I recently walked into the Nike store at the Great Mall in Milpitas to return a pair of shoes. What I saw next was brilliant because it was so simple and obvious once I saw it. Along with my return receipt, I was handed a coupon for 20% off one item - valid for 2 hours only. And since I was at the Nike factory outlet store (theoretically with already lower prices on many items), I felt a compelling urge to browse through the store to use this coupon. Not only that, I felt "special" because this coupon was just for me - the other shoppers walking in through the doors (without a return item) could not avail this generous discount.
The brilliant thing about this is that the folks at Nike used a simple incentive to convert me - someone who only wanted to return an item that day - to an actual buyer. This is the first time I have seen such an incentive, though I wouldn't be surprised if it has been tried elsewhere. Anyway, the point is that most people would probably end up at least browsing the store to find something worthwhile to buy with the coupon. And many of those would probably end up buying something (I bought 3 items - the discount was for one item only). Regardless of whether Nike ends up overall net positive with this incentive, and whether they continue running it or not, this is a great example of doing something different with an annoying experience (i.e. returning goods), which is pretty much the same EVERYWHERE.
There is some inspiration in here for product managers - especially those working on web products - after all, can you think of experiences that are pretty much the same (i.e. universally bad) everywhere on the web? How about account creation or SMS code verification as examples? But there is hope. Tatango provides something different and better to the tired experience of creating an account. Twitter generates a code that employs only the first letters of each triple-tap key on a normal mobile phone (i.e. 'a' from 'abc', 'd' from 'def', etc.) - so that, wait for this... you only have to tap once for each letter in the verification code!
What are you doing with your product thats equally brilliant?
