I had the chance of interviewing George Jones after his keynote and he was kind enough to share his thoughts on a variety of topics relating to what boils down to the motivations behind the design of the Borders customer experience. George’s media background as President, Worldwide Licensing and Retail for Warner Bros gives him a unique sense of thinking of the customer experience as entertainment and even as a film – a desirable sensibility when it comes to design of the retail experience.  George’s experience is deep – it goes well beyond Warner Bros (as in former President and CEO of Saks) and I believe the interview may give some non-retailers a glimpse into how a merchant thinks about our business. Things we covered included:

-How entertainment plays a part in the design of the Borders experience.
-Designing for the “technophobe” persona
-Disney, film, and the tune Borders wants to have customers whistling when they leave the store
-Comments on the idea that Borders competition is not just bookstores, it’s Lowes Theatre (a question that resonated with comments from Michael Eisner)
-What he learned from his relationship with Amazon and Jeff Bezos
-Thoughts on leadership relating to innovation
-Comments on their focus on offering travel and cooking experiences
-Comments on their digital business and a side bar on his feelings (very positive) towards Apple Stores

-The influence of Colette’s Paris on his store design
-Comments on he employs the time honored retail practice of “walking the mall” and where he gets ideas
-On how/why he hired someone from Victoria’s Secret to handle in-store visual design (“how you romance the customer”)
-On not defining personas and comments on their segmentation strategy
-Thoughts on Quant v. Qual research (my words)
-Why Bob Ulrich, former CEO at Target, was an inspiration

The interview is cut into 2 pieces due to my youtube account limitations – the audio is not bad and I plan on having a transcript posted later.  If you want me to post the digital audio let me know and I’ll make it available as a podcast.

Finally, I did experience L’esprit d’escalier “a French term used in English that describes the predicament of thinking of the right comeback too late” aka Treppenwitz, and I bet there are questions I totally missed – post them on youtube and hopefully my tagging won’t provoke ranting.