Carry on shopping

An interesting article was circulating this week about the impact of the recession on shoppers and hence how their behaviours had changed.  This got me thinking, always a bit dangerous, but isn’t it a case of the more things change the more they stay the same?

My take on it is this. 

Yes, we are still in recession and yes it has had an impact, but at the same time the same basic challenges still exist for marketing people.  It is still so much about Product, Price, Place etc, but not only are we having to work in more challenging times but then there’s also this thing called the internet. 

What that means is that a) people, and this is all people, have to some extent or another felt the impact of the recession and have therefore adapted their buying behaviours and b) the internet has been a catalyst for those changes. 

If anyone thought that the internet was going to make things easier for everyone then think again. For some maybe it does (make things easier) but for an awful lot of us it actually make things much more complicated.  We’re seeing that more and more with retailers being unable to effectively integrate their online and offline operations.  The internet has given huge power to consumers in their ability to research, compare, review and purchase.  Add in the economic downturn and this has given them real reasons to do more researching, comparing and reviewing.   Then we can’t forget of course that for conventional retailers it is not only about getting it right online – you’ve also got to get the basics right in store too – witness Tesco’s £1bn investment in its store portfolio and customer service!  And then it’s not just about doing that in a vacuum, you’ve got your competitors all experiencing the same pressures and looking to be more competitive themselves. 

So in short you’ve got a perfect storm being brewed up with consumers having to react to the economy combined with this great tool (the internet) to help them react more effectively.  But my point is this, despite the internet, and despite the economy, it still comes back to the obvious fact that success still derives from getting the marketing mix right.  The world has changed, but ultimately isn’t it still the same?

A (half) day out at the shops

It’s not often that I get a day out, or to be honest in this case a half day out, but with research taking place close by I had the opportunity to visit Stratford City, the new(ish) Westfield scheme.  And how interesting it was, I really should do it more often.

Approaching the centre from the train station, Stratford City is much more understated than its sister over in White City.  There is no grand entrance from the direction I walked and therefore the sense I got was of entering some huge space but having no sense of the scale.  Thankfully a printed mall guide was available which folded out into something larger than a sheet of A3 paper, the store list alone filling half of one side but despite that the font size was tiny that I don’t know how many people will actually be able to read it.  The challenge is that with so many stores and restaurants how on earht do you put it all down on paper – or alternatively why bother – or maybe just use electronic guides? 

First port of call the loos.  Always a good place to start since they are often indicative of a centre.  Wow!  Were they smart, clean, no spotless, and I guess they would be described by some one more poetic than me as elegantly modern.  This gave out all the right signals and even better, they were free!  (Always a point of much debate, “to charge or not to charge”, but in my mind anything that promotes dwell time is a good thing and with all these restaurants around you need to feel comfortable).

Walking around I was struck by the clever use of the overall space.  Hats off to the designers, it must have been tricky building around a major transport interchange, but the use of multiple floors gives it scale without giving the impression that you are walking miles and miles.  

You really will not starve in Stratford City. The food and drink choice is quite frankly both exciting and dare I say it baffling.  I can only believe that either a) the high footfall will allow every outlet to get its fair share or b) the winners and losers will be clear very quickly and we will see some rapid changes in the catering line up quite soon.

The fast food court was not open fully when I arrived, but McDonald’s was serving breakfast.  What I was struck by however was the number of tables laid out in 4s.  This is interesting since I cannot believe that the party size at Stratford City is significantly different from the average of less than 2 people. In short poor use of the available tables and chairs.

Despite the amount of catering I was slightly surprised by the lack of seating in the open areas.  There is nothing like a quick re-cap of where you are and where you want to go – even struggling with the equivalent of an Ordnance Survey map of the centre – and you don’t always want to buy another tea/coffee/smoothie just to sit down.

