Tesco (UK)

The international blueprint for promotion-led discovery: Go walk their floor as an observer and learn how to select, place, and promote offers brilliantly.

Aldi (Germany)

While I’m not entirely keen on the management structures within Aldi stores (managers have very little say in the basic running of their stores), it is understandable and contributes to an interesting twist on the discount supermarket. Aldi aren’t just about being cheap—an important component in the store’s reputation is the quality of product it sells, even if that product is a special buy and discounted down to the ground. By restricting the variety of options per line (fewer suppliers, far fewer lines overall, and so much larger product orders and potential for significant discounts as a result), standardizing everything to within an inch of its life, spending less on fixtures, and requiring less space than a traditional supermarket they carve themselves a price-led position relative to those supermarkets. But by maintaining product quality, they also then differentiate themselves from the Lidls and Nettos and are able to attract more middle-class spend.

B&Q (UK)

Always good at promotional deals but what puts them into this premier division of promotion-led discovery is their approach to pricing core project items. Let’s take decking—the deck planks themselves are almost priced to give way, a few pounds only for each 3m length: A wandering customer will do their initial value calculation—the one done in your head when you’ve actually come in for something else—based on the cost of the decking planks alone. That makes the cost of the project appear to be very low. It is only then when adding the cost of frame timbers, posts, screws, joints, and finishes that the true project cost emerges. By this point, it’s a bit academic because you’ve already pictured yourself out on the deck enjoying a summer barbecue.

Boots (UK)

Poor old Boots comes in for a lot of stick but I believe it’s a fantastic retailer. Boots is really a dreary old drug store, yet customers like to drop in for treats, bargains, and gifts—that’s a stunning leap out from their core purpose. One of the things Boots does really well, and that’s helped them to make that profitable leap, is promotions—they practically own the concept of three-for-two offers and are very good at communicating these offers, displaying them and refreshing them.

The Container Store (U.S.)

They are brilliant at this. The Container Store provides phenomenal levels of training and wonderful employment experiences and works incredibly hard to build stable customer-focused teams. The result is a business that punches well above its weight and that enjoys a near fanatical level of customer support. One of my favorite retailers anywhere in the world. They provide an average of 210 hours/year staff training, great staff discounts, and have featured in Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work in America list for 11 years straight.

Carphone Warehouse (UK)

I get a bit of stick for holding up CPW as an example of great retailing so often, but I’m not going to apologize for that. When a retailer is this good, and for all the right reasons, then they need to be singled out. CPW is all about service-led discovery: Customers walk into these stores often with nothing more than the notion that they want a new mobile phone. They do so, overwhelmingly, with the prior knowledge that the CPW assistant will honestly, and accurately, discover the right answers to that vague need.

John Lewis Partnership (UK)

A byword for honesty, quality, and great customer care in the UK. Customers are drawn to John Lewis because they feel sure that the team there will help them to discover the right stuff for them. JLP has been especially good at doing this in high-ticket electronics and computing—areas perhaps not traditionally associated with the store but that, nonetheless, customers feel good about letting John Lewis guide them through.

ASOS (UK)

The store launched in 2000 with the name “As Seen On Screen”—the Big Idea was to sell clothes seen on celebs and actors on TV and in the movies. A great niche proposition. The management team there quickly outgrew that space as they discovered that they were good at tracking screen-seen stuff but even better at understanding and stocking up-to-date fashions in general. That awesome instinct for fashion, and a focused concentration on the 16–34 age range, has driven product-led discovery and created a store that customers love to regularly check out.

Habitat (UK)

It’s in a right old state at the moment, but there are lessons from Habitat’s history that are worth looking at here. From Sir Terence Conran’s early days creating the business, Habitat was at the forefront of shaping British living. Habitat sold the duvet to a country raised under scratchy sheets and they did it by explaining to us that the duvet represented freedom from domestic chores. They made every 1980s kitchen complete by selling each and every last man, woman, and child on the planet a bright red, yellow, blue or green teapot; they helped my Mom and Dad feel comfortable enough to throw dinner parties by suggesting that a chicken brick, or a pressure cooker, was the secret to successful entertaining. Mom and Dad divorced in 1988, so I’m blaming Habitat for that too.

