7-Eleven, where brands and culture go to die
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Think back, way back, to the last time you were in a 7-Eleven. Recall the smell, the light, the products on the shelf, the linoleum under foot, the clerk behind the counter.
It’s as if everything that is bad and wrong in the ordinary world has assembled in a kind of jamboree of awfulness. When I used to frequent one in downtown Boston, I would shuffle around endlessly looking for something to eat. And I came to the conclusion that with the exception of a token apple or two, only artificial food is allowed in this place. If you ate here exclusively for a month (instead of at McDonald’s), there is no chance you would complete the assignment.
But it’s not just food that’s bad for you. Something about this very entropic place actually manages to wick away your knowledge of the world; what time it is, what season it is, what neighborhood, city, region you are in. And once the locational knowledge goes, it’s not long before basic identity info begins to go. Forget eating at 7-Eleven for a month. Try living there.
We are bat-like creatures, bouncing signals off the world to locate ourselves in this world. You can try this in 7-Eleven. But no signal returns. You are lost in a box lost in space.
So what happens to the brand in this box? But of course it withers and dies. It has been crafted by brilliant marketers. Millions have been spent to give it all but only the meanings that will make it resonant, interesting and vivid. But none of these meanings are robust enough to survive the 7-Eleven.
And what happens to culture in this box? Damaged beyond recognition. It has been crafted by the rest of us. And we what a thing we have accomplished. Talk about resonant, interesting, and vivid. That’s us. But even this is not robust enough to survive 7-Eleven. It is impoverished and hollowed out.
There have been two recent attempts to save the 7-Eleven. One was the Homer Simpson "endorsement." D’ho! I think this was a bad idea. (See my blog post below for the larger argument). More promising is the appointment of Rita Bargerhuff. Yes, she was the one who okayed the Simpson endorsement. And that tells us that she’s trying and that she knows the direction 7-Eleven must move: away from "convenience" (that concept that has underwritten so much bad design and experience) to something funny, playful, more responsive to the culture around it.
Who knows? Perhaps Bargerhuff will someday double as 7-Eleven’s CCO.
Reference
Hein, Kenneth. 2009. 7-Eleven Elevates Bargerhuff to CMO. BusinessWeek. November 18. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Homer Simpson and the 7-Eleven Endorsement debacle. This Blog. July 17. here.
15 Comments
December 29th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Your comments certainly reflect the American 7/11 experience, but is a long way off what you would experience in Japan – more fresh fruit, essentials, and a browsable magazine rack facing out of the store – designed so that people walking by are enticed in by the promise of human contact. Competition helps keep it fresh.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I have perverse love of the 7-ELEVEN experience in my part of the world.
To paraphrase Terrence McKenna who said in a podcast I listened to recently.
“Is the pinnacle of capitalism in the United States that we can buy a safety pin around the clock anywhere in the United States?”
Yet, despite my criticisms of the whole plastic wrapped, disposable society/culture/transhuman nature of the experience. There’s also something fluorescent-future, morbid-chic about it too.
Particularly so here in Asia where shops are often ‘brand’ new, and can stand for so much more than a micro coke (those small bottles that hit the spot aesthetically and proportionately), or a packet of fags or the array of nutrition free space candy. They can be an air con refuge creating a sense of order from the chaos outside, a refuge from the dimly lit, traffic jam beast of the polluted metropolis.
There’s something almost Zen like in a 4am 7-ELEVEN run. It feels like the ultimate scientific method breakdown in cost per gram, per cm, per minute – spread round the clock for an inconvenient truth.
If the future of consumption is to consume ourselves and our planet, aided by the impending-doom pressure of the quarterly report predicted earnings of 7-ELEVEN et al…..should we need an escape route trajectory to the cosmos to leaving a planet in cinders and sulphur…
Then somehow a 7-ELEVEN in space will be the first point of comfort while we strain to forget what nature ever looked like. If that’s the future, 7-ELEVEN is the first 21st century brand – It’s there already with the exception of a HAL computer perhaps.
But if it prefers Terra firma then it needs to claw something back from the past, that it probably never had in the first place.
..anyway. They make me think. A steady flow of internal and external contradictions. Which is interesting.
December 29th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Jan, perfect, America uses England for its TV product development. Japan would be a great laboratory for the retail experience. Thanks. Hoping you are off the road for a little while (loved your posts on managing the punishment for being in transit all the time. Hope our paths will cross in 10. G.
Charles, brilliant, better than the post. Hope we will see you state side soon. Let’s paint the town. Thanks, Grant
December 29th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Grant,
You’ve captured what I’ve felt for so long.
