What Retail Is Hired to Do: Apple vs. Ikea

Interesting comparison of Ikea’s and Apple’s retail stores, by Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt at Asymco. Includes this excerpt from Clayton Christensen’s Integrating Around the Job to Be Done:

The company has been slowly rolling its stores out across the world for [close to 50] years; and yet nobody has copied Ikea.

Why would this be? It’s not trade secrets or patents. Any competitor can walk through its stores, reverse engineer its products and copy its catalog. It can’t be that there is no money to be made: its owner Ingvar Kamprad is the third richest person in the world. And yet nobody has copied Ikea.

★ Monday, 7 May 2012