The world’s first omni-channel executive

The world’s first omni-channel retail executive was probably me.

In 1999 (not a typo), in a shockingly rare moment of forward thinking and risk taking, Sears’ senior leadership decided to launch an enterprise-wide initiative to glean how e-commerce and digital technology would alter our business model and to design a strategy to meet customer needs “anytime, anywhere, anyway.”

Millions of dollars were allocated, full and part-time resources were assigned from various business and support functions, a big name consulting firm was hired to help with systems integration, governance structures were created, and yours truly was plucked from the relative obscurity of running a small division to become the Vice President of Multi-channel Development & Integration.

Over a 15 month period, our renegade bunch of retail futurists executed a ton of analysis, unearthed scary findings (we had over 200 different 1-800 numbers!), delivered PowerPoint presentations bursting with jargon and coined memorable catch-phrases (my favorite: “silos belong on farms”). We also gained a deep appreciation for the barriers erected by organizations steeped in product and channel-centric thinking and behavior.

Once we wrapped up our work–and having blown through something like $7 million– we couldn’t point to many immediate high ROI recommendations. But our work did lead to an acceleration of investment in sears.com, building systems to create a single view of the customer and the formation of a central CRM group that yielded a lot of actionable customer insight.  We also developed the confidence to make pioneering investments in critical cross-channel capabilities such as ordering on-line and picking up in-store.

Personally I gained a very firm understanding of what is required to design a customer-centric strategy and implement a frictionless, channel-agnostic experience–which I was able to leverage once I moved on to the Neiman Marcus Group and in the years since I’ve been a consultant.

The purpose of this story, however, is not to regale you with my multi-channel bona fides.

The real point is that despite all the recent fervor around omni-channel this and omni-channel that, if you were really paying attention at any time during the past ten years or so, it has been blindingly obvious that digital technology was going to dramatically change the retail customer experience.

If you were really paying attention, you would know that Sears (and others) were publicly discussing the higher spend and engagement rates of multiple channels shoppers as early as 2003.

If you were really paying attention, you would know that companies like Nordstrom have been investing heavily in channel integration technology and processes for nearly a decade.

So if you are just starting to take customer-centricity seriously now–if you are peppering your earnings reports, industry conference presentations and investor meetings with little anecdotes about cross-channel customer behavior and the omni-channel blur as if this all just started happening–all this proves is that you were not paying enough attention years ago.  One has to wonder what other game-changing stuff you are years behind on.

Of course as Seth reminds us: “The best time to start was a while ago. The second best time to start is today.”

Leading through innovation starts first with awareness. Which needs to be followed with acceptance.

It’s a choice what you decide to pay attention to. And it’s a choice to act and to act boldly. Ultimately nothing matters without action.

It’s later than you think.

Understanding your brand’s ecosystem

Your brand, if it has any depth or breadth at all, can be seen as an ecosystem of sorts–an inter-related set of processes, relationships and perceptions that ultimately determine its relevance and health.

When you don’t see your brand as an ecosystem, and neglect to accept how you must co-evolve with your customers while fighting off hostile organisms, you miss emerging problems and nascent opportunities.

Witness Sears. When I joined in 1991, major appliances and home improvement products were king, defining the brand for most consumers and contributing an overwhelming majority of profits. Until Home Depot and Lowe’s emerged as major competitors the ecosystem we played in was a relatively straightforward one. Your appliance breaks, you get a new one. You need to hammer a nail, tighten a screw, cut some wood, we had the Craftsman tool for you.

Of course, the customer was always solution focused: as the old adage goes, you don’t buy a drill because you really want a drill, but because you really want a hole.  When new brands emerged to address a broader set of needs, consumer wants became articulated as home solutions–kitchen remodel, new home construction, DIY projects and the like.  The Sears (and Kenmore and Craftsman) brand needed to evolve as well. But didn’t.

During the nineties we worked hard to improve within our narrowly defined ecosystem (existing product focus, mall-based distribution), rather than see how the ecosystem was evolving. If we had truly understood and accepted the evolution of the ecosystem we had dominated for years, it would have been clear that we HAD to be in the home improvement warehouse business.

You know how this has played out. The fundamentally stronger organisms began to win out. Sears’ failure to participate meaningfully in the evolved ecosystem has doomed them to mediocrity at best; eventual demise in the most likely scenario.

