Part 1 of Smart Retail is for:
- Retail leaders: you’ll find here in one place seven critical tools for analysing customer experience, improving format engagement and uncovering performance improvement opportunities. There is the potential to drive major change projects as a result and my team are always happy to help shape those, so do get in touch.
- Owners and entrepreneurs: follow the ideas and advice here and you will either sharpen your current offer or find a stronger and better one. All independent retail businesses will benefit from running through this material.
- Store managers: give yourself a head start by absorbing and learning the theory and ideas set out here. You will also uncover opportunities to improve the business that are worth sharing with your senior team.
- Students and early career retailers: you are our industry’s future, so absorb and add the following to your melting pot of ideas and inspiration. Please feel free to challenge and shape the material and, as is the case for all readers, do get in touch and let me have your perspectives on it.
The seven secrets
I have deliberately avoided too much concentration on theory in previous editions of this book, preferring to work on the here and now of what is effective and practical. But things have moved so fast in our industry since the last edition in 2011 that to not explore these new fundamentals would be to sell the reader short. The most important change I’m referring to is dealt with directly in the first “secret” and it is the move from retailers holding all the power to a new reality in which it is now customers who have full control.
I used to think that calling the consistencies I’d observed in the best retail businesses “secrets” was somehow disingenuous. They aren’t secret – they’re pretty damn obvious if you look at enough successes. But what I’ve also discovered is that whether you are the CEO of a plc or a scary year into your first shop, what looks obvious to a third-party observer probably isn’t always obvious to the poor sod at the coalface.
I’ve called the most important consistencies of modern retailers “secrets” for this edition because I suspect that it flags them in a way that is more helpful to a retailer who is looking for answers. I’ve always wanted this book to be one that real retailers can take into battle with them – be that the battle to create a credible strategy, or the battle to make enough money this weekend to keep the lights on.
Who needs to know about this stuff if it digs deeper into the theoretical? Of course you must if you are considered a retail leader and, if you are, these seven secrets will be golden for you. But if you’re running a single store, leading a department, shaping e-commerce, or just keen to understand better the new workings of the retail machine, then you absolutely must have access to these secrets. Nobody else is talking about them in the way that I do and you have the possibility to work with me in shaping our understanding of these new realities. With big change comes real excitement and fun – it’s a great time to be doing what we do.
Modern retail – modern realities
This part of the book comprises seven chapters, each of which reveals a fundamental secret of retailing in the modern age. Some of these secrets are fundamentals that have held true in some form for at least the last 30 years, Big Idea and respectful management of people especially, but others have been rocketed up to the top of the list of essential retail needs by the violent change in power that has seen the relationship between retailer and customer transform as it has.
Much of that change in power has been precipitated by the staggering scope of technology-led change and Secret Six deals with not only the opportunities and necessities of technology but also looks forward beyond the idea of “omni-channel retailing” to a very close reality where retailing becomes entirely “location-agnostic”.
The one caveat to the importance of this section is one that I’ve always given: should you find yourself trading in an under-shopped marketplace where demand outstrips sellers and vendors or square footage (think UK home improvement in the 1980s or video games in the UK and USA in the 2000s), then nothing matters much beyond loading the shelves. I don’t see any market like that right now or for the foreseeable future though.
So, like the rest of us, you’re probably operating in an intensively competitive market, full of savvy competitors and demanding customers. For you, these seven secrets are absolutely essential to your creation, growth, survival and chances to flourish.
Big times, big words
Okay, I admit it, you’ve rumbled me. Secrets is a bit of hyperbole, a tricksy artifice that our brains happily and powerfully aid and abet by imbuing with valuable meaning. Bear with me, this isn’t a tangent. The reason I’ve used words such as “secrets” and “fundamentals” is the same reason we retailers must pay closer attention to the way in which we wrap experiences and products with words and frames (among a host of other elements) that help customers feel a particular way about those experiences and products. The third, fourth and fifth secrets deal directly with this idea but it runs through pretty much the whole of this book.
So the secrets themselves are definitely not unknowables that I’ve pulled out of thin air – but they are definitely insights that are much thinner on the retail ground than they should be. A few truly great retail businesses are doing all of them instinctively, while others clearly have a powerful understanding of most of them, but many are fumbling right now to get to the bottom of the seismic tremors that are rocking our worlds.
What you can be sure of is that almost all currently upward trending retailers have most of these secrets sitting at the heart of their way of doing business.
Retail secret one: low friction and high reward
How customer control means we must reduce shopping friction and balance this with a better understanding of how shopping experiences deliver reward.
Retail secret two: what’s the Big Idea?
Why you need to understand what you, as a retail business, are for.
Retail secret three: want? Got. Need!
How to understand and meet customer need states.
Retail secret four: “I’m just looking”
Why discovery is vital in modern retailing.
Retail secret five: I choose stories
How curation and narrative make it easier to decide to buy.
Retail secret six: the everywhere store
What location now means and how online and offline are irrelevant labels.
Retail secret seven: “we love working here”
How great employment experiences are vital to great customer ones.
Guaranteed success
I really should have put a question mark at the end of that heading. If you’ve bought the book because you flicked through the pages and just read “Guaranteed success”, I sort of apologise. But not really – I’m a retailer, we love a hook and you know what we’re like – you’re one of us. So this is a question, not an absolute.
Does following the seven secrets of retail guarantee you success? No, it doesn’t.
Three of them are fundamentals that are always there in retail successes but are also occasionally present in retail failures too. That’s another one of the thrilling, pit-of-the-stomach things about what we do. Our success still depends on whether or not other people buy into what we’re selling. Very occasionally, they just don’t, despite our best efforts. Often, experiments we try, ones that look like real crackers on paper, don’t work. That is the nature of trying and learning. Mistakes, dead ends and false starts are also the stuff of success because every single one of those is a chance to learn something and do it better next time. I’ve often talked about Ray Kroc and his string of failures until, at 52, he recognised something special in the way two brothers named McDonald were operating their burger joint. Kroc wasn’t a failure because he never gave up trying.
But if your retail strategy or business don’t have at least the spirit or the beginnings of the seven secrets within their DNA, then a failure is strongly indicated. I’ve seen few successes that don’t have the first three sorted. There are also very few retail market leaders that don’t incorporate three out of the remaining four in their way of doing things.
The great retailers today, but to a large extent through post-war retailing history across the Western world, all understand what they are for. They trade with a simplicity and clarity of purpose, they put nothing in the way of the customer handing over their money. They inspire customers by going beyond the product and instead sell how it feels to unlock the benefits delivered by consuming those products. Also, they understand increasingly that the store is wherever the customer is, that the same customer can be different people at different times (much more on that shortly) and that great employment experiences lead to great customer experiences.
So the seven secrets might not be a guarantee of success, but following them, building them into the absolute DNA of the business is going to take you a significant distance further down the road to it.
I believe that following the secrets is absolutely essential for start-up retailers and there are almost no existing retailers that would fail to benefit from reshaping their strategy around them.
Proof through exception
This is a fun game if you enjoy these things. Take any struggling big retailer and measure them against the seven secrets. I guarantee you’ll find at least one of the secrets is missing. Most often Big Idea but failure to inspire will usually be there. How about testing yourself too?