Zara (Spain)

Zara is built on an incredibly efficient supply chain that enables it to bring new items into stores twice a week, every week. That’s an astonishing commitment to product-led discovery—they lead the fashion retail industry on logistics and are able to take an idea from initial design to retail rail faster than anybody else. It’s obvious to see why customers might react positively to such fast change and ever-shifting variety.

Top Shop (UK)

No other fashion store anywhere in the world is as good as Top Shop currently is at product-led discovery. No young British woman, and no hip visitor to the UK, leaves Top Shop out of their shopping trip. The sheer weight of fantastic, right-on-the-money fashion that blitzes through the store and into customers’ wardrobes is truly mind-boggling. As my earlier case study on them suggests, this is almost entirely down to Top Shop’s commitment to stocking only stuff they love. Everything they sell works or it’s dropped fast, ranges are refreshed at speed, one-offs come in and go out (and onto eBay) at the blink of an eye, and even the celebs like to say they’ve been in and raided Top Shop. The business is all about making customers feel the urge to come in as often as possible in a bid to discover the best new stuff before anyone else does.

Apple Store (U.S.)

These iconic retail bases for Apple’s products are entirely about discovery. They are built, from the ground up, around the notion of non-Apple people discovering that Apple meets their needs better and of dedicated Apple users discovering more that they can do with their Apple products. So you have every single part of the Apple range, in quantity, out on the shop-floor set up so customers can touch them, play with them, have fun with them, and discover new things with them. Then the Apple Genius team, extremely well-trained customer advisors, make themselves easily available to give advice, recommendations and solutions. In the early days, I wondered if the Apple Stores would turn out to be heavily subsidized brand promotion rather than profitable stores; the opposite is true—the stores are very profitable as well as being stunningly successful discovery zones for loyal and new Apple customers alike.

Target (U.S.)

The team here recognized that in order to beat Kmart and to avoid a Wal-Mart smothering, they would need to offer something different within the variety-store format—and they chose discovery. They did that by building the entire store around innovative displays, by bringing in young and hot designers, through a perfect collaboration with Martha Stewart, and by creating a much friendlier and more open atmosphere than is usual in this type of store. Indeed, Wal-Mart has even been forced into creating a sub-format to tackle Target on Target’s ground: These slightly more-upmarket Wal-Marts drop the McDonald’s narrow aisles and guns and replace them with better-quality fixtures, more space, and independent café concessions.

Pret A Manger (UK)

These sandwich shops do authentic conversation better than any other retailer in the world. Should you find yourself reading this book while sitting at one of Pret’s stainless-steel counters, you would find that the coffee cup you’re drinking from has a note on it that explains how Pret’s coffee has come to taste as good as it does. That cup would explain too how Pret supports the grower of the beans your coffee was made from. You might then dab the corners of your mouth with a Pret napkin that tells you it’s made from unbleached, recycled fibers and that explains why that’s a good thing. This conversation Pret A Manger has with its customers is powerful and is about helping customers to discover a lunchtime option that meets a perceived deeper set of needs. There’s a lot of research evidence which proves that human beings’ sense of taste is affected by contextual information—telling somebody that they should expect to enjoy their sandwich more because it is fresh increases the likelihood that they will enjoy it more. You can use that in lots of ways in retail—we’re generally really bad at communicating emotional or sensual information so directly to our customers.

Lush (UK)

The store you smell before you see it has format-led discovery pretty much sewn up. Everywhere you look there are “handwritten” (actually printed but made to look handwritten) signs full of humor and passion telling you why they love the stuff they love. Lush’s discovery positioning was born out of a Big Idea that was genuinely new: to create cosmetics from pure fruit and vegetable ingredients with no link, at any stage, to animal testing. Instead of being terribly po-faced about that positioning, the team behind Lush chose instead to have fun. Stores are merchandised in a unique way that sits somewhere between authentic French market-stall, English jumble sale, and display stand at an expo—I like it a lot, it’s all really easy for customers and staff to interact with the product and with each other.

Urban Outfitters (U.S.)

You’ll notice that I categorize most fashion stores in the product-led discovery category. Urban Outfitters make the jump because of the innovative way they have constructed their display systems, the credible addition of non-clothes ranges and the considered inclusion of branded ranges. All displays at Urban Outfitters are mix-and-match—tables, shelves, and rails can be easily combined, moved and re-merchandised. This makes it easy for the team to constantly refresh the store and to use a form of convection to bring different items to the surface before allowing these to settle back into main stock as new items get pulled to the surface.