"Rather than just telling people we have a store full of products, we are selling the idea that hobbies are an enjoyable low-cost way of occupying leisure time", says Chris Crombie, chief executive of HobbyCraft, which supplies knitting and model-making supplies. Newspaper retailers have a sense that they need to do this, as do their suppliers. One of the newspaper industry's problems is too many potential readers focus on what they can get elsewhere for free and too few focus on the value that papers deliver. Shoppers need to be educated and when they are, mostly they like it. Waitrose and John Lewis put educating shoppers at the heart of how they differentiate their offer and it works for them. If they can, newspaper retailers can.
“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
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