I was in the Big Apple last week for the National Retail Federation’s Big Show at the Javits center. Nearly 20,000 people with something to do with retail from the C level (CEO, CIO, CMO) executives, to service providers, to the media – everyone was focused on retail and grateful the holidays weren’t worse than the previous year. I’ve done my predictions previously so here are some of the current trends in retail I picked up on.
Intel & Windows New Digital Signage
Big Box Retailers Have Given Up On The Browsers; Consumers Are Now Seen As Mission Shoppers. They have to be able to “get in quick and get out.” It’s like the Internet has been overlaid on the sales floor. Nowhere could this be more evident than the new touch screen interface from Intel.
Their Intelligent Digital Signage Concept Proof of Concept, presents HD video streams on two separate displays. This signage recognizes a customers’ gender and height using video analytics and then immerses customers into a rich multi-touch environment. They claim this gives retailers “attractive tools that can help create targeted, personal and effective customer connections.” Makes me wonder if they came up with the idea from the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report.
What I got from it was a giant store directory that, seeing you were a man let’s say, would automatically pop up with the men’s sections of a store and show off sale items. What they’ll do with transgendered folks or men with long hair or a women with a Rachel Maddow haircut is besides the point. Information is a good thing – right?
Rachel Maddow
The trouble with mission shoppers is there is no magic to the experience – you’re just filling a pre-existing need. Great merchandising is getting people to stop and discover your merch, not see your store as Tron or look at the palm of their hand. Great retail is about looking around your store, finding your way, being interrupted by a great display that shows how several products can mix together.
Best Buy ads
Big Brother Is Indeed Watching You. Best Buy touted how they use cookies on people’s computers to monitor where a customer goes after they land on their site. For example, if you were looking at plasma TVs, clicked off to ESPN or YES network then came back to the Best Buy site, you would be shown a banner ad tailored to sports. If it were HGTV it might show you an ad for a vacuum. When one woman asked the marketing representative of Best Buy if there were privacy issues they faced she said, “No.” When the questioner followed up with, “How could that be if you are tracking sites visited?” She said they used service providers who kept everything legal. Hmmm.
Blog Readers Rock! At the opening reception, longtime blog-reader Mike Murray, Director from Caliber Interactions found me and thanked me for my blog,” You stated the value proposition of mystery shopping better than I’ve seen anyone do.” I also had owners, Directors and managers waiting for me after sessions to chat about their business who recognized me from this blog. If you have something to say – blogs are a great vehicle to connect with people in your industry!
Online Learning is Only Good For Product Knowledge. In various button-hole meetings it seemed many had tried online learning but found that experiential training, the kind I present to retailers, is the only way to move sales. Otherwise, the learning just doesn’t seem to “stick.” They can read the text but that is hard to pickup, monitor or duplicate so retailers need to create safe educational learning where they can role-play and get immediate feedback.
Merchandising and Sales Skills Have Deteriorated. On Tuesday, I was having lunch with Gordon Segal, Founder of Crate & Barrel and his team. I thought the only way retailers will succeed with so many identical competitors in an overcrowded marketplace was to invest in sales training of the crew. ”You’re right,” he said. ”We had to sell back in the 60′s and 70′s, that has been lost.” Winston Weber had said earlier that day that, “Merchandising skills have dropped over the past 25 years. We need to reteach the basics.” Amen to that!
Original Jake Drawing
Accidental Businesses Can Prosper. Life is Good started as an antidote to negativity. The Jacobs brothers sold t-shirts for five years with no success. When they came up with the design of Jake and the words, “Life is good,” they sold 48 of the new designs in 45 minutes back in 1994. That may not seem like much but it was enough validation to them to go with it. Thereafter, anything that celebrated life Jake could do. They expanded their company by celebrating the simple things in life – hiking, fishing, ice cream. They found a niche by accident and grew sales from $87,000 to over a billion dollars in sales. John Jacobs is an Amiable personality that built on his natural inclination to be with people and created a company focused on people and helping people. His story was worth the cost of the convention registration alone.
Online Retailers Are Looking To Get Into the Bricks and Mortar. With so many stores looking to bring their business online (which I’ll tell you about next time,) I was fascinated by the online retail CEOs sharing their plans to expand out from virtual reality to storefronts. One told me, “We can give a better experience for our brand through people.” No names given but this could be interesting to watch.
Social Media Continues To Get Rave Reviews For the Isolated Stories. There are a certain segment of Feeler personalities that are happy to volunteer their time as “brand ambassadors.” They are the golden ring for many retail marketers who have scads of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Are these consumers who get off bragging about connecting to large brands (did you know Tide laundry detergent has 300,000 Facebook fans) really driving sales or just an experiment? Everyone is looking for their ROI (return on investment) when it comes to social media. James Bickers, Sr. Editor of Retail Customer Experience highlighted a woman upset her wedding dress hadn’t arrived, Tweeting about it, Bloomingdale’s hyper-responsive responses, day saved and customer happy. But is that really great customer service? Which leads me to my final point.
Great Customer Service These Days Is About Fixing Things Gone Wrong Or Getting Your Way. It’s like a spoiled child being listened to. Is that great customer service? I don’t think so but from the NRF awards, that’s what was rewarded. Great customer service is an experience so tangible, so connected to another human being from the start that the shopping experience with another human being stands head and shoulders above any experience the customer had that day at work, at home or in the mall. So exceptional that the shopper felt compelled to tell others how remarkable it was to friends, family and co-workers and then yes, posted it on Facebook or Twitter. That’s the mark of customer service from a customer standpoint.
From a merchant stand point it is to sell the merch so convincingly that the customer doesn’t even know the interaction follows a process (like my Sales RX: Five Parts to a Successful Sale) that builds the transaction, basket or average check while building a dynamic relationship with the salesperson and then the brand or store. That’s the trend we need to see more of or we’ll see more people grasping at the straws of technology because its easy; not the foundations of great retail which is to sell the merch which takes training.
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Instead of rehashing social media do’s and don’ts like it was 2008, how about a dozen huge HD displays showing actual tweets about the largest brands in attendance. Bonus would be displaying all the #nrf11 tweets in real time – both good and bad. The board could do the same with Facebook Fan pages and others. It would have brought the need for monitoring social media, personality of your business, etc home to all the attendees much better and sparked dialogue among attendees.
This has to be embarrassing to NRF that this facility can’t provide reliable connections. NRF should partner up with their solution providers AT&T and Verizon and the rest to fix it. Social media was worthless on the show floor and cost vendors some buzz.
The NRF Foundation Customers’ Choice award, conducted by BIGresearch came up with these results:
The customer sets up an account online, registers up to 6 loyalty cards and they get a plastic card with three on the front and three on the back.
1) Silos. Apparently every department is now referred to as a “silo” that needs to be broken down because they are all so isolated. No wonder so many big retailers are in trouble.
3) Yes, I drank the Kool-aid. It made several presenters sound a bit delusional. I mean, didn’t the ones who “drank the Kool-aid” at Jonestown all die?
