The return of real

People are craving real experiences again, those that are tactile and sensual, and that should not be a surprise. First comes the disruption from a new technology and then comes the normalisation in which the beneficial parts of formally disruptive ideas are absorbed and the ephemera discarded. Take e-books, for example. After a period of intense Kindlefication of reading, e-book sales are stagnating and physical book sales are strengthening. Across global bookselling, bookshops are reporting customers returning and sales gently strengthening. E-books haven’t failed, far from it, but they have found their place.

Knitting, baking, the maker movement – real is returning, where technology is enhancing the experience. So the bread is real and made by the consumer, but the recipe and a video on kneading techniques are playing on a tablet on the worktop, while artisanal flour has arrived from a tiny mill nobody would have heard of before the internet. The knitters are sourcing their yarns from great online suppliers or via links on knitting blogs; they get together in online forums but meet in cafés and the cafés start to link up with wool shops. Real experiences, social sharing and the pleasure of expectation returning. The trend for mindfulness is part of this too. Being aware of the impact on your mind and wellbeing through slowing down and enjoying real experiences. I find all this extremely optimistic and empowering: real and digital working together to make life easier to enjoy.

Aspiration culture becomes expectation culture

Expectation appears to play a very important role in how a person experiences a particular scenario. It also now appears that implanting false memories to then have an impact on preferences is almost trivially easy. Could the way we talk about products and experiences before a sale also have an impact on how a customer feels about those things when finally using them? I am convinced it can and that our marketing communications are an essential part of setting up exactly that process.

Sorry, what? Did I just keep on going after dropping that bombshell on false memories? Prof. Giuliana Mazzoni at Hull University has shown how false memories can change people’s behaviours. In one experiment, she plants a memory of having been sick when eating turkey sandwiches. (Her test subjects have been pre-screened and identified as having a particular fondness for turkey and so would be expected to eat and enjoy turkey sandwiches.) Having planted the false memories, subjects are invited back two weeks later for an experiment that they believe is unrelated and asked to eat and rate certain sandwiches. Consistently, the subjects eat far less of the turkey option from a platter of three and then rate the turkey poorly on taste. In a further experiment, they are asked about their history of turkey, with the subjects then self-suggesting a former bad experience with eating turkey.

A bad experience that didn’t exist before the implantation of the false memory.

The implantation process is incredibly easy. At an initial interview, subjects are told that they have been entered into a computer programme that has suggested things that are likely to have happened to them when they were children. The first suggestions are small and extremely likely to have happened to most people, such as they liked chocolate and visited the seaside. Then a much less likely one is introduced, that they were sick after eating turkey, which is then followed up with what feels very much like a version of cold reading where the interviewer talks in confirming language, such as “You can remember the aftertaste that lingers for a few days, can’t you?”, and so on. Subjects are shown fake news stories from around the time they were children that talk about contaminated turkey meat making many people ill.

This idea is so powerful–doesn’t it say so much about how we can influence customers’ preferences and choices in positive ways? Plant those ideas that you are great to shop, be specific about why, reinforce positive ideas with confirming language. Possibly draw the line at inventing old news stories about how great you are but how important does it now become that, after a customer has a great experience, you reinforce that and stop being shy to remind them of those brilliant experiences?

Your voice, get ready to use it

For the remainder of this chapter and the next, I’m going to talk about the practical things retailers can do to interpret what we’ve just discussed. If you’re running a big retail business with a clever marketing team champing at the bit to get on with doing their thing, it’s probably not for you but, if you’re running a small chain or an indie, you’ll find this part very useful.

Despite my reporting of the false memory hocus pocus above, marketing itself is not a mythical black art, it is nothing more, or less, than a common sense framework: a framework into which your activity can be fitted. Marketing theory is very simple. The skill, especially in the case of retail, is not in cleverly executing the practice of marketing but rather, it is in trusting your gut feel to keep things simple. Marketing is about understanding who your customers are, where they can be found, what they need, and how much they will pay to satisfy those needs. That’s really kind of it.

This sets up a series of questions. Who are we selling to? How do we tell them about our product? What will they pay for it? Notice how these questions form a chain? The answer to the first informs the second which, in turn, sets up the third. Answering these questions can help you to make better decisions on promotions and on advertising.

Questions chain:

1. Who might want to shop at a store like ours?
2. What might they like about us?
3. Which products would excite them?
4. What kind of promotions do they like?
5. Where can I find these people?
6. What should I tell them?

Each customer type looked at will create a slightly different thread. Use what you learn to select target audiences to talk to. The following pages list some of your options for reaching those audiences.

Social media

Unfortunately, it is really easy to get some rotten advice on the use of social media as a marketing tool for retailers, and it’s easy to waste a ton of cash on that advice. I don’t want to add to that, especially if you are reading this book a couple of years after publication when the platforms and opportunities will have changed.

What I will do, though, is suggest some useful ground rules that have been consistent in best-practice over, at least, the last few years.

