best Christmas ever.' That makes us feel great.

Marie 20:49
That's amazing. Yeah, well done. Well, you guys are the best. I'm not biased at all.

Guest 20:54
We're not the best by a long shot. There are some really good operators in our industry right here in Sydney, and if we're in the top 10, that would be a wonderful thing.

Marie 21:05
Take the compliment. I'm going to edit out all that nice stuff you just said about your competitors. It's going. Take the compliment.

Guest 21:14
Far and away the best there's ever been, actually. People just want to be us. Get in the queue. I haven't got time anymore. Is this over? Right, next.

Marie 21:26
See how long you come on a podcast for half an hour and all of a sudden the headphones can't fit on your head anymore. How do you know when it's time - or how does a company know when it's time - for an exercise like this?

Guest 21:38
So going back to the analogy of the bank, if you were to look at the four major banks, they don't really have any ideas. They have a colour and they have a strapline that changes every six months depending on who the marketing director is. They've got nothing that defines them. And they've also got this remarkable kind of gridlock thing where the four major banks are only ever going to be the four major banks. The competition rules around them are ridiculous in terms of acquisition rights and all that kind of stuff. So you're always going to have challenger banks and other players trying to nibble away at the fragments of space in between. If you imagine a square inside a circle, the only opportunity in the world of banking is in the bits of the circle that don't touch the sides of the square. That's where Bendigo Bank plays. And as a challenger brand, they have to innovate all the time in order to be seen as a viable option to the major four. The major four get a huge advantage in terms of buying power, so the challengers are never going to be able to compete on price. What they can compete on is all these other things we've been talking about. Eventually, when the major four piss somebody off, they're going to say, 'Okay, I've had enough of that. Who else is there? We'll look at Bank Australia - they've got a fantastic idea. Or look at Bendigo Bank - they've got a great idea as well.' And that's the point. That's what we're doing. We find that working with challenger brands in general - not just banks, but everything from telco to auto to the rest of it - the smaller players are not only primed to innovate, but they're more empowered. They've got smaller teams. At the end of the day, those businesses are not full of people who want to kill each other, whereas all the top-tier players are exactly that. They're really toxic environments. I mean, dealing with the big telcos here in Australia is one of the most absurd things. Honestly, I've seen things happen in meeting rooms that you wouldn't dream of. It would make working with Gordon Ramsay seem angelic. These are real people who behave like this.

Marie 23:41
Dealing with any government organisation is the same, and I always laugh when there's a message that says - one of the first messages you hear when you're on hold is - 'We will not tolerate abuse.' Now, if that's the first message you're sharing with your customer, you've got to think: what are you doing to make your customers so angry in the first place?

Guest 23:59
We actually walked away from our two highest-yielding clients about three years ago, and they're actually part of the same organisation. One owns the other one. Within the space of about three months we'd walked away from both of them.

Marie 23:59
Wow.

Guest 23:59
Our business took a dive for about six months, and then we came back and we're now better than we've ever been. And our mandate - I mean, I'm 51, for God's sake - I don't need the hassle of working with assholes. I just don't need it. All of our clients now are good people and nice people, and there's nothing wrong with being nice in business.

Marie 24:32
Oh, it's everything. And you know what? It comes back to that idea of purpose. We know that, yes, it's an attractive proposition for customers looking for something beyond that toxic, horrible experience of working with some of the other bigger brands, right? It's the same when you're recruiting employees. So you'd look at an environment like Bendigo Bank versus something that's just grey and yellow and transactional. You know where they're going to choose to work.

Guest 25:03
Yeah, no, for sure. Absolutely. It's really interesting.

Marie 25:06
What about from an office perspective? A lot of people that I work with and that listen are not in a retail environment - or retail service environment - necessarily, although I will be sending this podcast to the service manager at Mercedes, who pissed me off last week. Listen to this, Sebastian. Learn something. But what if you were working in an office environment? Does that office environment have the same kind of impact? Does the same kind of thinking apply?

