Skip to main content

Understand your retail offer through the words of others

People jump to conclusions often with little evidence to back up their decisions, Daniel Kahneman observes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.
“For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs,” he writes.
Independent retailers must bear this in mind as they read national newspapers. Expect to see all sorts of self-interested story-telling dressed up as truth. Some of this will damage your business.
For example, discount retailers are now in fashion. “The more consumers are led to focus on price, the more we benefit,” Roman Heini, joint managing director of Aldi UK told the FT this week. Is it true? I don’t know. You have to make your mind up.
Worse. Greens newsagents in the heart of Mayfair has shut its doors. After nearly 20 years of buying his newspapers and magazines there, Tyler Brûlé, the FT’s Fast Lane columnist was forced to shop elsewhere.

“This small drama on Marylebone High Street represents just one example of a huge trend – what we might call ‘the other face’ of the UK high street crisis,” writes Brûlé. “The issue of essential independent stores being lost from many gentrifying neighbourhoods. Typically they are replaced with upscale outlets [that] offer little in the way of creating any sense of community.”

Newsagents are important, says Brûlé, who is also the publisher of Monocle, because they tend to offer shelf space to new publishing ventures that chains often avoid. While you may like his argument and call to landlords to be nice to independent retailers instead of seeking to increase the value of their buildings through deals with famous national chains, you will be better off getting your business model right.

Finally, the Guardian challenged shopper Juliet Stott to ditch Ocado and try out three alternatives: Lidl, Tesco and “local stores”. Lidl cost £137 for 126 items. Tesco £136 for 127 items. In each shop she opted for own label or Everyday Value items.

“Swapping to unknown brands and changing our buying habits saved us as much as 58% off our weekly shop, which was much more than I expected,” she says.

The deals to be had by shopping around mean I will become a much more selective shopper, she says. The savings are attractive.

But what about in week three? “Shopping in my local market town just north of York was just as I had expected. It was expensive and time consuming. There were fewer own-brand products, which meant I had to pay more for the leading brands or for the privilege of shopping locally,” she said.

How much did she spend? £74.05. Why so low? Stott “purposefully restricted what I bought to keep the cost down”.
It is the worst experiment that you could ever see.

“The greengrocer-cum-deli was a gorgeous place but some items were almost double the price of supermarkets,” writes Stott. “A small brown loaf was £1.15. It may have been freshly baked and much better quality but it was half the size…” I think I can see the bias in this comparison.

Every day, you will face similar prejudice to some extent from many of the shoppers who use your shop. On top of great systems and prices, your shop needs to tell a great story that shoppers can buy into. If you tell it right, they will believe you.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“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...

New look: big copy small?

The owners of B&Q are talking up how they have cut the price of a store refit from £2.5m to £1m by using wood-effect vinyl instead of wood and painted MDF backboards for displays. Managers are learning to live with grey shelving instead of a warmer-looking cream. Shoppers notice the produce, not the fixtures, suggests one executive. Up to a point! Most local retailers will extract the maximum possible life from their fixtures, sometimes taking too long to change equipment that has become tired. As in all business, it is getting the balance right. Shops need to be refreshed and with a purpose.

The secrets of persuasion: No short cuts.

The best moment in my interview with Terri Sjodin, who teaches many of the world’s top corporations how to sell persuasively, is when she smiles at me and asks to hear my “elevator speech".   My mind literally goes blank. The author of Small Message, Big Impact , her new book on how to craft powerful messages that persuade people to listen to you, has thrown the gauntlet at me. There was nowhere to hide. I had just told her how I had used her book to write out my three minute speech to open the Local Shop Summit. She listened patiently to my pitch, thought for a moment, and said: “I bet you had an illustration in your mind of an independent who really capitalised on your ideas and has taken them to the bank.” I could swear she was reading my mind. I blushed and nodded. “So you should open with this story,” she said. “Start out by saying: ‘Let me open the conference by telling you a great story with a happy ending.’ So the audience will say to themselves: ‘He is goi...