How To Market Your Retail Business
When retailers decide to get away from couponing, a wonderful thing happens. Value is defined. More customers walk in. Sales increase.
I’ve been preaching this for nearly twenty years. So I was intrigued when Clark Hermanson, one of my Facebook fans emailed me several of his ads the business had previously run in the Chicago Tribune. Much like any other nursery center, the same formula had been used to create each ad. They all offered sale prices on featured sponsors’ chemicals and then a bit of generic text highlighting their own in-season items.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with these ads, except everyone in nursery and garden centers is doing the exact same thing.
And when you just do what the other guys do as well, you become price-driven. You become a commodity. You become a nobody trying to say “look at me.”
Oh, I hear you out there. “But Bob, we need the sponsors’ money to get our names out there. It doesn’t matter what the featured products are or that they take up half of the ad space. It just matters that now we have money to run the ads to get our names out there.”
Well yes, I understand what you are saying, but to what extent is that type of generic memorable to your customers?
To what extent will it help frame your store as THE store for customers to go to? Will that ad get them to drive past the big-box with 69 cent annuals, $4 hoses and all the ancillary stuff they might need?
That’s when Clark realized the greatest thing they had going for their nursery center was their history. But how could he sell it most effectively?
That’s when they came up with these …
And this….
Do you see what is missing? The price, price, price.
Pesche’s decided to remove the sales angle from all of their ads. They wanted to stand out on their own.
They wanted their customers to know they were better than the other guys and thumb their nose at the other guys at the same time ; something I did fairly notoriously with Starbucks. Notice their ads meant shopping at the independent meant you got something better. Something personal. Something that could only work for that one store at that one location. It features the specialness of that one independent retailer.
Clark told me, “Customers are not running around trying to find out who has $1.00 off Miracle Gro this week. Those ads didn’t differentiate us. Now with our story instead, it’s been our best May in our 86-year history, partly due to weather, but mostly due to the ads which most of our new customers are mentioning.”
Summary
You will never be able to justify your advertising cost; it’s true. Putting a coupon in the ad doesn’t prove reach or effectiveness; it just means there are people who look for coupons in ads and use them.
You measure your brand by sales, by leads, by new customers bragging about how they drove past your competitor to discover you.
Bob,
I LOVE this! I love the way Pesche’s chose to highlight their story and who they are, rather than discounted prices. Everyone everywhere can learn from this case study. What is your true value? Share that with others. And customers will forget that they even care about cost (because truth be told, if it feels right they’ll find the money for it).
Thanks again for your brilliant insights!
Heather
This was truly inspiring to the core. This spoke volumes to me. Bob you’ve been saying this to us for a long time, but these pictures were worth 10,000 words. Thanks!
Love this!!!
Genius! Perfect ads to remind people what’s important!
As always another great post. Added to this I also feel we need to rethink all those local events like “Girls Night Out”, First Fridays, Second Saturdays, etc. Many shops are discounting, etc… but we’re training our local (and ‘regular’) customers to wait until these special monthly events to make a purchase. We’re teaching them that our pricing really is negotiable. Not sure that’s what we want to do.
Those that support it believe it’s’ all about traffic. But I feel many of these local events could be promoted as ‘we’re open late for you’ – we have ‘fun things to do’ for you – rather than come on down and get a discount.
Not sure how to switch gears if your community is already doing this. But I think it’s the wrong approach. Any thoughts?
There are lots of key considerations for building a successful retail business. If you want to make a good business idea then you should consider long and short term objectives, competitive landscape, market trends, risks, opportunities and projected financial.