How employees can help put the 'corner store' feeling back in retailing

In the current issue of the American Marketing Association's Marketing News magazine, columnist Don E. Schultz suggests that today's shoppers long for the intimacy and caring service once provided at their local butcher, baker or dairy deliveryman.

He contends that retailers wishing to survive in today's hyper-competitive environment must possess three attributes:

• Fast: Like Spanish clothing retailer Zara, merchants need to respond quickly to changing consumer tastes.

• Friendly: Like the Apple store where employees are taught not to sell, retailers need friendly people, friendly products, friendly atmosphere and friendly shopping.

• Focused: Here, Schultz cites online retailer Zappos as having narrowed its mission to one thing, namely making customer service their true competitive differentiator.

I believe that retail employees – as well as their managers – play a key role in delivering on these priorities:

• Fast: Employees can listen carefully to customer comments and requests on the floor of the store; pay attention to market trends on their own as consumers; then feed their insights back to the company to accelerate innovation. (For this to be successful, the company needs an easy system for collecting such feedback, and needs to build receptiveness for such employee engagement into its culture.)

• Friendly: Employees are chiefly responsible for providing customers with helpful and friendly service. Staff need to understand the products they sell, and know the store's policies on returns, exchanges and the like. (This means that management should provide adequate employee training about products and service delivery, and should consider some form of recognition program to motivate employees to deliver the best customer experience.)

• Focused: Identifying the company's focus – then communicating it to employees in a manner that they can act upon it – is a prime responsibility of management.

AMA members may read the full article by clicking here.

Why not segment restaurant customers by time?

 A while ago, I was in Trudeau International Airport in Montreal awaiting a flight home to Toronto. I had plenty of time before take-off, so I wasn't in a big hurry to get some dinner before boarding the plane. I could relax and have a relatively leisurely meal.

More recently, when returning from a business event in Victoria, my time was tighter. I asked the host of the White Spot Restaurant in the airport if I could have lunch in under a half-hour. "Of course," she said cheerfully. I wolfed-down a hamburger and salad, and got through Customs in good time.

These contrasting experiences got me thinking about how restaurants (especially those in airports) could respond to these diverse dining scenarios. Why not have two or more designated sections of the restaurant, along with differentiated menus, to effectively serve these customers with differing time parameters?

This approach would enhance the dining experience for those travellers in a hurry, since they'd have fewer but speedier menu options, and they wouldn't impatiently wonder why a server at another table was seemingly not racing to serve them.

As well, it would simplify life for restaurant servers by eliminating the need to repeatedly explain how long various menu options take to serve, and by allowing them to spend a bit more time providing friendlier and more relaxed service to those guests who aren't itching to pay and dash off to their gate.

A sad day for comedy on Canadian TV

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Roger Abbott, a mainstay in Air Farce on CBC Radio and later on CBC TV. I once went to a taping at the old studio in Cabbagetown... His imitations of Jean Chretien and Peter Mansbridge were spot-on.

Read an appreciation and profile here... Globe & Mail article

Achieving prosperity through design (and how marketing helps)

There's plenty of talk these days about the need for Canadian business to increase its productivity in order to thrive in the ruthlessly competitive 21st century. Put more bluntly, it seems that companies must either innovate or face extinction.

Innovation can be defined as the act of applying new or different knowledge and skills in order to solve problems. And based on my early studies in architecture school, the practice of innovation is synonymous with the discipline of design.

Regrettably, many people equate design with 'styling' – the surface appearance or visual appeal of an object. But as I alluded to in an earlier blog, great design involves much more than merely visual delight.

I believe that great design involves the development of creative solutions that effectively address all the relevant needs of all the relevant constituents connected with the problem at hand. As trained problem-solvers, designers are adept at considering and balancing these often-competing needs and perspectives.

For instance, suppose a designer is developing a new smartphone. The relevant constituents  would begin with the phone's end-user(s), then its purchaser, then the retailer who sold the phone, the wholesaler who shipped and warehoused the phone, the manufacturer who built the phone, and potentially even the communities where the raw materials used to create the phone were extracted. All have a stake in the overall quality of the design solution.

More obviously, our phone designer would need to consider all the relevant needs of these diverse stakeholders. Again using our smartphone example, this involves not only how good the phone looks (its aesthetic or 'cultural' appeal) and how well it works (its functionality), but also how cost-efficiently the phone was manufactured and packaged, and how big an environmental footprint it leaves (the choice and quantity of materials used in its manufacturing, its energy consumption during operation, and the ease of its disposal at the end of its working life).

