The corner store on my block knows more about service design than most agencies I've worked with. Not because anyone there read the literature — because the place itself is the strategy: the counter height, the credit ledger, the chair nobody officially put there.
Marketing scholarship has a word for this — the servicescape — and forty years of evidence that the physical environment does persuasive work no campaign can. What the evidence understates is who the environment persuades to stay, and who it quietly tells to leave.
When I ran community health campaigns, we learned this the hard way: the clinic that felt like a waiting room for bad news lost people the flyer had already convinced. The message was right. The place said otherwise. That gap — between what a market says and where it says it — is the research program.