Whilst covered centres are extremely popular for all the obvious reason to some they are almost claustrophobic.  Westfield have tried to alleviate this with an outdoor area they have called The Street.  This is great idea and since you can loop out and then back into the covered malls it gives a sense of ‘getting some air’.  Unfortunately on the morning of my visit The Street was acting like a wind tunnel so I suspect few people would want to stay outside long.

What did strike me however was the sense of lack of maintenance.  The leather chairs and sofas were already looking tired, but more concerning was that several internal (yes internal) signs were missing letters so rather than giving directions to ‘the Street’ what I read was to ‘he treet’.  As ever even in such a huge scheme it is the little things that matter, the attention to detail that makes the difference, and shows your shoppers that you care.

All in all a great centre, in all senses of the word.  Some parts still to be completed I know, but I look forward to returning again to see not only what it looks like completely finished but also to see if the maintenance teams have been a little more active.

Understanding customers, cost or asset?

Ask a bunch of business people and they will all go on of the importance of consumer insight, of putting the customer at the heart of your organisation, of getting close to the customer or any other similarly clever sort of phrase. 

It is one of those things we accept as being rather important and the sort of thing that is just the way businesses have to be these days.  Or do we really?

I was reminded by a tweet earlier today that as people get promoted in organisations they usually get moved further away from their customers, and thus have a lower chance of understanding their customers at first-hand.

It has been said that marketing is too important to be left solely to the marketing department.  I’d suggest the same was true about insight or market research.  Not only that, but it is too important to be seen as it is in many organisations as a ‘nice to have’ or just a cost to the business. 

I once knew of a business where conducting some research to understand how your customers perceived your service was seen as a little vanity project for the marketing team.  But they weren’t doing it because they hoped to get a free lunch from the research agency; they were doing it to give some hard facts and figures to the business and to support a corporate tag line that was about being the best.  As soon as things got tough for that business they took a knife to the research budget and they had no empirical data to back up any claims.  The senior management team saw market research as a ‘nice to have’ and not as a ‘need to have’.  To them it was really a cost and not an asset.  Sound familiar?

They had not made the connection that by cutting back on research they were getting further away from understanding their customers despite the fact that they would still have chanted in unison in any strategic workshop session the mantra ‘we need to get closer to our customers’.

In the current climate it seems that saying it and actually doing it may be harder than ever. The research budget does appear to be back on the chopping block.  Ever the easy thing to remove, I’m sure many a conversation has been had along the lines of “why conduct research every year when every other year will probably do?” 

Ironically in these times when trends move ever faster and fashions change ever quicker is it not more important than ever to understand how your market, your sector, your competition or your consumers’ needs are changing?  Arguably the demand should be for more insight, not less, for increasing budgets not cutting them.

So next time you hear someone trotting out those phrases about understanding the customer, find out what they have actually done about it.  Have they really seen insight as an asset to their business or did they really just see it as a ‘nice to have’ that quite frankly they just don’t really see the value of.

The rise of do it yourself – a good thing?

There was a time when as a brand manager/ marketing manager etc you surrounded yourself with the right mix of skills. Often this involved paying other people who were experts in their particular field to do the stuff that you couldn’t do.  These people worked for companies who did things like design things, draw things or write things. (Clue: You knew it’s what they did because they tended to work for businesses with wacky names or ones with three or four surnames thrown together, and they all seemed to have been to better universities than you).

They in turn might hire other people to do things like storyboard, script and film stuff for a TV commercial.  (Clue: You recognised these other people because they seemed to wear clothes that you didn’t think were suitable for wearing during the week). Somehow it seemed to make sense.

But then things changed a bit. You didn’t need to spend money on people to do all of that sort of stuff. You could do some of it yourself.  There were computer programs that meant you could type your own brochures, why you could even use other programs to design things like maybe a logo, after all how hard can it be?

Then other people came along and invented other things that you could use to do your own research.

So what is the role of the brand manager /marketing manager in this day and age? And is all this do it yourself thinking really that smart?

