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Wednesday
Jul282010

The bullsh*t detector question & 15 interesting facts

 

Here is a list of 15 more-or-less useful retail facts:


  1. People spend 2.3 seconds on in-store brand decisions.
  2. Just over 90% of shoppers make unplanned purchases.
  3. Shopping list use is up substantially (65% say they use one).
  4. Gen Y shoppers are also more likely to make impulse purchases at end caps. 
  5. About 70% of shoppers say they responded to end-of-aisle signage.
  6. About 62% of shoppers say they responded to merchandising displays.
  7. About 58% of shoppers say they responded to department signage.
  8. About 55% of shoppers say they responded to shelf strips. 
  9. Sale prices motivated more shoppers (70%) than "everyday low price" positioning (47%.) 
  10. About 93% of Baby Boomers, say they prefer product messages rather than price-point messages while shopping. 
  11. Only about 25% off customers walk past halfway in the typical specialty store.
  12. You can achieve a 25% gross margin lift by going from 1à2 aisles 
  13. Sales can increase by1.3% when dwell time increases by 1%.
  14. You get on average a 10% sales increase with a store design with a left entry and clockwise track.
  15. Most women (86%) look at price tags – less so than men. (I don’t know the exact percentage.)
When I teach the MBAs to think like an MBA, I teach them the most important question they can ask; is this question:

So what?

Because, guess what? 

Unless you can answer this question, all the facts in the world mean nothing. Anyone of these ‘facts’ can significantly impact your business. But ONLY if you can translate the fact into the ‘answer’ to the question of ‘so what.’

Could you help me gather some more facts? I have a very short survey (4 questions, 4 clicks) that will give us an insight into an important topic.
The survey is HERE. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated. (Australian based respondents only please, because it is unique/relevant to Australia only.)

 

Tuesday
Jul272010

56a6a158

Saturday
Jul242010

Congratulations to the team at Nationwide News

 

Congratulations to the Field Sales Team at Nationwide News under the leadership of Stephen Pilon.

They all graduated recently from the Ganador Business Academy with a Cert IV Business.

Hope you go on to do more and achieve even more.

Saturday
Jul242010

A theory waiting to be proven

Dear browser, reader, stranger, friend.

Can you please lend a hand? I have a very short survey: 4 questions (A or B) = 4 clicks that I REALLY would like you to participate in.

It is peculiar to Australia, so if you are an international reader, then please ignore.

If you want to know the outcome, you can either drop me a line or subscribe to our newsletter (box to the right of the screen.)

 

The survey is HERE.

 

 

Muchos Gracias.

Wednesday
Jul212010

The problem with experience

A contrarian observation this week:

Tom Peters posted a short video on the Problem with Perfection (see below). We have long taught service personnel who do our Customer Service training that it is impossible to exceed expectations. Tom Peters has just vindicated our approach.

 

 

 

 

 

And all of this got me thinking about the problem I have with experience. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am happy to blow my own experience trumpet as warranted.

But we have the opportunity to train many very experienced employees.  But as you work closely with so many of them, you realise that they have been short-changed by their employers and they don’t really have 20 years’ experience, but 1 years’ experience 20 x over.

They learned to do the minimum at the ‘sit-next-to-nellie’ school. They learned a few procedural matters = the way we do things around here. But they never mastered the underlying principles, and consequently they have never been able to add value to the business by making suggestions/ improvements.

On a more strategic level, your experience predisposes you to keep repeating what has always worked in the past. It blinds you to the new imperatives.

Because, to continue to be successful, you need to abandon past successes

So one needs experience in knowing how and when to change, not just familiarity with processes. (You need that too, but it is not going to prepare you for the impending changes.)

You get that experience in any of the following ways:

  • by going through change repeatedly & looking for patterns
  • by risking untried methods
  • by wilfully changing things in small ways (much like the fire fighters do back burning)

You don’t get it by hanging on to what worked and resting on the laurels of your experience. Success is addictive, but very few addictions work out well in the long run.

Don’t use your experience as a shield to defend against change, use it as a machete to chop a new path.

Saturday
Jul172010

Assortment, Range, Width, Variety: Definitively

The literature throws up a wide range of definitions for some everyday terms we use in retail. 

So I did some digging to find the definitive answer. This is as good as it gets... and well worth learning and copying.

Wednesday
Jul142010

Why did you not call?

Not sure if you noticed that there was no RetailSmart post last week. My guess is not.

Nobody called to enquire simply because the ideas, insights, opinions expressed in this blog, whilst hopefully informative and maybe even entertaining, do not form an integral part of your life.

If you were a customer of mine, that would be devastating.

If my customers don’t miss an update or an output of mine, then I would be in serious trouble. (Fortunately, the reason for the missed post was because I was delivering some of those outputs.)

But it does raise the question:

Would your customers *really* miss you if your business disappeared overnight?

If not, what are you doing about it?

If so, do you really know why? And can you sustainably defend that reason?

To be sure: I am not referring to your ‘competitive advantage’. I am not a fan of the concept because it suggests to me that you are keeping an eye on the competition instead of worrying about your own business and keeping an eye on the customer. I am referring to the notion of having a strong (in-demand) retail proposition.

 

And the most important question of all is this:

 

Would your customers really agree with your answer above?

Thursday
Jul012010

Invisible dollars: Or the Art of Retailing

Where the material ends, art begins. 


This is a quote by Etienne Hajdu, and it reflects his view on sculpting. Retail too, is an art, and we are inclined to forget that sometimes.

Sometimes it is what is NOT there that makes a retail experience memorable. In fact maybe, as alluded in the title, that is really what retail is all about.