Sears is just one high-profile case, but there are many other brands that have become extinct or largely irrelevant by neglecting to truly understand the ecosystem in which they live. Or die.

 

 

 

JC Penney swings for the fences (Part 1)

New CEO Ron Johnson’s first big move to re-invent JC Penney was to eliminate their intensely promotional high/low pricing strategy. The key elements are:

• Moving most products to “fair and square” every day pricing
• Establishing month-long themed value pricing for certain key items
• Simplifying and creating regular break dates for permanent markdowns.

To break-through the sea of sameness that envelops the slow growth moderate department stores space, Penney’s clearly needs to take bold action. And any student of retail knows that other needed changes to product assortments, in-store experience and digital strategy will take multiple years to fully implement. So what should we make of this “radical” new pricing initiative?

First, anyone who knows retail knows how foolish a high/low pricing strategy seems. The amount of money spent advertising events in weekly circulars and various broadcast media is enormous (and increasingly ineffective). The payroll and collateral costs of constantly changing in-store signing is a major line item. And “forcing” consumers to wait for a sale or have a coupon or get your store credit card to obtain the best price is seemingly a big customer dissatisfier.

So going to “fair and square” everyday pricing would seem to be a win for the consumer and a major improvement to any retailer’s earnings. Why not emulate Nordstrom and get both great Net Promoter scores and have an advertising to sales ratio that is the envy of the competition? It’s a slam dunk, right?

Well, not so fast Skippy.

First of all, unlike Nordstrom, every promotional retailer like Penney’s (and Sears and Macy’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond, etc.) has taught their customers–over many, many years–that their “regular” price is a sucker price. Reversing this perception will not happen quickly, no matter how creative your new ad campaign is and no matter how much money you throw at it in the first few months.

Second, every retailer has a customer segment that is intensely deal driven. This group refuses to buy unless they are convinced they have gotten the best possible price. And they believe they can ferret that out. They love the thrill of the hunt. Buying something without some special incentive is an anathema to them.

History shows–whether you are Sears, Macy’s or Saks–that when you pull back on promotions this segment’s business drops like a rock. If they are a tiny fraction (or an unprofitable piece) of your sales, it’s not a big issue. If, as I suspect is the case at JCP, they are a meaningful profit contributor, the short-term hit is significant and they will be hard to win back.

Third, like it or not, promotional marketing creates urgency to buy. Major events with limited time offers drive traffic. In-store messages that shout a great deal increase conversion. Over time hopefully Penney’s can teach their consumers that every day is a good day to check out their store and that there is no reason to shop around for a better deal. In the immediate term sales will suffer.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the math on everyday pricing is tough. While it is true that most consumers buy at the lowest promotional price, it is also true that there are plenty of customers who pay full price (or receive a lesser discount). To achieve the same gross margin percentage would mean setting an everyday “fair and square” price that is above the lowest historical promotional price. But by doing that, you will be uncompetitive with your direct competitors.

An informal price check I did yesterday (at the mall closest to Penney’s corporate headquarters) revealed that Penney’s price on several key national brands was several dollars higher than Macy’s and Sears. For consumers that pay attention to such things, this will undermine JCP’s pricing integrity and cost them business. This also creates an opportunity for Penney’s competitors to attack them directly on the one major initial plank of their new strategy.

The other alternative is to set prices to be consistently competitive day in and day out. Doing so will drive Penney’s gross margin rates down, which will require a very significant increase in sales just to maintain the gross margin dollar productivity at last year’s levels–which weren’t at all impressive.

Penney’s has acknowledged that they expect to take a near-term sales hit as they implement their new pricing strategy. And everyone recognizes that pricing is just one piece of a multi-faceted, multi-year transformation.

My fear is that this pricing change is much more of a swing for the fences move then the new management team realizes and that the first few innings of this new game will be far more brutal than expected.

While unconfirmed, initial reports are that sales having taken a bigger hit than management anticipated, which could lead to inventory issues and a huge loss of momentum for the new leadership at Penney’s.

I applaud Ron Johnson’s willingness to go big and bold. However, I expect his credibility and tenacity will soon be tested.

***********

In Part 2 I explore what else Penney’s new strategy must entail.

 

The obvious obviousness of omni-channel

Sitting in sessions at last month’s NRF annual conference I might have thought a drinking game had launched where you would down a shot every time someone said “omni-channel” or uttered the phrase “seamless integration.”

