Sometimes, just breaking the rules can become the only way to succeed. As Kishore Biyani, CEO of a rapidly evolving retail company of the Indies, explains*: in a company someone should retain the Kama (creative spirit) and Yama (control) in balance for the sake of a positive retail experience. Furthermore, someone has to pay attention to the key cultural characteristics and subsequently the visual preferences that are shared by human societies.
Kishore Biyani narrates, that he had a strange experience when he decided to set his stores appropriately, according to the visual standards we found in supermarkets and grocery stores of the Western world. Once he tried to mimic the appearance of them, meaning those ones with the bright lights, the well organized corridors and clean shelves, all he finally achieved was to make the whole buying experience look sterile.
The worst possible scenario came true, as he unfortunately realised, that while consumers could walk easily through the aisles, then they used to immediately move towards the exit. That was the time he decided to throw convention out of the window, and made some tough decisions based in the awareness of cultural differences.
He decided to interrupt the ordinary series of shelves, to use irregular aisles and disarrange the product placement. He stopped selling polished apples and left fruit and vegetables on their soil. He finally came to the conclusion, that in his case all that customers wanted wasn’t a neat self, but the noise and the mess reminiscent of the quality and freshness of the producers’market.
*You can find the story and many others in that great book: Caspian Woods, Devil’s Advocate. The 100 Commandments You Must Break in Business, 2012
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