Working to Make Shopping an Experience You Won’t Forget
Rocketing his Porsche to 70, Armando Trentini devours switchbacks, pounds over cobblestones and is bee-lining toward the water when the passenger to his right buckles. “That’s enough! Let me out!” She’s feeling queasy, she says.
Suave as a count, in polo shirt and good loafers, Trentini pulls over. He’s heard it before. It’s not, perhaps, the response most car salesmen hope for. But a touch of nausea is a fine thing at Houston’s Momentum Motor Cars, thought to be the nation’s only car dealership with its own miniature racetrack and a retired race car driver to command it.
The track may reflect one dealer’s vision or even Texans’ special love for big space and bright cars. But, it also seems to reflect a trend in millennial U.S. culture: Today’s consumers crave experience.
Car Customers Get Thrill of Racing
Inaugurated over the summer, Momentum’s three-quarter-mile track provides just that for as many as 15 prospective customers on workdays, 65 on Saturdays. And though the track is often used, as the dealer’s management says, to show off the stolid charms of Volvos, one look at the grinning passengers stumbling from the Boxsters and Beemers makes the track’s real purpose clear.
And part of the thrill is Trentini, who raced professionally in Europe for 20 years before moving here. “Putting a fellow in the car with you who is a bona fide world-class racing driver--to the average guy on the street, that’s a big deal,” says therapist Sam Stott, visiting Momentum to check out a Porsche. “I mean, duh, what’s everyone thinking in the back of their mind when they buy a Porsche? They’re thinking about racing, about what they thought of as a kid.”
“I was scared,” burbles Monica Patel, a first-year medical student who recently took a Momentum joy ride. “I just loved it.”
The thrill, Patel says, is what sold her. She knew she wanted a BMW when she came to the dealership. But when Trentini zipped her and the midnight blue car she was thinking of buying over cobbles and curves, she wanted her car from Momentum.
Starting with a long, swooping loop, the track coils into a tangle of switchbacks, detours onto bucolic cobblestones, changes to a sleek straightaway, then finishes with a “skid pad” sloshed by soapy water jets. As Momentum’s staff describes it, the $850,000 track simply shows off fine cars in a luxe environment. Performance car manager Mike Yale says the track seems to clinch deals--82% of the customers who go for spins, he said, end up buying cars.
On the other hand, even before the track, Momentum was already pretty successful, ranking among the top 10 sellers nationally of Porsches and BMWs. “Basically, we’re being competitive with other dealerships of this caliber,” explains Leonard Morris, Momentum’s silken-voiced “concierge.”
Voicing his wish to make a “visitor’s” stay as pleasant as possible, Morris glides through a lounge, where attendants brew cappuccino amid club chairs and chess sets; through a hushed, sterile service garage, swept relentlessly through the day; and, finally, to Momentum’s “roadside cafe,” complete with tiny tables and an observation deck. What’s all this about?
Businesses Offer a Bit of Real Life
It’s emblematic, experts say, of a response to changing economic and even emotional realities. “Consumers can buy cars at any number of places and get the exact same thing,” says Ohio-based consultant Joseph Pine, co-writer of the 1999 book “The Experience Economy.” “Or you can get on the Internet and buy it cheaper, probably.”
Real-life businesses, on the other hand, can offer, well, some life.
“As you get more and more selling on the Internet, I think the whole purchasing process is a little more dry, a little more purely rational,” says Randy Batsell, a Rice University marketing professor. “And anybody who’s able to make it a little less purely rational may have an edge.” To compete with the Internet and with each other, more and more companies are offering “experiences” that attract consumers as much as the product itself.
Car dealers elsewhere may not have racetracks, but they do have putting greens, dirt dunes for trying four-wheel drives and faux “mountain lodges” adorned with fireplaces and model planes. Theme restaurants such as Planet Hollywood and Rainforest Cafe serve up amusements to which the food is secondary. Those restaurants are drooping these days, says Pine, mainly because they failed to renew the experiences they first offered.
Closer to--well, technically over the cutting edge: Tel Aviv’s short-lived Cafe Ke’ilu, which translates as “Cafe Make-Believe.”
The restaurant owner believed that customers visit cafes to see and be seen. So Ke’ilu served bare plates and mugs, charging customers $3 during the week and $6 on weekends for the privilege of hobnobbing over empty china.
One of Pine’s picks for most surreal “experience” is at Jordan’s Furniture in Natick, Mass. An elaborate re-creation of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, the store is staffed with costumed salesmen offering carnival beads and baubles. Every half-hour the store erupts with a multimedia spectacle, with stilt-walkers and floats.
The home furnishings link? “None whatsoever,” Pine says.
But even Jordan’s falls short of the trend’s real apex: charging admission for the promotional experience itself. American Girl Place in Chicago hits that pinnacle. Purveyor of high-quality children’s dolls, the store charges $25 for an hourlong show and $16 for a cafe experience, including lunch and etiquette lessons.
Buyers Can Find Human Contact
Economically, it’s clear why stores started charging for their experiences: The activities got expensive, and with more money, retailers could make the experiences all the more fabulous. But the lure for consumers is complex. Shoppers have always loved novelty--there’s just more of it now, Batsell says. But Americans also are isolated, with fewer familial and communal contacts than in the past.
The chatter and drama of shopping become appealing sources of human contact.
And despite the accelerated speed of daily tasks, “we’re so time-starved,” Pine says. “We used to be responsible for our own experience--now, we will gladly pay someone to stage the experience for us,” whether it’s a children’s birthday party or the frisson of a ride ‘round a racetrack. So maybe it’s inevitable that when one part of human behavior, say, shopping, takes on a new role, say, life, participants’ roles get muddled too.
Take Armando Trentini. A 55-year-old native of northern Italy, he has a degree in art history and a family business selling the works of Old Masters.
Now, the former Le Mans endurance driver motors around a miniature track 45 times a day, in large part, he says, because it’s so entertaining.
Handling fine cars is a joy; and for a man like Trentini, the lure of high speeds never fades. But what really captivates him is the experience--a vicarious one. “I love it,” Trentini says, in a wry, buttery accent. “The most fun is to see the reaction from clients. I’ve had a couple who were sick.”
