Retail Winners get to know customers on an intimate basis.

Cut through the noise

Increasing Retail Sales Now – More Customers More Often Buying More

Executives ask one question on an almost weekly basis: “How can I differentiate my company in the marketplace?” My reply to every president, chief executive officer, or vice-president of marketing is always the same: “Why do you want to be different?” We are swimming in an overabundance of products and services. “Different” is no longer a differentiator.

What is? Creating a RELEVANT brand, offering and relationship with your customers and market.

What world do you live in as a retail executive?  Do you really understand your customer and the pressures of the marketplace?

Consumers are changing like quicksilver now.  They are far less brand loyal, they search for deals and value, they prioritize what they need differen

Consumers seek meaning and a brand they can trust. They are busy at work on Web 2.0 platforms creating ways to cut through the noise in search of products and services that resonate with integrity and transparency; in a word, authenticity. That quest for authenticity is a call to action for any company intending to be relevant in the 21st century.

Step Back and Consider Your Brand

As the marketplace has shifted, so too must your brand offering and service contract. A single, beautifully designed product offering and service contract is nothing, if it is no longer RELEVANT TO BUYERS IT IS AN OPPORTUNITY WAITING FOR a company that will take the time to understand three things: the deep-seated desires of its customers, its own DNA, and the sweet spot where the two overlap.

What is the right approach for innovative companies to take? First, take a step back before introducing just another product. Decide who is your true tribe and what makes the most sense for those customers and your company at a particular time. Push the pause button, dig deeper, and reconsider what it would take to make your customers truly love who you are as a brand.

Back in 2001, Umpqua, a regional bank in Oregon founded to provide loggers and farmers a banking alternative, approached Ziba, my design company, to help redefine the banking experience. Instead of getting to work designing right away, we had to discover what banking meant to Umpqua’s customers. What were their attitudes about banking in general? How did community banks like Umpqua, with its 65 branches, fit into that picture? How did large commercial banks fit into that same picture? With the convenience of online banking and ATMs, what would motivate customers to go into a bank in the first place?

Customers Crave Personal Service – RELEVANCE 101

Next, Umpqua had to understand its own culture. What did Umpqua believe in? What was it good at? What did it stand for? What could it stand for?

After researching these questions thoroughly, Umpqua found its customers were craving intimacy. They were tired of the impersonal service they received from regular banks and suspicious of financial institutions in general. While other banks were competing with a convenience strategy centered around the Internet and ATMs, Umpqua identified an opportunity to provide customers with a “slow banking” experience that was both inspirational and encouraging. This translated into comfort and personal service—a hotel/retail metaphor with a modern-craftsman aesthetic.

The result was a flagship store in Portland’s Pearl District that delivered an unprecedented banking experience tailored to the specific needs of Umpqua’s customers and the unique expression of Umpqua’s DNA. It also happened to make Umpqua a lot of money. The first week the store was open in April, 2003, it generated $1 million in deposits. Nine months into the first year, the new store had a record $50 million in deposits. Since then, Umpqua has rolled out stores based on this template in other cities in Oregon, and created a smaller version for smaller neighborhoods.

Starbucks Recovers from Disaster – RELEVANCE 101

Customers will forgive brands with which they feel an authentic bond. Starbucks (SBUX) is the story du jour of a company whose strategy went from grassroots to gimmicky somewhere between the original handful of stores in 1982 and the more than 15,000 in 43 countries today. By its own admission, the company lost sight of who it was and what their customers wanted.

However, CEO ’s process of recovery from this potential brand disaster is what makes this story so compelling. Schultz chose the path of integrity: He publicly admitted Starbucks’ role in its own decline and invited others to participate in the company’s recovery. Transparency is a requirement for companies striving for authenticity. And, from his public admissions all the way to the launch of the social networking site mystarbucksidea.com—which invites customers to submit store improvement ideas—Schultz has embraced this concept in spades.

Now, instead of the media focusing on the dilution of the brand, the press and the blogosphere report on how Starbucks rediscovered its DNA. While the future remains to be seen, my bet is on it recovering gracefully.

The Art of the RELEVANT Relationship– RELEVANCE 101

The women’s clothing store Anthropologie is another modern, authentic success story—with a twist. Anthropologie’s retail environment is an artful rendition of a French market that creates a mood of discovery and whimsy. While the merchandise is a unique mix of found objects from around the globe, the store is as close to a genuine French flea market as is the French bread sold at Safeway (SWY). However, customers have been known to spend over an hour in a store and close to $80 a visit.

