Shop Till You Drop!
Peter Weedfald
Senior Vice President Sales & Brand Marketing SHARP Home Appliances & TV Consumer Electronics - SEMCA
From the fleeting glimpse of the obvious department: Our retail industry and indeed retail shoppers are hunting, reevaluating and reinvesting in new tech-operating models, new buying habits through unprecedented, seismic change.
As you read this article, approximately a billion square feet of retail space sits vacant throughout America.
Fast paced global economic shifts, multi-modal technological advancements and frequent jump-starts fuel new opportunity, causing turmoil as change is moving faster than legacy retail models can keep up with.
Recent Comment
Always good to see your thoughts and comments Peter. The pace of change is rapid. Those who embrace it can find a lot of opportunity, but resistance is pretty futile. It is as you put it, a whole new world. Making it better is up to us.
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For consumers, cloud-virtual and physical-retail shelf space accelerates a confusing blur of shopping destinations and preferences. For retailers and manufacturers, the role of brick stores with heavy SG&A legacy costs must be re-balanced against a multichannel shopping question: “What should a consumers’ shopping experience be in our physical store versus and or complimentary to our new cloud based economy?”
According to recent eBay Enterprise research, 72 percent of more than 1,000 online retailers surveyed anticipate online revenue to increase by 17 percent in 2015. As we know, physical retail growth is either flat, receding or expanding as a function of this opulent internet growth rate, as consumer shopping preference rapidly matures and accelerates through the fertile clouds.
The Very Good News: The legacy expression “shop till you drop” has a new progressive, excessive and digressive global centric meaning. We cloud-shop second by second, minute by minute for much more than product purchases. We shop for social likes, trends, opinions, information, exciting content and warmly felt community participation 24 hours a day. We shop for love, games, TVs, hotels and finding the truth about our past as well as our future. We even shop to find ourselves hunting and pining for positive feedback: to find our social and perhaps moral value through the first inch of a glowing mobile or stayed piece of glass.
The shop till you drop mentality changes everything for retailers, manufacturers and consumers alike. It changes everything in how we compete, how they shop, how we win. Changes even how we build, burnish, mature and accelerate brand value, our affable brand promises. The bloviated or bombastic way of legacy push-advertising is long gone, now considered a benefit for your competitors and a deficit for your brand if foolishly deployed.
Learn and Very Quickly: Call me the master of the obvious or perhaps a ninnyhammer however, I believe consumer facing channels of distribution are quite magical. They grow, they recede, they change, they morph: they find the way to serve copious opportunity whenever and wherever consumers gather.
In point of fact, mature retail management fueled retail growth through a simple formula: “Open up new shiny stores and strategically market, locally and globally.” Language such as “same store sales, basis points and local market expansion” were the standard bill of successful retail fare. As we depart from the old, the wonderful magical mystery tour of physical retail growth dominance, we begin to learn, once again, to supplant our opportunity sights on a very different way of doing business, especially for those in sales and marketing.
e-Commerce, let’s call it “non-human retail-selling intervention,” creates a slugfest of competitive hunting and farming for consumers through a glowing piece of glass. Recent headlines from brick retail legacies include: physical store closings from Sears to Macy’s to J.C. Penney to ToysRUs to Staples to Gap to RadioShack to American TV to Tiger Direct, to many more. To be clear, e-commerce has effectively scotched hard working brick retailers. It still only effects physical buying across America by 15 to 20% of total consumer sales however, time, change and growth opportunities are shifting.
The following are just three of ten Green Reign Leadership principles to consider deploying to best capitalize and re-growth retailers physical and cloud based shopping aisles:
Shoppers know more than store associates. Why? Because their knowledge gains and decision assertions are garnered in the clouds not from physical store engagements. Retailers can re-muscle up in-store traffic and consumer relationships by capitalizing on their cloud power: connected devices for their associates, active and valued apps for consumers to knowledge-up their 24 hour a day shopping experiences/journeys.
Associates can best profit from consumer in-store baskets. I recently phoned Harry and David’s to order a basket of goodies for a good friend. After I placed the order via phone I was asked 4 separate upgrade questions of which I chose to add 2. I felt better, my friend will be happier and Harry and David will benefit in terms of smarter revenue and profit. The in-store experience must also be a win-win-win experience. “Help me fill my basket with the joy I deserve, the joy I pine for, the joy I might have missed and I will in turn fill your cash register here and in the cloud.”
My cell phone is my smartest physical-store directory. Yet, brick stores are not directing me to their locations, promotions, sales or aisles. Time’s up! One to one CRM or SCRM mobile data mining, data-magnetic-consumer-opportunities has been in play for years as has been GPS services and in-store traffic directing apps. Both drive traffic. Both can drive substantial profitable consumers if you focus on physical store traffic opportunities as job one.
Technology should not be treated as our friends or our future for business growth. Consumers are our real friends, they are our life blood to reduce expenses, increase growth and ensure omni-channel competitive advantage. Tech-tools are simply a doctrine of necessity for business to best engage, serve, support, sell, build life time value and to brand persuade consumers.
Technology is a back end proxy, a series of cold and hidden levers designed to keep, adopt and ensure consumer engagements. Consumers offer the best answer to the most important question of omni-channel opportunity growth.
“Treat me like I matter in your physical-brand-world and I will treat your brand, your products and services the way you want me to both at your physical and cloud based store cash registers. Trust me, treat me right and I will shop till I drop for you, for me, for my entire family.”
Peter Weedfald Author's page Peter Weedfald is President of Gen One Ventures, a sales, marketing and brand-product consulting company. He has served as SVP, Chief Marketing Officer of Circuit City, SVP of Sales and Marketing in North America for Samsung, and SVP of global marketing and EEVP, GM & Chief Marketing Officer for ViewSonic
Published Author-Film Festival Founder/Director/
9 年All that matters is my fellow human being. The rest should follow like a prayer flag, not lead. Technology behaves like an erection on a sailor's ship. The training for customer service corporate people leaves out pride and critical thinking skills so when the template fails, they can't solve the problem. The sales rep in many stores don't know where something else is located, much less are trained to look you in the face and respond when you say thank you. We need eye contact and the simple sense of human pride, dignity and honor to treat others like it matters, not the lover scrolling in a restaurant opposite his date while she eats desert. Talk to her moron.