The Masterful Experiential Design of Independent Bookstores
Without visiting it, imagine what’s at the other end of this URL: Relentless(dot)com.
What kind of website do you think this is? If they’re a company site, what do they sell? If you were to click the link it would take you to Amazon.
Relentless was Jeff Bezos’ original name. As legend has it, a close friend of his convinced him that the name might alienate customers, and so he changed it. He did however, keep the URL and to this day, if you go to relentless.com, it will route you to Amazon.
If you were to walk into an independent bookstore almost anywhere in the world, relentless would be the last adjective that would come to mind.
The independent bookstore experience is oriented around a love for books and ideas. More recently, certain bookstores have gone even further: Experiential design. They’ve crafted a specific experience for the consumer, designed to foster a specific psychological experience and impression.
As an example, consider Morioka Shoten in Tokyo. The place typifies a love of books. Or should we say, the love for a book. Singular. Morioka Shoten sells a single book at a time, on a rotating basis.
One book a week on a rotating basis. For that week, everything in the story is dedicated just to that book, and that book alone. They even curate their small, minimalist place in a way that fits the theme of the book, and the author themselves often comes and interacts with shoppers. Owner Yoshiyuki Morioka felt strongly that a single book will offer a deeper understanding and closer relationship with the reader as well as the essential pleasure of book reading.
Book lovers will fawn at an approach like this, which puts the love of books front and center. But they’ll also easily note that such experiential approaches may not lend themselves so well during a pandemic. Will these approaches, and independent bookstores, be able to survive?
To understand where small, independent bookstores may be going, we have to look back. And of course, the history of modern bookstores can’t be told without starting with Amazon.
The Evolution of the Amazon Bookstore and Decline of Independent Bookstores
Bezos always envisioned Amazon to be The Everything Store. And of all the casualties along this relentless mission, none may be more emblematic of its economic domination than the physical bookstore. Books were never intended to be the end goal, but a stepping stone.
Books were the perfect start. Bookstores are constrained by physical shelfspace and can only offer a small sliver at a time. But an online seller can have an unlimited inventory. According to New Yorker writer George Packer, this also gave Bezos a way of tracking the habits of “affluent, educated shoppers,” which he could then leverage for The Everything Store.
Books are also a great choice because all the necessary information about it (e.g. summary, author information, reviews) can be digitized for the online experience. Unlike clothes or furniture (which Amazon would later innervate), an entirely informed purchase can be made using this information; there’s no added benefit from getting to interact or “try out” a book in a physical store. And of course, with the advent of the Kindle, books themselves became Amazon’s proprietary digital products.
For the physical bookstore, the rise of Amazon was nothing of a catastrophe. Borders books shut its doors in 2011. Barnes and Noble, the largest book retailer in America, went through a series of bankruptcies, refinancings, and ownership changes in response to the Amazon takeover.
The impact on small, independent chains was also devastating. Two decades ago, there were about 4,000 independent bookstores in the United States. By 2009, that number was down to 1600. However, in the years since rock-bottom, independent bookstores have risen back from the ashes, reporting a 49% growth: from 1,651 in 2009 to 2,470 in 2018 at a time when the trajectory of larger chains have gone in the other direction. How can that be?
The Consumer Psychology of The Bookstore Experience
For all of its incredible convenience and low prices, there is however an aspect of the book which can’t so easily be captured and scaled in the Amazon model. And that is the actual feeling of buying a book. It’s more than just the raw utility of a book; it's a psychological state.
Bookstore enthusiasts will be instantly familiar with this feeling. “Cozy, warm, vibes” comes part of the way there. It’s been said that the English language lacks the right adjective to describe it. The Danes might do it better, with their word “hygge”, which roughly translates to the feeling of being inside, curled up with a book, on a rainy day.
Experiential approaches, either strategically, or intuitively, place this feeling at the core of the bookstore experience. And at the beginning of the Amazon takeover, many physical bookstores weren’t optimized for this. The experience wasn’t a prioritized element of the consumer psychology they were trying to create. On one end of the spectrum, you have amazing experiential bookstores like Morioki. But most bookstores found themselves on the other end of the spectrum, where you’ll have a relatively stale in-person experience of a big chain retailer like Borders Books.
