When America gets tired of the “worst is yet to come crap” comments, we’ll recover the best part of America. Until then it seems these folks will find an even bigger audience.
You want to survive in this doom & gloom economy? Get the pant stackers out of your business. Hire salespeople. Keep the Wal-Mart employees at Wal-Mart and find the salespeople for your business. It’s not easy but neither is closing your store.
As a premium brand, Benjamin Moore has set a new direction for grabbing market share. Judging from the activity around the booth of customers, all women and some with kids, it seems to be working. Oh yes, no “2-for-1,” “buy now with no credit” and no coupons in sight.
At the Sonic Experience Store I found this kiosk with a screen for Virgin and rep David Weyher who took me through the concept from Creative Communications. Direct mail provider Mail America partnered with his company to integrate a direct mail piece that is trackable.
Please people – it’s been three months, not three years. Retail sales excluding autos and gas dropped a bit over 1%. Let’s not jump to conclusions.
To succeed, you need to tap into the unconscious which is the driving force. He quoted his study on smoking that showed conclusively the warnings on cigarette packages actually encourage smoking, areas of the brain light up when they see it. That is contrary to what conventional wisdom says should happen.
The Wall Street Journal today has an article so full of hysteria, no wonder the market is contracting. Excluding autos and gas, sales dipped a bit over 1%. From the first few paragraphs, you’d think it was off by 20%. Imagine if your kid came home with a report card of 98.7% – would the sky be falling then?
At first it seems you would get this information from a salesperson but what if you were so slammed with customers, they couldn’t get to the customer waiting? Employees could use this as part of their greeting, explaining how all your best products have this and they could get further information easily.
As we talked further, it seemed this would be much better at the premium product level. Joe agreed and told me about a BMW dealer in Germany using it to show customers exactly how they could customize their BMW. For them, there are actual samples of every leather on a card. Once the customer finds the exact shade they want, they place the card on the table, it reads and stores it.
Remember the story a week ago about how trips to the mall were off up to 30% portending huge declines in holiday retail sales? Like the price of oil was supposed to be $5 a gallon by now. The Wall Street Journal has a great chart listing year-over-year sales for the big boys right here. And guess what? It wasn’t as bad as feared.