Such a broad perspective of considerations can – and should – be applied to the development of intangible services as well as the creation of tangible goods.

So where does marketing fit into all of this? As 'experts on the consumer,' marketers have the task of identifying – ideally anticipating – the needs or wants of the consumer, then translating these into a clear problem statement that designers can easily work with. Then, once the product or service has been completed, marketers lead the charge in launching and promoting it in the marketplace, helping drive consumer engagement and ultimately sales on behalf of  'the client.'


If Canada is serious about boosting our national productivity and fostering innovation, then I believe design need a stronger role in the equation. Getting corporations (and other organizations, for that matter) to recognize and appreciate the vital contribution that talented designers can make to their success is one of today's most pressing challenges.

Water-glasses with balls... a 'Real Sports' highlight!

This evening, my son and I treated ourselves to watching the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Buffalo Sabres pre-season hockey game on a flatscreen TV from the comfort of a booth at the wonderful new Real Sports Bar and Grill, located adjacent to the Air Canada Centre – a sensitively renovated Art Deco building, by the way!

As per my family's lunchtime visit a few weeks ago, the food was excellent, the staff friendly, the service attentive and the atmosphere lively due to the presence of many groups of sports fans. These are the necessities for success in their competitive business.

But Real Sports recognizes the need for extra little surprises that help create the truly memorable customer experience.

The interior design features eerily lit decorative chandeliers made from hundreds of fanned-out hockey-stick blades. Above one of the bars is a ceiling patterned on a giant basketball net, with tabletops featuring real parquet flooring from the ACC. And your side-order of French Fries comes in a little metal basket that's a miniature copy of a real french-fryer basket!

But what was the highlight for me was discovering that the bottoms of the water-glasses contained small recesses in the form of sports balls – baseballs, golf-balls, footballs and basketballs.

Side view of 'golf-ball' water-glass held up in front of our booth's TV screen showing Leafs game.

 In my view, demonstrating such care for even the subtlest aspects of the customer experience is a sure-fire way to win the hearts of even the most demanding fans!

Duh, it's about the customer!

Kudos to Alexa Samuels for laying bare the dangers of not being customer-centric when creating your communications – Is your marketing making the customer think too much?

Begin with the mindset of: Where's my customer's head at regarding my product? and you will, at minimum, prevent customers from bypassing your message since they'll recognize themselves in your piece. At best, you will have gained new brand advocates since you've solved a problem for them and demonstrated respect for their intelligence and time.

On the other hand, if you launch your communications thinking: Hey everyone out there, lemme tell you all my detailed news!, you will likely confuse people who aren't as close to things as you, or worse, create a lasting negative impression of your brand.

Remember the old saw that it takes 100 contacts to create a good impression, but just one to break it!

A truly smart brand...

When shopping in-person at Indigo yesterday, I bought the latest in my series of (insert topic here) For Dummies books.

This one is iPad For Dummies, purchased to help me get the most out of my new 'essential business tool / really cool toy' – it really depends on who in my family you ask!

In the early days of Glue, I bought several of the books to help me learn about and run the business: Consulting for Dummies, Accounting for Dummies and Managing Business Change for Dummies. Since then, I've picked up several others – iPod & iTunes for Dummies and iMovie '09 & iDVD '09 for Dummies – to help me exploit specific new technological tools.

What really impresses me about 'For Dummies' books are their consistency:

• Packaging – the books are easy to spot on the store's shelf (helps me buy 'em), and each one is to distinguish from another on my bookshelf (helps me use 'em).
• Organization – each book follows a standard format (e.g., Contents at a Glance, Table of Contents, 'The Part of Tens', road-sign icons, detailed index), so I know what to expect and where to find stuff.
• Tonality – all the Dummies books I own have the same folksy language that's occasionally laced with gentle puns, but always very clear in delivering its message, making me feel comfortable when learning.

In writing this post, I've just discovered that there's a FREE For Dummies online reference library of articles and instructional videos on a vast number of topics, ranging from the six-step 'How to Unclog a Drain with a Plunger' (illustrated with still photos!), to 'How to Create Smart CD Playlists in iTunes' that includes helpful screen shots. Heck, you don't even have to buy this company's stuff to learn things!

Overall, I believe For Dummies books exemplify effective branding: they make a clear and relevant promise ('A Reference for the Rest of Us', now apparently updated to 'Making Everything Easier') and then repeatedly deliver on that promise.

Now that's smart business!