Friday June 20, 2008

Can I get a Snickers with that iPod?

Add these to the list of things you can now purchase from airport vending machines: iPods and beauty products.

This probably is old news to those people who frequently fly through major airports, but such machines were a surprise to me when I spotted Apple and Elizabeth Arden machines last week at the Minneapolis airport. Large groups of people (myself included) stopped to stare, snap pictures and scratch their heads as they passed the iPod machine.

No one seemed to care about the Elizabeth Arden stand (despite its more visible placement), so who knows what that says about travelers. Perhaps entertainment tools are an easier airport sell due to boredom-inducing flights and layovers. Makeup just might not be that high on the priority list while traveling…

The Apple vending machines got the OC team thinking: good idea, bad idea? Good idea if you have a laptop with you with which to load the thing. Bad idea if you have no computer and thus would find that a vending machine-procured iPod holds no immediate entertainment value whatsoever. And, as OC designer and Web guru Joe points out, trusting a vending machine with several hundred dollars (even via a credit card) is sort of a scary option.

Perhaps the real value in airport vending machines is the opportunity for brand visibility. Thousands of people, many of them utterly bored and eager to look at anything remotely new and different, stream by the machines daily. I’d venture to guess that even if the machines bomb in terms of sales, they’ll create such a buzz (hardly a novelty concept for Apple!) and increase in brand visibility that Apple will consider the machines a handy alternative to traditional advertising venues.

Posted by Camden Easterling Swindell at 09:58 AM in Observations