Forget worrying about the last mile, delivering retail business strategy successfully to the customer relies on that last inch!
Take the Waitrose promotion “Indian meal for two for £10″. This must be in direct response to the M&S “Meal for Two for £10″. Waitrose marketing department have put their heads together and come up with a variation on M&S and scored in a couple ways – the Indian meal is extremely easy to cook and therefore really does replace at least a take away, and no-one expects desert with a Indian so Waitrose can provide a more complete main course for the money.
So once the idea is in place what else needs to happen? Product development and the commercial team must have been involved to develop the dishes and negotiate prices with suppliers. The level of stock required needs to be forecasted and on Saturday evening had reached the store and was displayed prominently, the instore signage was in place – a large banner as you entered the store and the promotion was set up on the tills so the customer got the promotion in the end.
But retailers will always need to deal with dumb customers like me who take a different route around the store and miss the display. When I asked a member of staff (admittedly a young lad who is probably only Saturday staff) about the promotion, he said that only some stores were doing it. I would have challenged this anyway in view of the banner at the store entrance but another member of staff said that this store was doing the promotion, took me to the display and my husband and I enjoyed a very nice meal yesterday.
So for all the meticulous planning, the success of a promotion relies on every member of staff knowing about it. This requires excellent communication between head office and store in the first instance. There are many ways of achieving this but more and more retailers are deploying store communication systems based on web technology to achieve this. In a large store like a supermarket, a further level of communication needs to take place within the store. Realistically this is probably going to take the form of daily team briefings but technology could also be deployed by requiring staff to check the store communication system for key messages before starting a shift.
I attended the Econsultancy Supplier Showcase on Search and Bid Management Tools yesterday. These tools help in house and agency web-marketeers make their way through the jungle that is created by all the various combinations and permutations of online advertising that are possible. For each campaign, once the keywords have been selected, there are options of using pay per click, organic search or affiliates, then these are combined with options for the ad text, the landing page, the match type. It can end up in thousands of options and the task of analysing which is most profitable is really daunting and is faced by every retailer with an online presence.
So what options were discussed at the event?
Systems to address this solution fell in two camps:
The black box algorithm. Set up a lot of options which will result in many competing combinations that can be tested against each other and also set your business goals. Sit back and let the algorithm optimise your spend for you. Of course you can’t actually sit back because you need to keep setting up new options for the system to analyse.
The rules based system. Use these types of systems to manage campaigns in bulk. Set up rules so that the system can change bids automatically or simply alert you, the manager, when certain events occur. This type of system may seem to rely on greater human skill but the black box system also needs feeding with likely combinations.
And finally there was the “humans are best” camp. There was certainly a view that the search engines provide a perfectly usable system for free with a range of reporting and that a skilled web marketeer using these tools can beat a system any time!
No sooner do I highlight what a great brand-building job Zavvi’s high street presence did but The Hut (who now owns the online Zavvi) announces that it is going to launch on the high street. Currently The Hut is pure play e-commerce operating its own site alongside white label sites for people like ASDA. The plan is to open banks of unmanned touchscreens with chip & pin machines in shopping centres. The aim being to build The Hut’s brand.
I have just found the Retail Week Blog by Tim Danahar known as the Retail Day. Not strictly about retail technology though. Really think I should have found it sooner but it was only started on Dec 3rd. Glad to see this blog pre-dates a proper magazine like Retail Week!
The top search term of all time for this blog is “store management system”. It beats the next most popular term 3 to 1. But what does store management system mean to you?
Thanks for voting. If you answered EPOS system, leave a comment to let me know what you would call a system to address the problems retail operations face co-ordinating efforts across stores.
It has been no secret over the last few months that the only retail channel where there is any growth is e-commerce. The credit crunch (now downright recession) has been hitting retailers hard and many are improving or launching websites to compete. The ultimate move to the web however, is when a brand built on the high street moves entirely online. This can be seen in a few examples, some more high profile than others.
Woolworths' blog
Woolworths’ fall into adminstration over Christmas is perhaps the best known example – and where is the Woolworths brand going to survive? Shop Direct Group has purchased it and plans to launch a Woolworths e-commerce site. See the Woolies Blog for updates on progress.
Zavvi e-commerce site
Zavvi, another high profile Christmas collapse, has also survived on line. The Hut has purchased the Zavvi e-commerce site and is already trading. This is particularly interesting as the Zavvi brand only had a year or so to get established on the high street after it was rebranded from the Virgin Megastore. The high street is still an extremely powerful method of establishing a brand.
ProCook e-commerce site
Finally, a lesser known example, ProCook (purveyor of saucepans and all things cullinary) is reported to be closing its 18 high street stores to concentrate on e-commerce. It will however be keeping 13 factory outlet stores. The website currently shows 13 stores.
Posted by Rachel Maclean 
Posted by Rachel Maclean 
Posted by Rachel Maclean 