Anthropologie has made an art of the authentic relationship. The company’s customer is not a roughly sketched demographic. Nor does it expect to sell to everyone with a one-size-fits-all approach. Anthropologie has dug deep into the subtleties and nuances of the psychographic profile of a specific type of thirtysomething married woman. Anthropologie outlets are an extension of her adventurous, bohemian-chic self that doesn’t get much play when she’s juggling a career and kids. Connections like these accounted for growth of 18% in the fourth quarter of 2007 in an overall disappointing quarter for the women’s apparel sector. Not bad for a company that doesn’t advertise.

Let Your Customers Be Themselves– RELEVANCE 101

This is what it means to forge an authentic relationship with your customers. It’s not the kind of relationship that lasts for only one season or that comes on suddenly because your product is cheaper or more beautiful than another’s. It’s the kind of relationship that emerges because you offer something that caters to an essential desire and makes your customers feel they can be themselves. It’s the kind of relationship that allows for mistakes and creates a bond of loyalty. And having established an authentic bond doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels. People change, trends change, and you must always be willing to reinvent yourself as both your company and your customers evolve.

If you follow this approach, your true tribe will love and reward you for it, then spread the WORD—your business depends on it.

More than anything we help you target what drives revenue, membership and growth.

Here are some of the recent results that my clients have gained with this approach

·         One fitness client increased retention by 15% with some small but critical changes we helped identify – not only the problem, but a simple to implement solution.

·         We recently increased sales by over a million dollars for a mid sized retail chain.

·         We have uncovered 42 million in lost revenue opportunities for a National grocery chain and we are now helping them grab the opportunity.

·         Do you need low cost/ high return strategies for Customer retention and referral growth?

Our clients focus on adding revenues, and we become a measurable, profit centre for them.

My clients want more revenues now, and we are delivering.  

Increasing Retail Sales Now

More Customers…More Often…Buying More…

Lessons from the last recession.

In a time of retail declines, the above line should be your mantra.  It is well worth noting:

A study conducted by McGraw-Hill Research found that 
companies who maintained (or increased) their marketing throughout the 1981-82 recession saw an average sales growth of 275 percent over the next five years!

But those companies who cut their marketing saw paltry sales growth of 19 percent over the next five years.

Today let’s talk about the first of the aforementioned three mantras, once again, drill this into your head and into your team:

More Customers…More Often…Buying More…

So let’s take More Customers, and in the following two entries, I will talk about More Often, and then Buying More.

Day One: More Customers

More Customers will come from 3 key areas

1. Existing Customers

2. New Customers and Conquest of Competitor Customers

3. Conversion of Non Buying Store Traffic (Browsers)

A Magnet - What is it that attracts more customers through your doors?  Promotions, Advertising, Sales and discounts, Value and Excitement.

So, you need to build or enhance the “Magnet” that brings people to your stores and your brand.

Your magnet will need to be extremely targeted, it will need intelligence, imbedded within it, so that you can earn critical selling knowledge from all your new traffic, and you will need to be able to establish a “hook” a relationship that will let your effectively reach out to your new customers and market, in order to use your newly minted knowledge and relationship to bring these people back and sell them more in the future.

Today, there are better ways to harness the internet to generate excitement and Draw.  Retailers on the winning edge are using a new layered strategy to attract, engage and sell more.

A smart retailer will engage a strategically planned and well executed strategy to use intelligent contesting, linked to knowledge generating feedback and engagement tools, linked to rewards incentives and offers.

The result is a much wider exposure to the entire POTENTIAL  Market.  If this is executed effectively, you have:

An amazing, low cost MAGNET that sucks in large numbers of all the groups that could buy from you, and then you move to the:

COMPASS

Once you have attracted this huge new audience, you engage them with knowledge generating feedback and engagement tools, that forms the compass and the magnet that lets you craft the best offers, promotions, values and deals that will motivate purchase action at the most profitable level for each relevant group.

MAP

Once you have the audience and the knowledge and the relationship, you can create a map, that lets you figure out the best way to, clear inventory, fast, because you DO NOT WANT INVENTORY LEFT THIS YEAR.  Keep in mind that weak retailers will be saturating the market through this season and into the coming year.  Next you will want your map to help make sure that you will dominate your market.  THERE WILL BE LESS AND LESS ROOM FOR ALSO RANS.

Yes, there is great danger and risk ahead, but there is also incredible opportunity for those who see the opportunity and run with the right plan.

That is the intro to MORE CUSTOMERS.  NEXT, I WILL COVER MORE OFTEN.