When the vehicle becomes the destination

If you read most marketing magazines, attend a typical industry conference or listen to professional service firms pitching their latest offering you hear mostly about tactics and techniques.

Whether we’re talking about social media, mobile apps, big data analytics, cross-channel integration–or whatever the buzz-phrase of the moment happens to be–there is a tendency to glom on to how something works and whether whatever is being sold can deliver ROI as a stand-alone investment.

Yet the reality is that your journey toward impactful customer-centricity, toward being truly channel agnostic, and ultimately delivering on the promise of a frictionless customer experience, isn’t merely about picking the right individual component pieces that move you closer to your vision.

This is not to say that individual investment decisions aren’t important or that one should completely ignore ROI calculations.

But the remarkable brands of tomorrow are likely to be run by leaders who understand where they need to get to and are committed to work through the ways to get there. They realize that their brand is an eco-system and creating it requires ruthless experimentation, making some bold investments, driving a culture that puts the customer first and aligning the organization and metrics against that end vision.

In an ever-changing and fast-moving world the vehicles we choose are likely to come and go.  When we hold too tightly to them we  risk losing sight of the destination.

Built for me (Part 2): Treat different customers differently

In my last post, I suggested that the most powerful brands elicit the feeling from their core customers that the business was designed around their unique needs and wants. That is was built for them.

This idea is a core tenet of strategic business model design. But it extends to tactical execution as well.

I’m hardly the first person to espouse the “treat different customers differently” mantra, but embracing it is essential to putting “built for me” into practice day in and day out.

Built for me can extend to how you deliver your customer experience. One size fits all approaches rarely yield superior customer service marks. When you don’t pay attention to–and act upon–my unique preferences, I’m less and less likely to return.

Know me, show me you know me and show me you value me.

Built for me should be a driving force behind just about any brands marketing strategy. More and more, mass promotion fails to move the dial or gives the illusion of prosperity when all you are doing is chasing sales with no potential to be profitable–or chasing customers with no potential for loyalty.

Leverage analytics and insight to deliver a progressively more personalized set of messages, offers and experiences.

There is no question that pursuing a built for me strategy introduces cost and complexity. But more and often than not, failure to embrace this path eventually leads to middling performance and consumers who are more than happy to take their business elsewhere.

 

Blaming the hole

None of the top 10 retail profit leaders in 1970 remain on the list today, and only half are still around at all.

Leading brands like Best Buy and Barnes & Noble, that just a few years ago were building stores as fast as good sites could be found, are dramatically shrinking their store base and scrambling to re-imagine the customer experience.

Smart phones and tablets, that barely existed 5 years ago, are putting unprecedented power in the hands of consumers and blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds.

More and more people are finding that what worked for them in the past isn’t getting the job done today. Sometimes painfully so.

That feeling of being a round peg in a square hole isn’t going away. Call it the “New Normal” or whatever you want, but it’s here to stay.

You can scream that this isn’t fair, or you can accept that there is no such thing as fairness. There is simply reality.

You can hang on to the illusion that you can control the way the universe unfolds, or you can get to work on the things that matter than you can actually affect.

You can stop blaming the hole.

Holes are going to change in size and number and complexity. New holes will emerge all the time. And probably at a faster rate than ever imagined.

But let’s be clear. If you find yourself being a round peg in a square hole, it’s the peg that’s the problem.

 

Brand as burden

Wade through marketing literature, or attend a conference, and you may well come across a statement along these lines: “You must be more than a business. You must become a brand!”

Brands garner premium pricing. A strong brand enables long-term differentiation and sustainability. Your brand will be your strongest asset.

But what about the liabilities inherent in many brands today?

An extremely well-known brand that lacks differentiation and relevance with its desired target audience is typically worse off than the upstart ascending brand.

Without question, fixing the tangible weaknesses in a broken business model can be a huge task. But it can be relatively easy compared with trying to re-program the minds of consumers.

