Would You Like a Wine with that Chair?
My favorite store in Des Moines, Iowa, is the West End Architectural Salvage Company and Coffee Shop. You can buy a 100-year old door and/or a latte.
When my wife and I went shopping there, I didn’t know that having a beer as we walked around is part of new nationwide marketing trend. It is really part of the experiential world we live in. The trend is really a mash-up of different experiences in one location, making for something new and refreshing.
You are finding restaurants in grocery stores, coffee shops in libraries, restaurants in movie theaters and soon you may find a wine bar next to the dressing room at your favorite clothing shop. One C-store, that should be touting gas, is now hyping pizza because of the coming electric car trend.
The multi-experience effort is really about trying to appeal to millennials and technology disruption in our categories. For retailers, sagging same-store sales have jump-started the transformation. Competing with online outlets means adding more and more value to the physical shopping experience.
So what can we all add to our marketing experiences to add value to our customers, patients (and families), contributors and prospective students? That is the question. Would you like a glass of wine with that? Cheers.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.