Nowadays it seems (particularly to reduce costs) you can do a lot of things yourself. Of course you write your own annual brand plan, and you even type it yourself! You go out and observe some of your consumers in real life and also compare and contrast your competitors’ products or service offerings.  But you might also be tempted to do a bit of your own research using a cheap web application, after all how hard is it to write questionnaire, format it and then email it out to your own database?  The next bit gets a bit boring though. You have to analyse the responses, and then really you should compare the results somehow either to a previous study or make some other meaningful comparisons. Only you don’t, because that’s not what you do and it’s not what you should do.

I’d probably use the example of the orchestra and the conductor. It may not be the best example but let’s go with it all the same. You see in the orchestra my belief is that the conductor sort of keeps it all together.  He or she ‘orchestrates’ a group of other people with their own skill sets and as a result creates something wonderful.  But the conductor even if he/she is really good on the violin doesn’t take the solo spot. If he/she is rather brilliant on the trumpet doesn’t take over when the trumpet gets its solo spot and even if they are a wiz on the timpani doesn’t hog the limelight for the percussion solo.  They use other people to do the bits they are good at and the really smart conductor probably also recognises their own limitations.

Just because you have a camera built into your phone doesn’t mean that you should shoot your own brochure. Just because you have a camcorder in your phone doesn’t mean you should produce your own commercial. Just because you found a cheap app on the net doesn’t mean you should do your own research.

Remember, you are the conductor, so conduct.  Do not try to play every part as well.

No such thing as a free coffee?

 Now I like coffee. To be honest I am much more of a coffee person than I am a tea person, so when I heard about the free latte offer in Starbucks I was certainly going to make my way to the local branch.

I was somewhat fearful of a queue stretching half way down to the Steine, or perhaps the memo from head office has not actually reached/been sent toBrighton. But my fears were unfounded, the experience was better than expected. I was met by smiling staff who knew exactly what was going on. There was no embarrassment on my part asking for a FREE coffee, and I announced my name clearly – it’s not difficult to say, it’s Paul. I shuffled along the counter and when it appeared to be my turn the young lady serving called out for ‘Latte for Rail’.  Now that was me, I boldly announced it was my free coffee, despite feeling a bit foolish somehow and also slightly sorry for the assistant who could not get my name right.  But, what the hell it’s a free coffee.

The thing is it got me thinking about coffee. Yes really. To be honest I rarely find myself in any of the branded shop nowadays unless I am out of the office and in need of a coffee fix. In Brighton making a coffee in the office seems to be the obvious thing to do!

Firstly the cost. For the price of a take away I can buy a jar that does numerous cups – OK, so I also have to buy the milk too.

Secondly the quality. Naming names, Starbucks in Victoria station has to be the worst. If it isn’t cold, it’s all frothy and half full, so passing by always reminds me why I try to avoid them, Starbucks in particular.

Third the wait.  It’s only a coffee, OK it’s a cappuccino, or it’s a latte or a flat white (who named it that?) or some other poncy name, but it’s really a white coffee.  It seems to take forever to a) get served and then b) actually to get your drink, unless I’ve got a good half hour to spare I usually walk away.

So where does that take us?  Well it seems that the Starbucks offer generated simply huge numbers of twitter page impressions so I suppose the PR team are happy – even if like me quite a few noted the inability for those serving to get customers’ names right.  I’m slightly more positive towards Starbuck now after all they did give me some 50% off vouchers too.  But is this the start of the UK coffee wars?

I suddenly realised how many branded coffee shops there were in Brighton!  Costa alone has so many that it actually double-counts them on its own website!  It looks like there are five or six in Brighton, not including another in Hove. 

So how many more can they all build?  They all seem to stock the same range of drinks, I think they all have flat whites these days too.  Maybe growth now is going to come from stealing share.  Which may mean more loyalty cards, more price cuts and maybe with any luck more freebies. 

