Chapter Three. Keeping it simple

Selling stuff in shops is incredibly straightforward. It’s not easy—easy and hard are different things to simple and complex—but it is straightforward. You’ll come across retail businesses all the time that tie themselves in knots of complexity, you might even work for one of them, and it almost always leads to eventual disaster.

Equally, retailing isn’t about inventing brand-new ways of doing things, have a look in the “History” section in Chapter 16 and you’ll see that there have only ever been four genuine innovations in retail history. That’s liberating: You don’t have to be the fifth person in history to come up with something brand new to be a great retailer. Rather it’s about creatively applying simple principles: like understanding who might want to buy the stuff you’d like to sell; working out where they might like to do that; and presenting a shop that gets them all excited about being in it.

The world’s best retailers all, without exception, do “simple” brilliantly: They communicate simple ideas clearly and quickly and they meet obvious straightforward needs in simple, straightforward, ways. You want a cheap T-shirt—you go to Primark; you want a tasty and fresh sandwich—you go to Pret A Manger; you want honest help and advice—you go to John Lewis.

Brilliant retail businesses do “simple” brilliantly: They make it clear what they are for, they sort things out, they make things happen through heavy application of common sense and “the obvious.” It pains me to see retailers drag their businesses through horribly complex processes of organizational change, branding transformation, and culture-shifting without really understanding the common-sense issues and without having a clue who their customers are. And it happens all the time.

Case study 3.1. Net Smart Retail: Woolworths doesn’t understand you anymore

Blimey, but the Woolworths story upsets me: thousands of dedicated staff out of a job, lots of suppliers with a big hole in their accounts, a great heritage lost and, worst of all, loads of communities suddenly missing a really important retailer from their local towns. Why was Woolies important? Because it was a great place for lots of us to get all those nice little treats and sundries without having to get in the car or on the bus to get out of town, it was cheap—we could afford to get the kids a toy there, we could afford a can of paint to make the house look a bit nicer, we could do simple and easy things in simple and easy ways without busting our budgets.

The reality is that Woolworths officially blamed their demise on Tesco and Primark having better buying power than they had themselves. I don’t think this is quite right. Woolworths over-complicated their business, forgot who their customers were, and stopped giving real people what they actually needed. And the proof of that hypothesis? Simply that Woolworths isn’t really dead at all—their customers found a new Woolworths that understood them better, and it’s called Wilkinsons. Wilkinsons swiped Woolies” lunch from right under the noses of Woolworths senior management.

I can remember sitting down with one of the Woolies marketing team a few years back and damn-near screaming at him to stop waiting for consultants to give him profiles of his “six magic customer types” and instead go talk to staff and customers in some of his shops. To go talk to the people walking past his stores and to ask them what they loved and hated about Woolworths. Ask them what they want, what they liked about his rivals. To get to know them in the simplest way possible: by talking to them face-to-face. Now, this chap is a nice guy but he just didn’t get it and so he and similarly minded colleagues ran one of Britain’s best-loved stores off the edge of a cliff. It was unforgivable and, yes, I’m angry. Angry for those staff, suppliers, and customers who have lost out. Old tough and gnarly F.W. Woolworth himself would be in tears, he really would.

It didn’t need to happen. A Woolworths that went back to its roots, that talked and listened to its customers and store staff would have pulled itself around. Probably after some drastic change, sure, to pare things back as Woolworths did in the 1980s under the wise stewardship of Sir Geoff Mulchay, a man who never has lost touch with real people and real needs. But it would have succeeded—Wilkinsons proves that.

Talk is cheap but it’s worth lots

I mentioned talking to store staff there, and can’t stress enough how crucial that is: No matter how hard you try, the cleaner in your lowest-profile store knows your business and your customers better than you do. So, talk to them and learn—you’ll run the company better if you do.

You’ve all heard the acronym KISS, right? “Keep It Simple Stupid.” It’s advice I often get from my mate Kevin McNally at Sony during his briefings. It’s good advice too—forcing you to come back to the basic truths of any given situation.

Retail is simple things—simple principles, strongly executed. Those principles are about human things. And that’s what this book is about—reconnecting with the human, the simple, the foundation stuff that retail is really all about. We’re not going to chuck out the numbers but we most certainly are going to learn how to use them to our advantage as proper emotion-driven retailers.

If we do this, we will achieve more success—the evidence within the world’s best retailers proves that time and time again. Carphone Warehouse, amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Tesco, IKEA—they don’t complicate, they simplify: They get on with things and they make huge amounts of money.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.145.151.26