All shopping is about discovery. Even the customer who is certain they just want Heinz tomato ketchup week-in and week-out is disruptable by a good promotion or interesting new alternative—and they delight in it, even if that new discovery turns out to be disappointing. The point at which discovery is made may shift, but no shopping trip is ever made without it. Our role as retailers is to work out how to make discovery work for us to generate a sale.
Sometimes the discovery will be made before leaving the house: Research having been done online, in magazines, and among friends. That certainly applies to a more significant degree on big-ticket items but even then, having spent years watching actual customer behavior in-store, I suspect not as often as we might assume. Indeed, McKinsey & Company conducted research in 2010 that suggests 40% of customers who leave home knowing what they want, having extensively researched it and used all the tools online to help with that, are still “open to persuasion” once they arrive at the store.
Discovery makes people touch things. Make a customer say “wow” in your store and you’ve got a sale. Discovery is not just about showing customers surprising things; it is the complete process of helping to guide them to the highlights of your range, to the great promotions, to using great service to lead customers to the right choices and to structuring whole formats to provide moments of discovery throughout the customer journey.
If you’re managing a store within a chain, it’s well worth picking up the principles of discovery and making them squeeze your store’s merchandising to the limits. Try stuff and communicate back everything that works—use this as an opportunity to influence the direction of the business and to raise your personal profile. If, dear reader, you’re one of those lucky people in a position to create, adapt, or relaunch a format then I urge you to put discovery at the center of your thinking. Doing so will increase footfall, increase conversion, and help your team to maximize average transaction values.
A reputation as a store that can meet customers” subconscious desire for discovery will drive your footfall. Customers tend to visit stores that meet their needs—a need for inspiration, surprise, and ideas is satisfied in a store that has built discovery into its format and merchandising. At its simplest, it’s about making yours a store that people out on a shopping trip feel like they want to drop into “just because.”
This is a no-brainer: If you can actively get more of the best parts of your range into the minds and hands of customers as they browse your store then the more often you will convert those browsers into buyers.
Discovery is also about the total sale—everything a customer might need to get the best out of their purchase. So, that might be accessories with clothes, insurance with a phone, sauces with the pasta. It’s also about creating such a credible service-position that your people are better able to give customers the right advice on a total package—especially important in big-ticket situations.
This is all good simple stuff still—the only hard part of all this is in ensuring that there is consistency along through your Big Idea, mission, values, and into the way in which you tackle discovery. It’s a little bit chicken-and-egg, but faced with a blank sheet of paper, I would be making sure that my Big Idea was something that can be delivered with the techniques of discovery. Mission and values, what the business exists to do, and the spirit in which it does it should then nicely slot into that.
There are broadly four approaches to tackling discovery: promotion-led, service-led, product-led, and format-led. A small handful of retailers—Lush, Pret A Manger, and Stew Leonard’s (see later) included—take advantage of discovery across all four approaches and others combine two, sometimes three. Where I’ve listed a retailer as a great exponent of a particular approach, it’s because that’s the one that’s at the heart of what they do best.
This is the most common approach, and if you’re able to offer great deals, it’s very powerful. The availability of those deals is only half the story though—really high-quality merchandising is the critical component: getting your deals, and the benefits of them, into customers” faces.
Source: Koworld
• Creative promotions
• Variety of promotions
• A near-guarantee that there will be a deal for every customer, every time
• Consistent low prices on core products
• A retail type that encourages regular revisit
• Celebration of the offers by putting them in good locations and regular inclusion of the “good stuff”
• Store layout that includes plenty of hot spots
• Planned customer journey that leads visitors between those hot spots
This is all about using your people to provide customers with a fantastic discovery experience. We’re talking motivated, well-trained, professional teams encouraged to dedicate themselves to providing the best honest advice, suggestions, and after-sales service. Keys to achieving this are all written up in the “Team” section of this book—go do that stuff. Your customers will love you for it—love you with their wallets.
• Make it clear that you trust your team with your customers, that your number one priority is the satisfaction of both.
• Treat your people with respect.
• Offer them great training and lots of it.
• Allow and enable your people to experience the products you sell: Give them big staff discounts and operate loan programs for new products.
• Get your people involved in the supply chain: Allow them to see how things are sourced and made—doing so will help them to enthuse about your products and, more importantly, to identify what makes your stuff great.
• Structure your reward program such that it is biased toward customer satisfaction and away from sales volumes.
• Put in place a recognition program and use it to say “thank you” each and every time you see your people go the extra mile for customers.
• Value knowledge highly but also encourage your team to always be open-minded and make sure they understand that every customer has their own set of needs.
• Stress the value of listening to what customers tell us they need and show how this is more important than telling customers what we assume they should have.
Where the product is the star: Innovation, fashion, trends, great iconic design are the critical factors in stores where the product leads discovery. So, we’re talking about the kinds of stores that are great at buying and merchandising and at refreshing the ranges. But it’s more than that—it’s critical that the top team in this sort of store have an innate understanding of the principles and power of design and that they have a sense for the zeitgeist among their target customer groups. A lot of expensive single-store businesses start up as retail businesses in this category and an awful lot of them fail—they fail because the owners mistake “knowing what I like” with “knowing what customers want.” When done right, though, the approach can be incredibly successful—the very best fashion and furnishings stores are great examples of product-led discovery shops.
• It’s all about your buying: Spotting exceptional products at the right price points.
• Hang on, maybe it’s all about your merchandising: Showing off those products in inspirational settings?
• Study all the sources of information on trends you can find: Subscribe to trade-specific designers” magazines such as Frame and Creative Design.
• Watch what goes on in competitors” stores very closely for clues on trends.
• Talk to customers, get feedback all the time.
• Ask customers what’s hot, encourage them to make recommendations on new finds and new directions.
• Investigate design leads.
• Ensure key products are given room to breathe and are displayed to their absolute best.
• Be prepared to drop poor-performing lines early (or at least to change emphasis if you can).
• Refresh ranges often but show respect for important classic lines too.
• Do not presume to dictate taste but do try hard to influence it.
There are a number of retailers who have based their entire Big Idea and format around discovery and paths to discovery. These are the stores you find full of handwritten notices recommending products. They are the ones in which you see little notes to you, the customer, all over the place that connect you with the products. Everything in the store is about making sure that you are made aware of how brilliant product X will be for you, how you will feel, what a difference this thing will make to your health, well-being, or lifestyle. That sounds a bit “ad-man” written down. It’s worth saying that in order to properly convince the format must be honest, credible, and authentic too. Oh, and this is important: Format-led discovery only works if there is service-led discovery in place too.
• Create an authentic voice for the brand.
• Use your values to ensure that voice properly represents your Big Idea and mission.
• Create a compelling conversation throughout the customer journey: Make use of space on product, bags, shelf-edge, in changing rooms, on product cartons, walls, bags, editorial, at the cash register, and so on.
• Provide honest advice, from written communications through to staff advice.
• Celebrate the great products: Be enthusiastic, explain to customers why you think item X is so great.
• Constantly refresh displays.
• Get customers involved with recommendations.
• Make good use of customer advocacy: Make it easy for customers to tell others about your store and range.
• Remember that it’s the conversation that’s important.
• Make good use of seasonal and “occasion” events.
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