S60 Open to new features

The Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass is my favorite bookstore in the world. The staff is unassuming, the displays are eye-catching, it is cramped enough to always make me feel there is an urgency to the reading I've yet to do, yet open enough that I can find a place to hide and read a few pages in whatever book has caught my eye.

It was also the first "brick and mortar" store in which I ever encountered written testimonials from bookstore staff. Each week the "Select Seventy" displays the top-selling fiction and non-fiction books of the week. Every selection has a hand-written note underneath it, with a review from someone on the Harvard staff. The testimonials make each book that much more approachable. The idea, I'm guessing, came from the Amazon.com-style customer testimonials which we all read when shopping online.

In the past few years just about every shop has added some sort of employee testimonial. Our local ice-cream shop features hand written comments underneath each flavor of ice-cream. Starbucks, of course, features written descriptions of each flavor of coffee.

Consumer goods stores like "Staples" are now going one step further. In the past few months they've been adding not just employee, but *customer* testimonials to their in-store displays. The Wall Street Journal wrote about this recently ("New Marketing Style: Clicks and Mortar" Dec 27 2007) Apparently Staples goes so far as to add three "pros" and three "cons" from customers who have recently bought products and written to Staples to either praise or complain about their experience.

I see this blending of online and offline marketing as a logical evolution of strategy. The offline world is borrowing one of the most effective means of educating consumers from the online world: The customer testimonial.

As we roll out the S60 Ambassador program in the coming months we'll try to tap into a similar strategy: Spread what is being said online about mobile technology to the offline world.