1. Assignment # 2 - Observation
Miguel Carrillo S.
Crash Course on Creativity
Stanford University

2. Buenos Aires
• Although I’m colombian, I was working this week on a project in Buenos
Aires, Argentina
• I got to visit stores in Palermo, a trendy neighborhood of Bs Aires.
• Stores here are mostly boutique type of stores (there are also many
independent designer stores)

7. Notes
• The stores I visited were popular stores within the Palermo neighborhood.
• They were all exclusive small stores with large ceilings, sparse merchandise
and their target: female, 20-30 years old
• All of them had similar strategies to draw customers into their stores: window
displays, signs with attractive logos/fonts, nicely set stores that looked
interesting from the outside.

8. Observations
• In this type of store, the customer usually doesn’t know what she/he wants:
they generally browse throughout collections
• There was a constant flow of people, but customers usually left after 10 mins.
• Exclusivity is usually communicated through small details: 1) high ceilings, 2)
nice building materials (especially floors/walls), 3) good counter where register
is, 4) sparse merchandise, 5) personnel attention
• Attention is drawn through only one of the senses (mostly): the sight.

9. Hidden Opportunities
• These stores could benefit from an innovative communication with the customer:
• 1) Draw visual attention differently by doing a live street painting (or live wall
painting within the store) of a campaign (if it’s a young fashion brand).
• 2) Surprise within the store to make customers want to stay: What about a store
that has tags on clothes with an ID (organized according to a trend, for example)
and whenever the customer wants to try on these clothes in the dressing room, a
specific song starts to play (just for them) through RFID? (Radio-frecuency
Identification).
• 3) Make the customer feel unique. Stores could start tutorial videos on a screen
within the dressing room (with kinnect technology) to help the customers how to
look better or match the clothes they’re trying on.