If you are asking, the name is now Rail, and anything with a silly name as long as it is full, and tastes of coffee will be just fine by me.

Driving loyalty?

I was tempted to join one of these petrol station loyalty cards, on the basis that “why not”. We’re filling up at least once a week, there is no supermarket petrol station in town and if I stick to one brand then maybe I can get some form of reward.

So we signed up and in due course received a nice plastic card and even some discounts.

The trouble is not 12 months after joining, the petrol station in question has changed ownership, and of course the new operator no longer accepts the loyalty card.

Now the company in question here were quite clever. They sent out some money-off vouchers to encourage me to use their next nearest service station which is about 15 miles away. So although I wasn’t going to go there very often there would be occasions that I might be passing and therefore fill up there.

On the first occasion on presenting the money-off voucher the person at the desk explained that they had never seen the voucher before, but were willing to accept them since it was clear to her that they were indeed genuine. A clear case of “didn’t get the memo” or “didn’t read the memo”.

On the second time of visiting, early last week, I was unable to make any purchase because I couldn’t, they didn’t have any, a clear case of “didn’t get the fuel”. Now to be fair there was at least an inch of snow on the ground, maybe even two, but having said that the next petrol station I came to, some 500 yards further into town seemed to have no problems at all getting either petrol or diesel.
Now funnily enough I did try to contact the company in question but their web site kicked me out as soon as I submitted my comment, and I do not believe it actually got through to them.

The result of all of this? Well at the moment I am a little unsure as to how I feel about them. Part of me still feels they have demonstrated consistent incompetence but part of me now just feels a bit sorry for them and want to give them another chance.
I suppose this is another case of needing to focusing on the basics like getting fuel to the forecourt and ensuring you are able to communicate within the organisation, otherwise are you just wasting your time with those fancy cards, web sites and points statements?

Measuring Marketing

In our recent survey of shopping centre managers, we found that 80% of shopping centres were commissioning advertising to promote themselves. What surprised us was that only 50% of shopping centres were measuring how effective their advertising was.

Marketing budgets can be enormous, with huge TV ad campaigns, but without market research it is impossible to tell if your message is getting to the right people and if it is influencing their behaviour.

Lord Leverhulme famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half.” Without this type of feedback on marketing campaigns some shopping centres will never know.

Websites are *so* last century

In our recent survey of shoping centres, nearly all shopping centres now have a website, giving details of store listings, opening times and how to get there. Where the industry seems to be lagging behind other sectors is in the use of new social media to promote and grow their brand, as well as other uses such as readily available feedback for research purposes.

4-out-of-10 centres are taking tentative steps in to this brave new world, but many lack the expertise or time to manage an increasingly important media for commuincating with their customer base. Business Blueprint have developed a social media product, Diamonds, which cultivates a group of key target customers and brand advocates who will freely give their opinions on your brand.

It all Ads up

It’s good to see ITV back in the black, benefitting from a general increase in advertising spend.  As the economy has been recovering, firms are reinvesting in their marketing budgets, but are very much conscious of getting value for money.

We at Business Blueprints offer an independent assessment of how effective marketing campaigns are.  A clear indication of the penetration, awareness and relevance of a campaign that is not prejudiced by self-interest, gives you the information you need to judge the performance of your marketing budgets.

In a recent survey, we found that whilst 8-out-of-10 respondents were spending money on advertising, only 50% were conducting any research about the effect of their advertising, and only 35% were getting any customer feedback at all.

Don’t just do it

I read with interest in Retail Week a piece on B&Q and how they had embraced the internet for their on line research.

Using their own social media application ‘B&Q Voice’ they had generated their own panel of 80,000 customers which had allowed them to generate 2-way dialogue with their shoppers in the form of both quant surveys and through focus groups.

It is encouraging to see the research aspects of on line communities being made use of in addition to the ‘one to many’ broadcasting which seems to be the norm from many retailers.