Guest 25:34
Oh yeah, of course it does. It absolutely does. It has to. What's really interesting about the office environment for me is that when you talk about office environment as part of a corporate brand, the thing we're going through at the moment is this: when you look at COVID and the way people have been working from home for about a year, other than the normal distractions like dogs and babies, the main disadvantage of that - other than loneliness - is this need to be part of a team with a common purpose. That common purpose, and Karl does this brilliantly, he unravels what that is - that common purpose and reputation and the way we behave and the way it's all aligned - and he creates environments with really good designers that make the people who go to work there feel, without having to read words on the wall and without having to be told what to do, that they belong somewhere and that they as individuals and as a team can see that journey ahead of them. It's a real skill, and it's something we'd love to get into one day, but at this point in time there are some players out there who do it beautifully. Imagine that whole sequence of getting up in the morning, feeling good about your job, getting to work, interacting with people, having a brilliant day, and then leaving and just thinking, you know - most of that is orchestrated around the environment and the way people interact, and the science of that, the science of human exchange, dealing with it in an environment where there's a hierarchy of order, where you've got to have people in offices, you've got to have certain spaces and certain ways for more senior people to have privacy. But it's a real skill. The interesting thing for us is that we have a creative studio in Pyrmont, and what we don't have is that common purpose from a brand-company perspective because there are 19 different creative agencies that work in here. What we do have is a common understanding that the space belongs to everybody in it. Equally so, the whole senior management, the directors - one of which is here talking to you now - we don't say, 'This is our business and we're going to sit here...' No. We are on a totally equal playing field with everybody else, and we demonstrate the way that we want people to behave by leading from example. It works beautifully. People go to the pub together, we do all this kind of stuff. There's no sort of, 'Oh, do you mind if I do this?' People feel at home here. If you set it up in the right way, it works really, really well.

Marie 28:08
So you work with some of the most amazing brands. So is this an activity that's mainly for rich companies?

Guest 28:08
Yeah, it is.

Marie 28:08
That's disappointing. I'm joking. What about for those poorer companies who record podcasts amongst the laundry?

Guest 28:26
No, I'm being facetious. It's probably not for rich companies, particularly if you look at the way certain categories work here. Not wanting to get boring, but going back to the banks again, the four majors won't ever step outside their comfort zone. They don't need to. They don't have to. There's no motivation to. Whereas - and it's probably the same with telcos as well - when you talk about rich we're talking about a very different thing to financial. We're talking about companies whose senior management have evolved as human beings and that they see the value in creating customer experience that is genuine and authentic and progressive. It's not just cookie-cutter, formulaic, numbers-driven, cost-cutting, squeezing staff down to the bare minimum and saying, 'Yep, we've got it on the spreadsheet, it works, and the colour's right, and therefore I've done my job. Hallelujah.' We personally deal with some incredibly visionary people who haven't come from business; they've come from all walks of life and are now leading organisations through cultural change, which manifests itself not only in head office but also through their retail outlets. That's truly exciting. Really exciting.

Marie 29:42
That's amazing. You're in a really exciting space. But surely even these people must also be expecting a return, so they're doing it - yes, they're visionary and it's a great thing to do - but they're also smart business people and they know that through doing this there is a return. It just comes later. So what kind of returns can an organisation expect if this is done well?

Guest 30:06
One of the barometers of whether or not it's working - which is a really clear barometer - is whether or not the client stays with you and says, 'We really enjoyed that process. It's going well. We now want to do a few more.' And a few more turns into a few more, and a few more, and a few more. You end up doing the entire network. That's a clear indication that the revenue generated from the first few stores is funding the redevelopment of the other stores, or the new stores, if they were a fledgling business that is growing. We see stuff done by our competitors all the time that's absolutely stunning, and you only see it once because, as beautiful as it was, it was unsustainable. Typically that's because their environmental piece has been done brilliantly, but they haven't been concerned with the human piece or the digital piece because they don't do that - somebody else does that. It's so depressing when you see it because there are some designers out there who do stunning work, and yet the model doesn't work, and I can see where it doesn't work. It's like, if only they had gone down this in a more structured and disciplined way of integrating all parts of the business, it would have been right. So yeah, I think when you talk about returns, I'd say if you're going to do it, do it properly. Do it so the entire business is integrated around it. You can't have a retail organisation that looks at shops as a separate channel to the whole business. It has to be part of everybody's thinking: how does that customer or shopper interact with your brand through that channel, and how does the sensibility of what you're doing there affect everyone throughout the business? That's the only way it can work.

Marie 31:43
Jason, I really enjoyed that chat. Thank you so much. I've learned a lot.

Guest 31:48
Thank you so much. It's nice - now I can hear you properly again. Thanks for having me on, Marie. It's been awesome. And you, too, have worked with some wonderful people who I admire and who we also work with. I think a lot of it's to do with being collaborative. My scope as a designer has branched out into a few other areas, but I never have the hubris to say, 'Yeah, we do that, yeah, we do that, yeah, we do that,' because you just get into trouble. But along the way we've picked up some incredible partners who have enabled us to penetrate different parts of the realm of retail design and business, and that's taken us on some really cool journeys. So yeah, look, it's been a ride. I've really enjoyed it.

Marie 32:30
Amazing. Thank you so much.

Marie 32:37
And that's Commical for this week. If you'd like to join the show, suggest a topic or ask me a question, hit me up on Instagram at @marieeldaghl, or email me at commicalpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening. See you.