From Fast Company's recap of their pre-Apple interviews with Apple's new consumer experience chief. Emphasis is mine.
On brand culture:
Everything we’ve done is counterintuitive to traditional selling organizations, with their traditional training. My dad used to always say that he could teach anything but he couldn’t teach how to feel. That’s the hardest part when you have 11,000 people: How do you teach them to feel how we feel? When I first started, we had no training programs--none of that. We had to put in world-class sales and service training programs. The thing is, I don’t want to be sold to when I walk into a store. I want to be welcomed. The job is to be a brilliant brand ambassador. Everybody is welcome. Don’t be judgmental whatsoever. Look them in the eyes. Welcome them. ‘How are you?’ Don’t sell! NO! Because that is a turnoff. So how do you hire all these amazing people and put them in a world-class retail setting and then say, ‘But you’re not allowed to sell’?! How do you put this whole digital team together and say, ‘But we are not doing any direct marketing to sell to you!’? The digital guys look at you like you’re nuts. But no, no, no, no, no. What we have wanted to do is build an amazing brand experience and an amazing way that people can engage with the brand. Then it will naturally happen. And then I don’t care where they buy. I only care that they buy the brand.
On desegregating digital from brick-and-mortar:
Traditionally, wholesale is wholesale. Digital people are incentivized to drive digital. And store managers are interested in the store. We blew that all up. I said, No, no, no, store manager in Detroit: You’re responsible for digital too. You’re telling me nobody in Detroit is shopping online? Wrong! Now London, for instance, every week has to report their online traffic and their offline traffic and what was their crossover. I hired a chief customer officer who came from Lloyds who built us a huge insights and analytics department. We put in traffic counters in all the stores, because I could get traffic online but I couldn’t get traffic offline and so I couldn’t get any crossover behaviors. We’ve got ten thousand iPads out there in the stores. And we’ve built this clienteling app. So if you buy in Hong Kong or if you went and bought online or even if you are just window-shopping and have stuff in your basket--we’ll know. Offline stores will be able to see all your behavior online. We are blurring the physical and digital, and it’s not just the retail experience. It is the service.