Clasificación y valor

Place is not always a physical location. Not since the World Wide Web made Internet commerce and communication a reality. As many would-be dot-com entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, there is more to online success than simply opening up a portal, giving it a mem-orable name, buying a database, and lining up some products.

A successful e-organization must have a presence, a story, and a sense of the experience—and magic—it wants to create for the customer.

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Walk into the Godiva shop in Water Tower Place shopping center on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and you know you’ve entered a special space. With your first breath you inhale the rich, decadent smell of chocolate. The curved golden walls, art nouveau design, and elegant display of chocolates all work in concert to say, “Come in,” “Browse,”

“Take something home.” You know you aren’t just buying candy—you are experiencing Godiva.

Click to Godiva.com and you know you have entered an equally magical space. While the fragrance isn’t there—yet—the look, the feel, and the ambiance are just what you would expect of a site dedicated to the expensive, high-quality, melt-in-your-mouth, special occasion choco-lates and truffles that bear the Godiva name.

As important, the look and feel of Godiva.com reflect the look, feel, and ambiance of a brick-and-mortar Godiva boutique. Just as the phys-ical Godiva stores exude quality, taste, and a touch of indulgence, the Godiva Web site sends the same subliminal “Go ahead. You deserve it.”

message. It is exactly what we mean by imbuing a virtual place with a touch of magic.²

Distinctive and eye-catching design is only one part of the formula for creating a virtual place with magical properties. It is also about building trust and creating a unique service experience. There are thousands of mediocre Internet places, Web sites that do little more than offer a list of items for sale. The successful ones imbed themselves in shoppers’ memories by instilling an effortless feeling of being well served. From the first click, shoppers are drawn in, made curious, and delighted by the display of offerings. When every link works—and help is given if and when it’s needed—the experience is secured in trust.

Whether shoppers buy on the first visit or not, the visit is branded in their memories, and they will return to experience it again.

Lands’ End is another company that knows the importance of mak-ing every e-space touch point—the look and feel, the ambiance created, and the personal care provided—exude a little magic. Specialized tools, live access to customer service representatives, and multiple ways to browse and shop work in concert to convey LandsEnd.com’s dedication to customer service and desire to please the customer.³

Organizations like Lands’ End and Godiva design virtual places with distinction and magic. They take the time to evaluate their cus-tomers’ desires and present their goods and services memorably, reliably, and consistently. Shopping at these sites feels real to the consumer—

whether she’s a housewife in Utah or a purchasing manager for a Fortune 500 firm in Philadelphia. A well-branded site with a touch of

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magic attracts a loyal and profitable following that guarantees its online success and bottom-line performance.

The word “virtual” has come to be associated almost exclusively with the Internet. But there are other ways for the essence of reality to be im-bued in unsubstantial form. It is at the heart of literature and anima-tion. One of the most overlooked of virtual places is the humble mail order catalog. A good catalog displays and showcases desirable prod-ucts. A magical catalog enfolds the reader in a fantasy world woven around the products it displays and sells. Two of the best are the Vermont Country Store and Mary Jane’s Farm. Pick up either catalog and you are drawn into a world of country living, organic farming, and old fash-ioned country storekeeping. Indeed, the catalogs themselves are more magazine than catalog. Of the Vermont Country Store catalog, first pub-lished in 1945, the Saturday Evening Post wrote:

Some bright morning the mailman may hand you an un-usual and surprising kind of mail-order catalog. You may well mistake it for a New England Almanac of 1888. Its archaic title reads “The Voice of the Mountains” and it comes from the Village of Weston in the Republic of Vermont.

Printed in black and white and embellished with woodcuts, this old-fashioned pamphlet advertises products varying from Vermont Indian pudding and Bearpaw popcorn to a convert-ible rubber-tired buggy. And salted in between the salable items you’ll find bits of poetry, an editorial on “Getting Up Early in the Morning” or a fervent plea for cleaner mountain brooks.⁴ Those words were written in 1952, but the Vermont Country Store cat-alog still weaves its virtual magic web of old-fashioned cracker barrel nostalgia around its customers, many who have been loyal readers—and buyers—for two generations. The red-heel cotton work socks, cold-weather hand creams, flannel nightgowns, and bags of hard candies—

where else can you find a chocolate Brazil nut–stuffed trout called a Turkey Joint—they sell are unique and nostalgically reminiscent of an-other era.

Mary Jane’s Farm, 57 years younger and published half a continent away in Moscow, Idaho, enfolds customer/readers in a virtual world of organic farming and New Age, old-fashioned values so richly, they can almost smell the straw of the hen house and the back-country breakfast frittata cooking over an open fire. Founder Mary Jane Butters describes her mail order publication as “one part catalog and two parts

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zine.” The color photos of her cuisine are coupled with unique articles, interviews and tips, photocopies of reader letters, and nostalgic sepia-tone pictures of kids and cows. On one page is an article on how to make a camp stool, on another how to stack 39 bales of hay on a regu-lar pickup truck, and on yet another how to get really great customer service. The stories and letters interspersed among the ads elevate the buying process to the part–barter, part–banter ambiance of the 21st century version of the old country store—or a direct–from–the–grower transaction. You only see Mary Jane in the photographs, but a quick leaf through her “magalog” leaves you feeling you have found not just a merchant, but possibly a friend for life and a great source for organic trail mix.

Virtual Magic doesn’t just occur through the manipulation of a mouse or the thumbing of pages. Virtual Magic can be live and sponta-neous as well. QVC, the West Chester, Pennsylvania–based television shopping network creates an “intimate” and “personal” community of half a million members—viewers—each and every day of the week. The QVC shopping channel—the initials stand for Quality, Value, and Convenience—has fashioned a virtual mall that generates $4 billion in annual sales, and feels as homey and personal as a backyard fence rela-tionship among a group of friends. Truly an act of Virtual Magic.