Once it committed to a new strategy, Cadillac addressed the rationale shortcomings in its value proposition relatively quickly. But it took more than a decade–and huge marketing expenditures–before it meaningfully moved the dial with the new consumer segments it desired–and needed–to endure. Consumers had to let go of their pre-conceived negative brand associations before being open to even consider buying a Cadillac.

A case in point today is JC Penney’s radical attempt at re-invention. Penney’s is just over six months into a stated 3 year plan to transform their business model. They are aggressively rolling out new merchandise, new pricing, new advertising and a new in-store customer experience, among other needed changes. It will be 2014 before the customers they aspire to own will get a reasonably complete look at the tangible aspects of the new strategy.

But one thing is fairly certain. Many, if not most, of the consumers that Penney’s will need to win over have a well-developed–and long-standing–view of the brand, and it can be summed up simply: “it’s not for me.” Changing the rationale aspects of the shopping experience is absolutely necessary–and no small feat–but it will not be sufficient.

When your brand has become a burden the challenge of turning the ship goes far beyond fixing the cost structure and improving the features and benefits of your offering.

If you are contemplating taking on the challenge of re-inventing a legacy brand, do so very, very carefully. The retail graveyard is filled with brands that failed to appreciate how daunting the challenge is.

And if you go down the path, expect to spend more money and more time than you think.

Probably a lot more.

 

 

 

8 things that are wrong with your omni-channel strategy

Read anything about retail, attend a conference, get pitched by a consultant, evaluate a new software product, and chances are you hear “omni-channel” mentioned early and often.

So with geniuses like me throwing the term around ad nauseam, let’s get specific about what is probably wrong with your current strategy and what you need to do to go from meaningless words to remarkable action.

1. Focusing on semantics rather than strategy. I’m often asked what’s the difference between “multi-channel” and “omni-channel” and my answer is typically: “Not much and who cares.” The point is having a strategy that reflects how customers shop today. The point is designing a value proposition that fights and wins in an increasingly blurred channel world. The point is delivering a compelling customer experience day in and day out. Call it whatever the hell you want. It’s what you do that matters.
2. An appalling lack of customer insight. If you are blessed with a killer offering and virtually no competition, go straight to #3. But if you don’t work at Apple or Google, chances are you need an actionable customer segmentation. Chances are you need far better insight around consumer behavior. Chances are you need to be able to differentiate your target customers by needs and value. If you don’t have the data to treat different customers differently, you are at a huge disadvantage.
3. Your mileage may vary. On one side, you have pundits screaming that if you aren’t “omni-channel” today you will be out of business tomorrow. On the other side, there are those that find that sentiment preposterous; just look at Amazon, they don’t have retail stores and they are doing fine. The truth is that every brand’s situation is different. An omni-channel strategy as an abstract concept is useless. An omni-channel strategy that reflects the reality of YOUR consumers, YOUR competition and YOUR current and future capabilities is all that matters. You aren’t Amazon. You aren’t Nordstrom. You aren’t Macy’s. Take what you like from some of the leaders and leave the rest.
4. Screwed up metrics. Ask a retailer about their  “same store sales” and “gross margin rates” and “sales per square foot” and the growth in their brick and mortar stores compared with e-commerce sales and you are inundated with data and commentary. Ask them about growth in key customer segments, segment profitability, traffic conversion or retention rates, cross-channel browsing behavior and the like, and you are probably met with silence or meaningless babble. What gets measured gets done. But if you are focused on the wrong data you are going to do the wrong things.
5. A dumb organization structure with dopey incentives. Most of the time I was at Neiman Marcus our then CEO would get on analyst calls and talk about our “compelling multi-channel strategy.” We included similar words in our annual reports and investor presentations. In reality, we were organized by channel, had no meaningful truly customer-centric efforts and all the top executives had incentives to maximize their own fiefdoms. Silos belong on farms. If are serious about “omni-channel’ you need to set a structure that reflects customers first, and channels and/or products, second. You need to pay your people on those things that truly advance key customer segment growth, engagement, loyalty and advocacy over the long-term.
6. Confusing the vehicle with the destination. Yes, the web can be a sales channel, but for most retailers it is mostly a tool. Having a social media or mobile strategy is critical, but only as a means to your customer growth strategy ends. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
7. Failure to ship. The era of months of intensive market planning, controlled testing and the big reveal are over. In case you haven’t noticed, things move a lot faster today, communication channels are increasingly blurred, and customer desires are far less predictable. Trial and error works far better than spectacular planning and flawless execution. Better to ship often and fix it in the mix.
8. Neglecting relevance. Retailers are great at talking to themselves. And passing to where the receiver used to be. And wallowing in me-too-ism. And going big and easy, rather than small and challenging. Treat different customers differently. Make it relevant. Extra points for remarkable.