In retail we focus on getting the offer right, on getting the prices right and so forth. We focus on the ‘what IS’ to the exclusion of ‘what is NOT’.

By this I mean we consider all the variables of retail and we attempt to manipulate that into something that is unique.

When people buy a product or a service, they do not only pay with money, they pay with many ‘invisible dollars’:

  • ·        They invest their very precious time
  • ·        They risk their reputation
  • ·        The opportunity cost of not pursuing a different product/outcome

Forgetting these invisible payments can cost us dearly.

Similarly, the retailer pays with those same invisible dollars (i.e. indirect costs) for the products. We don’t factor the opportunity cost of the working capital, the risk of obsolescence and damage into our cost of sales.

Forgetting these ‘invisible costs’ can cost us dearly.

But more importantly, how can you improve the customer experience by taking things away rather than adding it? It is human nature to want to add/grow/improve and it does not come naturally to prune or backburn.

We have found that we have to build these checkpoints into our Customer Experience Design initiatives by conscious effort to make sure we keep things simple and that we remember the value of the unseen.

Because, more often than we would care to admit, getting out the way of the customer is more valuable than the alternative.

 

Saturday
Jun262010

20 Lessons I learned about marketing starting a website business

I run a business in the real world that has an internet presence and we are pretty big on eLearning.  (Hey, I am even on twitter, have a LinkedIn profile, but I wouldn’t describe myself as one of the cool kids on the block. Like this one, and this one and this one

Running and marketing this ‘real’ business is very different from running an internet business – even if you use some of the same tools. But there are also some universal principles that continue to apply, no matter what the platform and no matter what the business idea.

Like everyone else, I am lured to the internet-only business model because there is such great potential to:

  • automate processes
  • scale up
  • tap into global markets
  • earn recurring revenue

I am also an experienced marketer (in fact I teach marketing part-time at a world-class graduate school) and I like to think I know the basics. Boy, was I wrong?

In April 09 we launched retailsmartresults.com. And these are the lessons I learned along the way.

It started out as a membership driven website business model, but evolved into something else. That is because we made many mistakes. Some of these we should have known better because it really is just about fundamentals and the other lessons are just about us paying our school fees. In hindsight, they are all obvious.

  1. There are a lot of people who can talk the talk but not too many who can walk it.
  2. There is a gulf (of money) between social-media-as conversation and internet marketing scams. (And there is a real opportunity in between.)
  3. If your business model and if your target market is not exactly clear before you start, you will spend a lot of time re-writing and re-designing.
  4. The technographics profile (put forward in ‘groundswell’) probably over-estimates the number of participants and ‘creators’.
  5. No one on the internet knows you are a dog. But the flipside of that is that no one cares about your blog.
  6. And they might not care if you are a dog, you will not be able to hide your ‘dog-ness’ for very long.
  7. There is an art to eliciting comments – and one not yet mastered.
  8. If it is extremely difficult to do, or if no one else has done it before; it probably is for good reason.
  9. A large following counts for a lot – and it is a lot harder to achieve (authentically) for anyone but a first mover. (In the internet world there is only room for one. One Amazon, one Ebay etc.  – but that is a post for another time.)
  10. One month = 7 internet years.
  11. The corollary of you don’t need much capital to start is that you can’t raise capital easily.
  12. By the time somebody has discovered the recipe AND is prepared to pass it on, the goalposts have moved.
  13. The average business person and employee – and that includes Gen Y – is not as computer literate as you think.
  14. Crowdsourcing cannot be applied to decisions you have to take.
  15. Customer service cannot be automated.
  16. Your competition almost always charges ZERO.
  17. The internet is a shallow pool.
  18. Face-to-Face counts. A lot. Maybe even more than before.
  19. Being in constant beta is a reality of the platform, but it is harder to live with than you think.
  20. Just because you like it does not mean everyone else will.
  21. Simplicity is hard.
  22. And one bonus lesson. The business plan counts for nought. The planning is invaluable. (I think I steal this from someone famous.)

If you have lessons of your own, comment below and I will be sure to take note because I don’t have any money left for more school fees.

Friday
Jun252010

7 reasons why Apple will fail

 

Make no mistake; I think Apple does Marketing amazingly well. I wish I had owned shares in them. (I am sure Bill Gates is glad he does.)

But sycophancy that surrounds the brand needs to be tempered; this emperor is not wearing any clothes:

  1. They don’t build what the customers want - they luck into it because they build what they want and that just happens to be cool. At the moment their definition of cool coincides with the dominant view.
  2. There is already a sameness in the design and the processes (iPad = big iPod Touch) – so it is inevitable that the sameness will come into the thinking.
  3. That (currently & apparently) unerring sense of what is hot - will leave when Steve goes.
  4. They are building a walled garden that looks like paradise but will eventually prove to be a prison. They are much worse offenders than Microsoft ever was; and really harks back to the closed ecosystem of the early internet. They will get away with it as long as a lot of ‘players’ continue to  make money with them; but ultimately their philosophy is anti-internet and I think the internet will win.
  5. No organisation (to my knowledge) has jumped the curve more than 3 times. They have one life left – and in internet years that is not so long. Someone will build a better mousetrap sooner rather than later.
  6. A big chunk of their cool comes from being the underdog/ anti-establishment. That is brand archetype that represents the essence of Apple. The reality does not reflect that and it is only a matter of time before the cognitive dissonance begins to jar.
  7. Their products are not very reliable – and after the coolness wears off, frustration sets in. I don’t know a singe owner of Apple iPhone, who is not a certified Apple fan, who will buy it again.