The notion that the 7-Eleven concept is that it’s a convenience store is more than just slightly wrong. For whom does this convenience work? The locations are, by airial photography based research, convenient. The hours extend typical retail and are, by logic, convenient. But all the things that could be the 7-Eleven’s alone – the store itself – are as you’ve described – other worldly. In my experience, the thing that nearly everyone is looking for is in the Dairy “department,” which is two refrigerated cabinets tucked into a far back corner. Convenient? Really?
I also checked into the link indicating that the new CMO (Bargerhoff) will lead initiatives that “… will enable 7-Eleven to achieve its objective of satisfying customer convenience…” Could there be an objective that is less aspirational than the mere satisfaction of an obvious preference for convenience; especially when the brands’ stores are actually designed to meet the convenience needs of the owner/operators?
BTW – In eastern Pennsylvania we have a competitive chain, the “Wawa” stores (run by the Wawa dairy company). They are better lit, have better coffee and the walk to the dairy isle is fairly straight-forward. 7-Eleven’s do poorly here. D’oh!
December 29th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
These places are quintessential machines for shopping–in order to be convenient, you don’t want people to linger, because that congests the store, makes it harder to detect shoplifters, etc. A convenience store should be usable but never too comfy. Your warm feelings about it come prospectively and retrospectively, knowing it is there for you and feeling good after it has solved your immediate problem of needing antacid at 3:00AM. (And remember the importance of cigs, cheap booze, and lottery tickets to their profit margins–these are not the sort of products where we’re looking for a showroom-type environment to shop.)
As for branding, the spartan-at-best aesthetics of these stores, if anything, puts a greater burden on the branding efforts of the manufacturers. The only in-store comfort you get is from seeing a familiar brand that promises a good experience. Everything may be under ugly lighting but by God the sight of a bottle of Coke in the refrigerator lightens the heart. In attractive and comfortable environments private labels and unknown brands have a better chance.
I hit my local 7-11 regularly, mostly for those small packages of Haagen-Dazs. We have a competing Extra Mile outlet diagonally across the intersection that also gets some of my business. We had a Famima store come in that tried to sell fresh food and look all pretty inside. It didn’t last a year.
December 30th, 2009 at 1:07 am
The biggest factor on me visiting a 7-eleven is walking distance. In high school I would walk past a 7-eleven on my way home, and stop by for snacks and such.
The 7-eleven across from my apartment in college I also visited often. It had those suspiciously well preserved sandwiches and sushi, along with fruit cups, apples oranges, milk, and necessities like toothpaste, motor oil, laundry detergent etc (all very small and expensive). (To be honest, I went more often for soda and caffeine).
And 7-elevens where my savior for the week I visited Japan. My friend tells the amusing story about whenever she asked for directions at any 7-eleven in Japan, the cashier would whip out a map and explain where to go using other 7-elevens as landmarks.
However, when I drive I never visit 7-elevens. For quick stops for unhealthy snacks or motor oil, I am far more likely to use the gas station when I stop for gas than make a separate trip to a 7-eleven, and for my late night needs I will drive to the bigger (and cheaper) Walgreens.
So for me, the problem isn’t the unhealthiness (that can change with the franchisee and location), but that 7-elevens are walking culture in a driving world.
Also, your post reminded me of Mary Minnick a remark in her 2006 interview. regarding some of the things she learned in Japan. They used their connection with 7-elevens for marketing data:
‘ Coke’s marketing team in Japan knew how to ride the trends, introducing as many as 100 new products a year, some with a life expectancy of just a few months. Thanks to constant data reports from 7-Eleven stores, “we knew within the first four weeks if we were going to be in trouble or not,” she recalls.’
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_32/b3996401.htm?chan=search
December 30th, 2009 at 4:38 am
For what it’s worth, the company which owns Japan’s 7-11 network has been a pioneer of automated real-time analysis of sales transaction data linked back to delivery logistics and suppliers. One result has been continuously-updated store-by-store diurnal profiles of sales, so that Marketing know precisely what products sell in what stores at what time of each day, with new stock deliveries adjusted accordingly and automatically every few hours. It’s certainly not the case, at least in Japan’s stores, that 7-11 stores display stuff which is not being bought.