Honey, I shrunk the store

Until Amazon–and a handful of other pure-play concepts–emerged as power-house brands, a retail growth strategy largely consisted of two major components: build bigger stores and create a bigger retail footprint.

Whether you were Walmart, Office Depot, Coach or Lowe’s, your strategy was mostly about pushing the limits of market dominance: expanding your assortments to cover every related purchase occasion and expanding locations to cover every trade area perceived to be viable.

Then digital happened, and if a large part of your product offering could be delivered without the need of a physical location (think Best Buy, Blockbuster or Borders–and that’s just the “B’s”) this has proved to be a big problem indeed.

And show-rooming happened, and if you were in categories where the consumer likes the research service found in a brick and mortar location, but ultimately buys on price, you were losing a lot of business to direct-to-consumer players not burdened by your overhead structure.

Then there’s the emergence of omni-channel retailing, and if you aren’t making it frictionless for your customer to shop anytime, anywhere, anyway, you were losing share to those who have truly embraced customer-centric retailing.

Last, but not least, the recession happened, and many of the consumers you were counting on–you know, the ones that had become weapons of massive consumption fueled by easy credit–suddenly pulled back big time, and many of the locations you opened in the last five years or so are dead in the water.

So for most, it’s time to shrink.

Fewer, more productive stores. New, smaller formats that resonate more strongly with today’s blended channel realities and that can work in different kinds of trade areas.

But if you think getting smaller is just about physical space, think again.

When you think smaller, think more intimate. Become more personalized, more intensely relevant. Treat different customers differently.

In the future the customer shouldn’t walk away from interacting with your brand thinking that you have down-sized. They should feel that you know them, you get them and that your brand was built with them at the center of all that you do.

The world’s best loyalty program

The world’s best loyalty program is no program at all.

If your value proposition is engineered to deliver a truly remarkable experience for your target consumers–and you’ve chosen to focus on segments that will allow you to make a profit–the result should be both behavioral and emotional loyalty.

Many of the world’s most powerful brands–Apple, Four Seasons, Louis Vuitton, just to name a few–have managed to thrive without such programs.

Let’s face it, most “loyalty” programs are some combination of ruses to collect customer data or serve as customer bribery schemes for the most promiscuous shoppers. Worse yet, many are simply me-too efforts that are knee jerk reactions to the competition which end up raising the cost of doing business without engendering true loyalty.

I understand that there are situations where loyalty programs have become competitive necessities. But before embarking on an expensive and complicated launch (or re-design) take a hard look at your underlying value proposition and customer strategy to make sure you are solving for the right problem.

 

JC Penney swings for the fences (Part 3): When the invitation is better than the party.

I like Penney’s new marketing campaign.

The TV ads featuring Ellen DeGeneres are captivating and funny–and seemingly everywhere. The print campaign does a solid job of re-branding JCP as fresh and contemporary, the monthly theme is carried through each piece beautifully and the featured items look great and seem well-priced. My only criticism is that the ads look a bit too much like Target (gee, I wonder how THAT happened).