• Tone of voice: create a voice for the business and be consistent in using it.
• Be active: do not fall into the “if we build it, they will come” trap. Go and count the number of dead Facebook pages for retailers that get no attention whatsoever. You have to actively manage and engage.
• Have something interesting to say: content is king, so you have to have something to say that people are engaged by and keen to respond to. Don’t update for the sake of it, be authentic and relevant.
• The Google Algorithm: read everything you can find on the Google Algorithm (and keep reading, as the algorithm is constantly updated), understanding as best you can because much of the detail is hidden, which signals that Google is listening for, and what it appears to be prioritising can be, the difference between your business appearing on page 1 of a search and page 100. Here’s a good archive of the Algorithm: https://goo.gl/YraEdX.
• Court bloggers: create good relationships with relevant bloggers, vloggers and special interest groups relevant to you. A respected fashion blogger loving your new shoe model because you’ve worked with them will generate more sales than a month of telly adverts.
• Get mentioned: paying for celebrity tweet mentions, Instagram photos and the like is tacky as hell, but shifts product like little else. If you can get those for free by courting relationships and being a compelling partner to relevant people, then all the better.
• Get ready for the platform that will kill the one you are on: do not stand still on one platform. What’s gaining attention and users’ time today may not tomorrow. See, for example, Tumblr and Flickr that have faded somewhat in recent years as Medium and Instagram have surpassed them; and the same will happen to Medium and Instagram. The kids might be on Snapchat today, but tomorrow it’ll be something else. Right now, Slack is a mostly corporate tool but has the possibility to develop into a discrete recommendations engine soon. (As soon as I submitted this manuscript, Instagram reported a fall in user numbers.)
• Learn about chatbots: start looking at chatbots right now – Google it and get involved. You’ve got four years to exploit the hell out of these. If you’ve no idea what one is, go and look at Microsoft’s Domino’s chatbot that monitors a chatroom and will order you a pizza by you asking it to.
• Sell on Amazon and eBay: labour-intensive but even big online retailers such as Wiggle.com are using Amazon Marketplace to leverage their exposure. The system is superb on both platforms and gives you another shot beyond Google to be discovered in search. Both, obviously, shortcut your opportunity to show your hand before the order (other than by earned customer reputation) and so price sensitivity is high, but there is still useful revenue and stock-turn to be had.
• Make lots of videos: make product videos, reviews and how-tos and really commit to it and make sure everything is in your consistent voice. Remind customers of why buying from you is so good. Video is great because it is you talking – you the human face of the business and, if people like you, they will like the business.
• Keep learning: last, but not least, constantly, and I mean every day, find an example of best practice on a given platform. Who is using Pinterest to generate sales? What are they doing differently?

Reaching customers – traditional methods

Easy ABC database marketing

Every store, physical or online, can, and must, build a customer database. Used sensibly, they drive customers to your site like few other direct advertising tools can. You don’t need complex software to run them: any database program, such as Microsoft’s Access, will do, though specialist services, such as MailChimp, can be very effective.

Here’s how to do email database marketing really well:

• Always get permission, as customers hate email spam and junk mail – it irritates them. They respond much better to expected messages, so long as these are relevant.
• Make sure you actually have something to say, such as an exclusive offer, hard-to-get item here in stock now, end-of-line special bargain, one-off event or exciting new line due in on date X.
• Start the email with all your headings – just titles with no additional body text, for example: “Buy-one-get-one-free on all paperback fiction this weekend only”, “New Dan Brown arrives in-store here on 11 June – reserve your copy now”, or “David Beckham here signing his new autobiography on 1 July”.
• Remember, time limits on offers always help to drive customers into action.
• Then, in the body of the email, below these headlines, you can expand on each subject. Try to keep words to a minimum, just tell the story and then get out. For example, “Buy one-get-one-free on all paperback fiction this weekend only”. Or “Choose any two from our huge range of great titles and you get the cheapest free; that includes all of our current best-sellers as well as the full selection of classic fiction. Saturday and Sunday only – we’re looking forward to seeing you!”
• Sign it! Customers appreciate a personal touch.
• Remember the rules: tell me what it is, tell me why I might want one, tell me how to get it.

The Data Protection Act

In the UK, if you are going to hold customers’ data in a database, you must comply with the Data Protection Act 1998. Most retailers have notified that they wish to be registered under the Act. If you have done so, you are likely to be entitled also to use the data you hold for database marketing purposes. You must check, though, before moving on.

One of the key aspects of the Data Protection Act is permission. When you ask for someone’s details, you must tell them that you will be holding these details in a database. You must also get their permission to send them things. Check on the www.gov.uk/data-protection/the-data-protection-act site for the latest advice on what to say and how to say it. Getting permission is good practice anyway, as there is little point in taking someone’s address only to send them things they don’t want to see.

Keeping track – measurement

Any direct activity needs to be made measurable. You can do this easily by adding coded coupons to printed materials and by using separate trackable URLs for digital marketing. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful chunk of free support you can then leverage to see exactly where sales and visitors are coming from.

In many situations, it is useful to set up a basic Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to make tracking easy. Literally, just a few columns for the dates and then a few rows for the various promotions you are running. Then record the number of people responding, the total value of their purchases and the margin earned on each transaction. At the end of each week, work out the total profit accounted for by your promotions. Then deduct from that the cost of the activity you ran. So long as you capture every relevant sale, then this is a crude, but perfectly acceptable, way to track how well each promotion is working for you.

You also need to take account of the discounts you gave to normal customers, those people who would have bought from you, regardless of the promotion. That is quite tricky and will often be down to your instinctive judgement. All the same, it is important because this number helps you to realistically appraise returns from your efforts.