As an industry, we can think of this in evolutionary terms: Amazon was the ultimate bottleneck force. It destroyed every bookseller who just blandly sold books. Those that survived then, were selling more than that. And those that have risen since have necessarily needed to focus beyond the book itself.
Amazon not only destroyed the stale, bland, physical bookstore, it also inspired a new generation of creative, experientially-oriented ones. So while the arrival of Amazon was in many ways a destructive disruptor, it also forced the entire field of physical booksellers to reshape themselves in interesting, compelling, and ultimately experiential ways.
The Experiential Design of Bookstores and Its Influence on Consumer Psychology
No one has navigated this better than James Daunt, founder of the UK’s Daunt Books. He’s a natural for what the Amazon extinction has left behind: a pure, unadulterated love of books and the bookstore experience. So much so that he gave up his stable, high-paying finance job to pursue his love of books as a business. In 1991, he opened up his first Daunt Books in London, and has since expanded to 8 in total. As other bookstores of all sizes and shapes have fallen to the wayside, he has found success.
He’s done so, largely, by tapping into the unique consumer psychology of the bookstore ethos. It’s experiential marketing at it’s finest. Daunt was behind one of the few bookstore chain successes of the Amazon era: Waterstones Books. And he did this by not treating them like a chain at all. Daunt has done this by breaking the traditional rules of bookselling in the Amazon-era. But he’s also done this by breaking the traditional rules of branding itself. He has doubled down on deliberate inconsistency in the book-buying experience.
He remarks to The Guardian, “I think bookshops should have personality. If you go to a pharmacy and buy shampoo then you want to see it in the same place. So every Boots is the same and that makes sense. But with books, it doesn’t”
And in some cases, actually jettisoning the brand itself. That’s right - as the CEO of UK’s Waterstone Books, he opened up several without the Waterstones title at all, and just let individual bookstore owners run the show as they pleased. “We decided that as they were very small bookshops in very small towns, it was barmy to call them Waterstones.”
North of the border at Indigo Books, “the bookstore peruse” is implemented in another way - as the central draw for a curated, lifestyle store. Here, the stores are a mix of books and items like throw blankets, scented candles, inspirational wall art, and Mason Jars.
Imagine cozying up on a rainy day to sink into a good book - the store provides both the book and all the components to create this vibe. In this way, Indigo has used a very similar strategy as Amazon: using the book as a wedge to sell a range of other products. Front and center is their signature “reading socks”, plush toe socks which epitomize the tactile aspect of the experience of being lost in a good book.
The bookstores that have survived, and thrived, have gone beyond the book. If you had to distill their product down, it would be this: an experience that exudes a love of books.
Whether, and how, small bookstores will survive through the pandemic is still uncertain. From a business standpoint, the pandemic seems like a cruel joke. The ‘love of books’ experience was their key differentiator which allowed them to survive (and in some cases thrive) during the Amazon era. And with COVID-19 it quickly became literally the one thing they couldn’t do.
But if the last twenty years of upheaval has taught us anything, it's this: People love the bookstore experience. And already, creative bookstores have moved to creative ways of delivering this: from author readings, to virtual bookstore tours, to actually offering a socially distanced book browsing experience outdoors. And with more people turning to reading while at home, bookstores that have been allowed to open have seen a surge in traffic.
They’ve been counted out before, and proved to be much more resilient than people had thought. It’s carried the industry through tremendous upheaval, and has given them a fighting chance in the grips of a pandemic.
One could even describe this affection with Bezos’ own language: relentless.
Photo by Clay Banks via UnSplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for Experiential Design Lessons from Independent Bookstores
Alter, A. (May 2019) How a Canadian Chain is Reinventing Bookselling, SFGate
Daunt Books, Company Website: https://dauntbooks.co.uk/, last updated June, 2019
Harrell, S. (July, 2020) Despite Coronavirus, Florida Bookstores Find New Ways to Thrive, NBC News
Packer, G. (2014). Cheap Words, New Yorker Magazine: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words
Raffaelli, R. (2020) Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores
Takram Blog (2015) Morioka Shoten: VI design for an award-winning bookstore of “a Single Room with a Single Book”, 2015
Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror (p. 185). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