But here’s the thing. Over the long-term the work of marketing is to differentiate the brand, create strong preference and reinforce loyalty/advocacy. Penney’s won’t win without doing a much better job of attracting and retaining a new generation of consumers and increasing the trip frequency, average purchase size and/or retention rate of the current base.

In the short-term, the work of marketing is to get the target customers’ butts in the store (or drive them to the website). I suspect the new campaign IS elevating interest in JCP and starting to drive incremental traffic. Yet while Penney’s has improved their presentation markedly, the stark reality is that both the product assortments and overall experience are still pretty much the same–i.e. unremarkable in most instances. And unlike Apple and Target, Penney’s store fleet is a grab bag of some very good locations with a whole bunch of mediocre and lousy ones.

We all know that when the invitation is better than the party, we aren’t very likely to get fooled the next time around.

 

 

 

It’s shrinkage Jerry!

You might be fortunate. You might be one of those retailers that is early enough in their maturity cycle to still have plenty of new markets to enter and quite a few new stores to open.

But for the majority of brick and mortar retailers it’s over. Or soon will be.

This is the era of shrinkage.

Fewer stores. Smaller stores. And a fundamentally different store experience.

The inexorable and dramatic shift to digital retail is already making some of your locations obsolete. And it’s making the space devoted to certain categories untenable.

If you don’t have a keen understanding of how these radical shifts will transform your real estate strategy, you had best get started.

If you don’t have deep insight into the omni-channel behavior of your core customers, I’d be worried. And I’d get busy.

If you don’t offer something meaningfully relevant and differentiated from what Amazon–or a host of other on-line only players can deliver–you need a dramatic re-think of your strategy.

You can take this dip in the icy cold water of reality as something to fear or a bracing wake-up call.

The former keeps you stuck.

The latter is a call to action.

 

 

 

 

 

When the last 15 years happens to you

If you are in retail, the last 15 years or so have brought enormous change. Let me call out a few profound shifts:

• Winning business model bifurcation: Price and dominant assortments at one end (Wal-mart, Amazon); remarkable experience and assortment curation/product differentiation on the other (Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton). The result is death in the middle.
• Digital retail: What started as an electronic catalog is now not only a high growth channel approaching 10% of many categories’ sales–and much higher if the product can be delivered digitally–but an increasingly important medium for promotion, interaction, customer reviews, price checking, etc.
• The constantly connected–and inter-connected–consumer.  As more and more consumers are armed with powerful mobile devices the notion of anytime, anywhere, anyway retail has become a reality–and expectation. Social networking, product review sites and pricing apps are creating greater and greater information transparency. The brand is no longer in charge. The consumer is.
• The omni-channel blur. Most of your customers will engage with multiple touch points in their decision journeys. As mobile commerce grows–and it becomes easier for consumers to seamlessly move between various applications to gather product information, check prices, confirm inventory availability, get product reviews and the like–the notion of distinct channels breaks down. It’s a frictionless, compelling experience that matters, not making each of your channels better. New ways of consumer engagement, new ways of organizing your business, new ways of measuring and incentivizing become mandatory. Silos belong on farms.

While it is true that remarkable new business models sometimes emerge quickly and unexpectedly, most winning concepts that have gobbled up market share from industry incumbents did not come out of nowhere.

Amazon launched in 1995. The off-the mall and specialty formats that have made life difficult for the Sears’ and JC Penney’s of the world have been important competitors since the late 1990′s. Anybody paying any attention to customer data during the last 10 years has known that the so-called “multi-channel” customer outspends a single channel customer by a factor of 3-4 times.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight it’s clear that many Boards and many retail executives were asleep at the wheel. They failed to gain sufficient awareness of the competition and seek truly actionable customer insight. They failed to accept what was happening. And of course they failed to act. And now it’s too late.

So here’s the new reality. While many of the companies I mentioned–and countless more I’m sure you can offer up–had some 15 years to see what was happening and make the necessary changes, chances are you will have less time. A lot less time.

So I guess the question is: what are you going to do to make sure the next 5 years don’t happen to you?