By  Ger van den Buijs – FiveDolphins.com

This article is an extention to an earlier article I wrote on Open-kitchen e-commerce. I got fascinated by this concept, because I realized that it is quite a thing for a restaurant to have an open kitchen. It is like showing ones guts. There is no place to hide, no way to fake, no way to cheat, no way to pretend. You are 100% You and that is exactly why it is so powerful. That made me wonder:

How could openness contribute to E-Commerce?

Rational behind Openness

As a start I will recapture the two articles I refered to in the first article. They shed a light on the rational behind open kitchen restaurants. One is a study from Harvard University. The other one an article in TIME BUSINESS. I will summarize the arguments they bring forward for you in one list. I think these arguments not only apply to restaurants. You can easily apply them to other branches.

If you have read the previous version, you might want to page to the second part which is completely new. There I will explain how our first implementation is going to upgrade the user experience of an, yet not to name, e-commerce website.

Transparency about Safety / Hygiene An important reason for diners to prefer an open kitchen is the transparency about how the food is being prepared. The open kitchen is a guarantee to safe food.

Appetite The smell of food, the activity of the cooks, the sound of pots and pans raises the appetite. You are tempted to pick a little piece from the countertop. And a customer with a raised appetite will order less economical.

Entertainment Going out for dinner is not only about food. It’s an evening out, an event. The open kitchen is a form of entertainment. The cooks become artists. Their movements become a dance. Domino’s “Pizza Theater,”  is a nice example how this can be implemented even in the lower levels of the market.

Professionality / Craftmanship Tossing the pizza dough is more than a performance. It’s professional production. No, it’s even more. It’s a demonstration of craftsmanship, displaying love for the action, the product and it’s value. We’ll go into the role of craftsmanship in more detail in the next chapter.

Interior design and Reduced energy cost These arguments might be very specific to restaurants, but they might trigger you to reconsider some of your interior design decisions. Production no longer needs to be hidden. People go on tours to visit factories, harbors, etc, because they are interested in how things are produced. Instruments and machines have an element of beauty. Why not show that?

Interaction proofs to be more than sociable. It has an effect on consumers and producers. Consumers value the food more when they see it being cooked. More surprisingly, interaction makes the chefs perform better. The sight of enjoying diners raises their performance.

The Harvard study compared three situation. In the situation of mutual visibility consumers attributed a +17.3% higher preference to the food. The effect of one-sided vision was tested in both directions. In situations in which the chefs could see the public, but not vice versa, the public’s appreciation of the food was also raised, with no less than 10%. In situations where the public could see the cooks, but not visa versa, the appreciation of the food was no different than in a closed kitchen.

What could these values mean to E=Commerce? Before we draw the parallel to E-Commerce, I first want to explore the element of craftsmanship to a deeper level.

Economics of Craftsmanship

What defines craftsmanship? To me, the differentiation is not in the ability to create a product in great detail. Also the professional is very capable of doing that. The craftsman, however, delivers more. He is devoted to the value of his product. This is based on a strong outside-in perspective, working from the quality the customer wants. The professional works from inside-out perspective, focused to deliver with high efficiency.

The impact of craftsmanship goes beyond the production itself. When consumers look for quality they consider three elements: Appearance, Functionality and Trust. This model is however incomplete. The model is insufficient to explain for example the global market leadership of some brands.

Next to the visible rational, we need to consider the non-visible rational, the experience. In his book Strategic Pokes: The Business Jalabi, a book you should certainly read, Shombit Sengupta calls this non-visible rational the “sparkling qualities”. Non-visual quality is the assurance of the product’s functionality during its life cycle.

This intangible value is created by the craftsman who adds passion and a multi-angle approach that exceeds the obvious. To customers, these intangibles have an unlimited value. It’s non-intellectual and the value is different from person to person. When customers appreciate the intangible first, they are willing to pay a premium price and return for a repeat purchase.

Open Kitchen E-Commerce

We started off with the question whether there is something like Open Kitchen E-Commerce. Some will answer this question with Yes. They will argue that Social Media have created openness. Twitter and Facebook are podia where companies can be blamed and shamed. Some of these messages go viral, causing great negative impact on company value.

This type of openness, however, only triggers a very limited part of the values that were attributed to openness in restaurants. You could maybe argue that this is equivalent to the hygiene transparency. Question is: “do you know of a E-Commerce company  that really demonstrates the joy of serving customers “? Do you know about an E-Commerce site that delivers the entertainment and craftsmanship of creation?

Another question is: “are our service teams stimulated enough to give their best, like the cooks that can see the diners”? I think the current social media bring that at best partially. This reminds me of the presentation Mark Schaefer did for E-Consultancy about the expectations of the Social Era Customer (SEC). He draws the parallel with the medieval markets. Social Era Customers want :

Social Era Customer	Analogy	Open Kitchen Restaurant
To know the person behind the company	Seeing who serves you, see his style	Entertainment
Transparency	Openness about the process of service	Transparency about Safety / Hygiene
Immediate impact of communication	Good service raises appetite,  bad service is devastating	Appetite
Openly shared Word of Mouth	The love for the product and value will make people talk about the product and service	Craftsmanship
To feel connected.	The interaction between cook and customer creates the connection people appreciate.	Interaction

These expectations of Social Media Customers match closely with the values of the open kitchen restaurants. My view is that there is still a lot to gain in E-Commerce. Conversion ratios are dramatically low compared to retail. An open kitchen policy in E-Commerce could boost the customer experience to really make the next step. One should realize that within a webshop, a customer is always on his own. There is no atmosphere alone. Imagine to enter an empty restaurant. My ambition is to develop a new type of webshop that steps up from an isolated experience to a engaging connected experience. That will improve your results drastically.

Economics of open-kitchen e-commerce

Implementation

You might wonder how to achieve such an open kitchen policy. I distinguish 4 strategies to work with customers:

Context marketing: adapting the site based on what a customer is doing.

Bottom of Funnel marketing: building an experience based on a customer request

Engagement marketing: building an experience based on a shared passion

 Personlization marketing: allow customers to personalize your product or service.

Together with a partner we are working on the first implementation. We are going to implement the first three strategies. Our objective is to create an engaging community. In an open-kitchen experience, such a community has to be real time and open. Customers need to be able to interact with each other. We position the team as hosts, because they express and strengthen the engagement the community is sharing.

In order for a customer to be willing to participate in the community, he’ll have to had a flow experience. I’ve written an article about flow and it’s meaning in the customer journey earlier. We are going to implement a shopping experience that responds to customer activity and to the interaction a customer has with other customers. The engine will produce additional content that is context specific.

Primary to all this, we’ll need to make sure our customers feels activated. We are convinced questions can play a vital role. Our brain can easily ignore information, but it can’t stop itself from answering questions. One need to realize that questions only activate a person when they require latently known information. Retoric question or questions one does not know the answer to will not activate a person.

We intent to allow customers to participate anonimously. Research shows that customers will only give you their email address when they are 60% through their shopping process. Our intention is to capture our customers early in their orientation phase, because good retailers have proven that when a customer experiences the sparkle of craftsmanship before he dives into the product specifications, he’ll be eager to come back and willing to allow for more margin.

 

 

Curious how our implementation will work out? Don’t miss the updates. When you send me a brief message, I’ll keep you posted.

Regards,

Ger van den Buijs

Ger is cofounder of FiveDolphins.com, the platform to facilitate customer flow within your site. You can follow me on gervandenbuijs.com, LinkedIn and Twitter (@BuijsGer)

With courtesy to Pixabay for the images.