Speaker after speaker–as well as subsequent press coverage–rattled off buzz-phrases, statistics and factoids regarding multi-channel consumer behavior as if this were some big new discovery or insight.

All this proved was one inescapable fact. There are two types of retailers in this world: those that have been paying attention and those that haven’t.

If you’ve been paying attention all of this has been obvious for years. If not, you are suddenly awakening to the cold harsh reality that you are behind. Perhaps way behind.

Any brand that has taken the time to understand consumer behavior already knows that consumers think brand first, and channel second. Any retailer that analyzes their customer data understands how digital commerce influences brick and mortar sales–and vice versa. Any company that has been willing to look, appreciates the large degree of cross-channel behavior that has been evident (and growing) for years.

It’s been more than 5 years since retailers like JC Penney, Sears and Neiman Marcus stated publicly that customers that purchase in 2 or more channels outspend single channel customers by a factor of 3 to 4X. In 2006–nearly six years ago!–my team did an analysis that showed that more than 50% of Neiman Marcus’ total sales (and a higher percent of profit) came from customers that purchased in multiple channels within a 12 month period.

The proliferation of robust mobile devices–smart phones and tablets–add more touch-points, new functionality and serve to further blur the lines between channels, while creating the need for more frictionless integration.

There is a big difference between a new reality emerging and your becoming aware of a reality that is already there.  And it’s dangerous to be confused about that.

Obviously.

 

It’s time to let go of that hammer

You probably know the saying: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

This explains a lot of behavior we see with the leadership at struggling retailers.

If you came up through the merchant ranks, chances are you obsess about product–rather than the consumer–and fall woefully behind in creating a compelling omni-channel shopping experience. Today, you are desperately playing catch-up.

If the only way you know to drive revenue is through relentless price promotions, you now sit lamenting the lack of customer loyalty and your shrinking margins.

If you made your money through financial re-engineering and scorched earth expense reductions, you assume your latest investment will cost cut its way to prosperity, rather than realize that your overwhelming issue is top-line growth (I’m looking at you Eddie Lampert!).

If you drove same-store sales through price increases rather than customer and transaction growth–as the US luxury retail industry did for many years–post-recession you find yourself with too narrow a customer base to sustain profitable growth. You now are working overtime to win back customers you priced out of your brand.

All of these problems were caused by a monolithic view of strategy and a failure to gain deep insight into customer behavior. Most were preventable.

Of course, the past is history and the future is a mystery.

But there is no mystery in the failed wisdom of clinging to the past and continually wielding the hammer that got you into trouble in the first place.

Let go.

Move on.

Get some new tools.

 

 

 

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?

 

Why wasn’t Jeff Bezos on your Board?

Ultimately a company’s success is determined by a sound strategy that is well executed by strong leadership and a passionate, highly capable team.

But don’t underestimate the role of the Board of Directors in distinguishing winners and losers.

If your business is established but struggling, you need a remarkable Board to help guide craft a re-imagined and remarkable turnaround strategy. If you are a rapidly growing brand, you need a Board that can challenge your growth assumptions and navigate make or break scaling issues.

Every Board should have outside members who are well versed on the critical strategic issues that face that company. Every Board should have several members who are willing to aggressively challenge the status quo and are willing to walk if they feel they are not heard.

The unfortunate reality for many companies is that the outside members of their Board of Directors fall short on both dimensions.

When I made my first strategy presentation to the Sears Board in 2002 I was certainly impressed by the distinguished careers of the outside directors sitting around the conference table.

But how many had any relevant experience with a retail brand turnaround or repositioning? How many had a solid understanding of the emerging impact of e-commerce? How many understood the fashion sensibilities of the mid-market female shopper? How many knew how to leverage customer data to fine tune a marketing strategy? How many had experience crafting a value proposition that could fight and win against increasingly strong price competition? How many grasped the intricacies of delineating and executing an assortment strategy that would differentiate us from both on and off-the-mall competition? How many had experience developing relevancy with the younger customer that we so coveted?

That answer was precisely zero.

Look at Sears’ Board today. Different players, same result.

Sears, of course, is just one depressing example, but you don’t have to look far to find many more. Just for fun, go check out J.C. Penney’s current Board.

We will never know how different things might have been if Jeff Bezos or Kevin Ryan or Tony Hsieh or any other similar forward thinking executive had been on Sears’ Board at any time during the last 10 years. And adding a Board member from a sexy, innovative company certainly does not guarantee success.

