Service design
Apollo: from bookshop to entertainment
Because books were only the beginning.
- Client
- Apollo
- Industry
- Retail, cinema and entertainment
- What we did
- Service design, brand strategy and organisational transformation
01
Once upon a bookshop
Apollo began as a small chain of two or three bookshops inside a group selling everything from cigarettes to DVDs. The businesses shared ownership, but not much else.
Customer habits were changing quickly. Books still mattered, but the way people discovered content and spent their free time was moving well beyond shelves and categories.
Apollo did not need a better bookshop. It needed a more interesting reason to exist.
02
Design the visit, not the inventory
Over several years, Apollo unified separate content and retail businesses into one entertainment experience: books, cinema, food on the go and more reasons to visit than a shopping list could provide.
The new concept was designed around the customer experience rather than the products on sale. That shift sounds obvious now. Most useful shifts do, once somebody has done the difficult part.
Service design connected the offer, environment, brand and organisation around customer value—turning a collection of businesses into a coherent destination.
03
Three hundred percent more hello
Bringing the experiences together increased customer interaction frequency by 300%. Purchase frequency and value also grew, providing the kind of qualitative research finding accountants tend to appreciate.
The deeper result was organisational. Apollo changed how it decided what to develop, moving from product-led thinking towards customer value as the primary driver of new services.
Today it is the largest entertainment brand in the Baltic states. The dusty bookshop grew up, bought popcorn and became a night out.
“Changing the focus of our business to our customers’ needs from our products has helped us not just to survive, but to take a huge leap forward.”
Mauri Dorbek, then CEO of Apollo