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Hitting the road, finding a kiosk

Encountering a kiosk in Alabama saved KioskMarketplace's editor some money, but also raised questions about how the kiosk gospel is being spread.

August 5, 2002

There are good ways to draw attention to one's self. Retrieve a kitten from a tree. Pull an old lady out of a burning building. Find a cure for a deadly disease. Return half your salary because the baseball team you play for is last in the division.

(OK, so there was a bit of fantasy in that last example - just work with me here.)

There are equally bad ways to draw attention. Yell "Fire!" for no pertinent reason in a crowded cinema. Drive your car up on a crowded sidewalk and play Ping the Pedestrian. Demand a $120 million salary coming off a year when you hit .215 and muffed 57 grounders.

Because kiosks lack a little something from a self-propelled mobility standpoint, attracting attention is more challenging. The kiosks cannot go up to a potential customer, tap them on the shoulder, and say "Yo, here's some information" -- which, for anyone who has ever seen movies about technology run amok (Westworld and 2001: A Space Odysseyboth come to mind) may not be a bad thing.

KIOSKmarketplace.com editor John Harrell

Instead, the kiosk has to draw the customer in. Flashy screens, interesting content, and unique designs can all be part of the allure of a successful kiosk. Educating people about what your kiosk can do is also important.

A little work, a little vacationing

The importance of knowledge hit home back in June, when my family and I headed to the Gulf Coast on vacation. To get to the Gulf, we head south down I-65, which from Louisville, Ky., involves about 3 ½ hours in Kentucky and Tennessee and somewhere between eight hours and half a lifetime in the never-ending edifice that is so uniquely Alabama.

But before you plow deeper and deeper into that stultifying drive, your first stop should be at the Alabama welcome center just across the state border from Tennessee. The center is near Huntsville, home of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Huntsville is pretty proud of its contributions to U.S. space exploration, which is why there is a Saturn rocket at the rest stop. Which is why you should stop there.

While my wife and daughter were having a bite to eat under the shadow of 20th century technological triumph, I was inside the welcome center seeking some practical guidance for the 21st century. That was provided courtesy of Info Alabama, a kiosk located at a corner near one of the center's entryways.

The touchscreen monitor offered information on sightseeing and exhibits in Alabama, but the section that caught my eye was the outlet-center button. Every year or so, we head to Mobile, because that is where my wife's family was raised, and Gulf Shores, because of the peace and tranquility that comes with lying lazily on the beach for four or five days.

But another reason to hit South Alabama is Foley, a tranquil town 10 miles north of Gulf Shores. The Riviera Centre Factory Stores is an outrageously large outlet mall; it is in fact two outlet malls in one, with a smaller circle of stores ringed by a larger perimeter of retailers.

What brought Info Alabama and the Riviera Centre together was the promise of a coupon book. By pressing a button, the kiosk printed a coupon, which my wife and I took to the Vanity Fair store at the Riviera Centre a few days later. The coupon was good for a coupon book, with the promise of $250 worth of savings.

Something for nothing

Now, in reality, we knew we would not save $250, since we did not intend to use every coupon and most of them had some expensive contingencies ("Save $5 when you purchase $100 or more at Â…," was the general tone). Telling someone they can save $250 with a book like that is like saying anyone could hit .400 in the majors; all they need to do is ensure that four out of every ten pitchers they face are regularly hittable.

But the book did save us about $25 over the course of a day's shopping. Whether it was books or my new soccer shoes or a watch, there was savings to be had. And we would have never seen those savings had I not been aware of the value inherent in using a welcome center kiosk.

Which is the main point of this column -- awareness. If there is one area where the kiosk industry and deployers can work more closely to achieve success, it is in the field of promotion. A kiosk is only effective with regular usage, whether it provides soft benefits or a direct return on investment.

The challenge for current and future kiosk deployments is in finding the most effective ways to promote the units. There are many ways to achieve this, through employee buy-in that encourages staff to work with customers, promotional activities such as advertising and contests, and through positive word of mouth.

The latter category could be the key to kiosk success. The great tragedy about a kiosk such as Info Alabama's is the difficulty in spreading word of mouth. Among our immediate circle of friends, no one has made a trip to Alabama since our return in mid-June, so we have had no one to spread the gospel to. I can mention the kiosk here, but how many great, useful kiosks are out there that will not get mentioned like this in a column. During a 20-minute stretch at the welcome center, I was the only visitor that even stopped at the kiosk, much less used it.

Spreading the word about successful kiosks to potential users is one of the industry's most important challenges.