But if a Board is supposed to guide the future strategic direction of the company, you might want to have a few people who know what they are talking about when it comes to issues that truly matter. And they also need to be willing to get in the CEO’s face when necessary.

As an employee, you should expect it. As an investor,  you should demand it.

 

 

 

The opposite is what’s risky

In a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review new JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson was asked whether it wasn’t a pretty risky proposition to completely re-invent a department store?

His answer was clear, concise and spot on: “The opposite is what’s risky.”

Years ago, when I was at Sears, we had many debates about how risky it was to take our dominant tools and appliance franchises “off the mall.” Mainly we were concerned about how such a bold strategy would cannibalize our core mall-based department store business. Now, more than a decade later, virtually all the value that’s been created in the retail tool and appliance industry has been captured by Home Depot, Lowe’s and others that responded better to shifting customer desires. And the core business we tried to protect now seems headed inexorably toward extinction.

Whether you study Blockbuster or Borders–or myriad other brands that fell hard from lofty perches–you don’t have to be much of a business historian to see how industry incumbents consistently get the risk equation wrong. And by the time their platform is fully on fire, it’s far too late to recover.

Defend the status quo and you’re likely to be the proverbial frog slowly boiling to death.

Challenge the status quo, walk through your fear and at least you give yourself a chance to survive and thrive.

 

 

The endless aisle and the world’s smallest parking lot

When I was in business school, one of the major consulting firms was notorious for asking interviewees the question: “what if energy were free?”  The short answer, of course, is “just about everything.” But the point of the question was to see if candidates could understand what a driving factor energy costs were in most businesses and consumers lives and whether the interviewees could quickly sort out the profound implications of no longer having that constraint.

I’ve been in retail about 20 years and for most of that time physical space has been the huge driving factor and constraint.

Retailers spend millions of dollars investing in stores and filling their shelves with millions of dollars in inventory. A lot of time and energy goes into visual merchandising and store display standards. Companies invest in planning and allocation software to optimize precious retail selling space and flow merchandise through their supply chains. You worry about things like “parking ratios” (the number of spaces you need per thousand of square feet).

And all along, Wall Street keeps you obsessively focused on comparable store sales growth, productivity per square foot and growth in square footage.

What would be different if most, if not all, of that did not matter anymore?

For more and more consumers, digital marketing and e-commerce has made the aisles endless and physical display meaningless. And the store is always open. Their parking lot is their desk chair, their couch, the smart phone or tablet in their hand. And your physical store is starting to look more and more like a showroom.

It won’t be long before most established retailers won’t be able to economically add any more net physical square footage. And if you are Barnes & Noble, the Gap, Sears or Best Buy, congratulations. You are already there.

If you are a multi-channel retailer where more than 10% of your sales are done through e-commerce and that channel is growing at double-digit rates, focusing on comparable store sales growth is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Comparable customer segment growth is far more meaningful.

If you have a lot of capital invested in physical stores and a large and growing percentage of your customers engage with your brand digitally before coming to your store, chances are you need a radical re-think about how you will drive brick and mortar productivity in an increasingly omni-channel world.

In a world of endless aisles and the anytime, anywhere, anyway consumer, just about everything is different. Or soon will be.

So the question is: are you?

 

 

In search of mediocrity

Winning companies consistently deliver a remarkable experience to their target customers. And they strive to always stay one step ahead of the competition. Seems obvious.

But let’s face it, far too many companies’ strategies are simply to close the competitive gap. That’s a start, but it’s not good enough.

When I was at Sears, we became obsessed with tactics to improve our relative performance versus key competitors like JC Penney and Kohl’s, acting as if we would win if our customer scores went from 4′s and 5′s to 6′s or 7′s, despite consumers rating our competition 8′s or better. One of my team members deemed it our “suck less strategy.” Inelegantly worded, but sadly accurate.

If your strategy is mostly about playing catch-up, but you have a sinking feeling that even if you accomplish it you will still be behind, it’s time to get a better plan.

If, when you are rigorously honest, you know you are on a quest for mediocrity, rather than doing something powerfully relevant and compellingly differentiated for your customers, you had better hit “reset.”

If you are throwing to where the receiver is, instead of where they will be, think again.

Good to great? Inspiring. Lousy to okay? Eh, not so much.