December 30th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Paul, Peter,Steve and Rebecca , yes, “convenience” feels like a relic of another era of marketing, when the objective of same was to make life velvety and placid, where now we want a small amount of resistance and difficulty. On the other hand, if what Peter and Rebecca say about 7-Elevens in Japan is true of the US, these stores are a mirror images of what we really want, or those of us, that is, who shop at a 7-eleven: young males chiefly who never met a junk food they didn’t worship. and if Steve is right 7-11 operates as a supply store for the rest of us, but I’m not sure what they have accomplished is “spartan at best.” What makes these stores so unpalatable is not absence but the presence of something really grim. Maybe it’s just that lighting. Some lighting just seems to suck the life out of everything. But it may exist to discourage shop lifting (Steve’s point again), because clearly the guy behind the counter couldn’t care less. Which recalls that wonderful scene in Gross Pointe Blank where the clerk is so absorbed by his video shooter he misses the gun fight taking place behind him.
December 30th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
aren’t we missing the real point? it seems to me that we are, mostly as a result of our own biases. what in gods name is so wrong about being a brand that lives in a space that promises everything you could possibly (necessarily) want anytime you want it? it all feels a bit too judgmental to be helpful.
are we not talking about car culture? it is also the truth that the gas companies (whose real estate alone justifies massive assets) have been a bit better at redefining this fourth space than even 7-11. i would never argue that an endorsement deal could constitute an effort to save anything. but so long as we are in our cars with our aspirations and our appetites – every rule of surprising and relevant brand intelligence should apply. maybe 7-11 is late. i dunno. i find the gas companies efforts equally ridiculous – perhaps that’s why they’ve sold it out to dunkin donuts.
December 30th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
There’s a 7-11 a few blocks from my house; I walk by it when I go to the grocery store and I’ve been in a couple of times to get batteries. Recently I saw a poster in the window with a picture of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law from the new Holmes movie. The text read “Get a Clue” and there was a picture at the bottom of this disgusting looking stick thing with a meat/cheese filling. I don’t know if the stick thing was supposed to be a “clue” but if it is, I don’t want one.
December 31st, 2009 at 1:44 am
just to add my two yen to what others have said: this post may certainly reflect the reality of 7-11 in America, but it is a far cry from 7-11 (or really, any convenience store) in Japan, which offers fresh meals, fruits and vegetables (depending on the branch), as well as a host of other healthy (and unhealthy) foods in addition to the standard packaged products. It goes without saying that they also offer the whole staggering host of services that one expects at any convenience store in Japan, from faxing/copying/product delivery to purchasing concert tickets/receiving amazon japan purchases, paying bills, etc.
Also, while most Japanese convenience stores print nutritional information on some of their products, I have noticed that recently 7-11 has started to prominently feature this data on their product packaging, so you can easily see how many calories/etc. are in a given product without even having to flip it over to check the back. Coupled with their increasingly wide selection of low-calorie foods, I’ve found it quite possible to construct a relatively healthy meal at 7-11 when you’re coming home from work at 11PM and all the supermarkets are closed.
Haha, I sound like a 7-11 marketing shill. Umm, sorry about that
But I just wanted to point out that not all 7-11s are like the ones in the US.
December 31st, 2009 at 1:45 pm
MIT Sloan used a case study of 7-Eleven Japan in their executive course on Corporate Strategy last year to illustrate how they recreated the brand there. It was brilliant and sounded exactly like what several have already described in the comments. I cannot fathom why 7-Eleven has not tried to implement something similar in the States.
January 6th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
A quick additional citation regarding 7-Eleven:
I highly recommend the business-manga ‘Project X: Challengers – Seven Eleven,’ a single-volume book by the creative team Tadashi Ikuta and Namoi Kimura.
It’s one in a series of “documentary manga” that tell the stories of business successes in Japanese graphic-novel form. There’s nothing ironic about it (though it is a bit meta, in that convenience stores are where so much of the manga business in Japan occurs). Another great book in the Project X series covers the birth of Cup Noodle.
Anyhow, what’s especially interesting in the telling of the story is the circuitous path that 7-Eleven has taken. The 7-Eleven system of centralized buying, uniform convenience-store operations, and franchising existed in the U.S. long before a parallel developed in the Japan.
Convenience stores in Japan were mostly literal mom’n'pop operations when the model was ported to Japan. The model took awhile to succeed in Japan, but once it was a success it was widely mimicked, and now there are several competing convenience stores every block or so in Tokyo.
The turnabout that makes it an especially interesting story is that eventually the U.S. operation fell on hard times, and the Japanese firm that was handling franchises in Japan bought the U.S. operation (at least I think I have those facts straight — it’s been a few years since I read the book).
Here’s a short link to the Amazon entry: http://is.gd/5PM5r
As a side note, if you want the Japanese convenience-store experience in the U.S., try to visit a Famima — there are a lot in Los Angeles.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Laura, excellent to know. Thanks, Grant
January 6th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Marc, wow, fantastic addition, thanks a million. Best, Grant