Saturday it rained the way it does in early March, sideways and personal, and I ducked into Powell's to wait it out. I bought a used paperback about the history of shipping containers, which I did not want when I walked in and now cannot stop talking about. The line at the register was eleven people deep at four in the afternoon on a downtown block where three storefronts have gone dark since fall.
REI is leaving the Pearl. The op-eds about the core have their own byline rotation at this point. And a bookstore that occupies a full city block, sells a product category the internet was supposed to have finished off in 2011, has never run a campaign I can remember.
Not a rebrand. Not a tone-of-voice document. A colored room system and a paper map.
Powell's never had to build a brand because it built a place, and a place cannot be replicated by anyone working in slides.
Here is what a retail strategy deck cannot give you. One, scale that reads as commitment. The store is absurdly, inconveniently large, and the size itself is the promise: whatever you are looking for is probably in here somewhere. Two, friction that functions as discovery. You get lost. Getting lost is the product. Every retail consultant alive would call the wayfinding a problem and every one of them would be wrong. Three, used and new shelved together, which says the thing no campaign could say credibly, that this place cares about books rather than margins on books.
I have sat in the rooms where we tried to manufacture this for clients. We called it authenticity, then we called it community, then we called it experiential retail, and we always ended up recommending an event series and a loyalty app. What we were actually trying to buy was thirty years of a store being where it said it was, doing what it said it did, while other people changed logos.
Salt & Straw has some of it, though Salt & Straw works the flavor list like a media property and that is a real strategy, not an accident. Stumptown had it and then had to defend it. Powell's is stranger. Powell's behaves as though marketing is a thing that happens to other companies.
The lesson is not that you should stop advertising. Most brands do not have a full city block. The lesson is that campaigns are what you run when the thing itself is not doing the arguing for you, and it is worth being honest about which situation you are in before you spend the money.
You get lost. Getting lost is the product.
I came home soaked, with a book about containers, and Truffles sat on it immediately. She has never gotten lost in anything. She also has never bought a paperback she did not need.