A few years ago I worked with Godiva Chocolatiers on a new loyalty initiative to take it beyond spontaneous purchases and holiday whirlwinds at its tiny shops. The most remarkable piece of learning came from a conversation with the president of the company. The week before Christmas was an “all-hands-on-deck” time for them, when he told me every senior executive throughout the Godiva world would go to work in the stores over the holidays. They would run the cash registers, work with clients to create the perfect holiday gift and bring fresh …
Small Businesses at Risk
An informal survey of fashion, retail, communications, and innovation gurus suggests to me that if leaders genuinely want the economy to roar back and remain roaring, fundamental change is required. We simply cannot return to our old, pre-Covid default settings. If we are honest, the business of supporting small business has been rattling along for generations, adding factions and fiefdoms to some mythic Rube Goldberg device. The Machine of Small Business The machine of business was not created by a cartoonist illustrating how to make simple …
Betting Big on Going Bigger
The other afternoon on Dateline White House on MSNBC, Nicole Wallace mused with a female guest about what will happen when they can go outside again. Their consensus: They need elastic-banded pants. Their knowing smiles suggest we all will expand our wardrobes. After a year of relying on figure forgiving leggings, t-shirts and hoodies, entering the once and future world of wardrobes frozen in the amber glow of our year-ago closets may come as yet another shock to our already traumatized selves. Yet it must be said, our year of living Covidly …
The New Consumer Faces an Anxious Future
Conventional wisdom insists the world as we’ve come to know it this past year balances precariously on a polarizing precipice: economic instability vs. the stock market’s irrational exuberance. Remember what happened to irrational exuberance? Consumer behavior today straddles a tipping point. To be clear, marketers are balancing the same divide. Poised on this teeter-totter, the key question looms: wither brands that understand and serve The New Consumer? Fairytale Moments Today’s reading of reality reminds us of the ballet version of The …
The Winter of Our Discontent
Sometimes it helps to stand back and look for the big truths hiding in plain sight amidst massive mounds of little insights, false positives, mistaken assumptions and, well yes, wishful thinking. Such a truth revealed itself as I took my regular Fitbit-inspired walk around Manhattan today. I started on the Upper East Side in the 90s and headed 35 or so blocks south, before heading back up: my roughly10,000-step daily requirement and all logged before 9:00 AM. Invigorating, right? Well, not quite. An Urban Wasteland Typically, I walk down …
Reimagining JCPenney
Several weeks ago, a colleague asked me which retailer(s) I thought were genuinely innovative. For me, "innovative" and "retailer" rarely fit in the same sentence, but, my immediate response: Carvana. Disruption for Detroit The world of used, or previously owned cars will never be the same. It has now been transformed into a fascinating, fun and, dare one say, festive shopping experience. Carvana is a totally reimagined catalytic wonder-what-it-would-be-like moment of new car ownership all the way through to the thrill of delivery and …
How to Understand Your Customer
Remember when the Paradox of Choice was published? Sociologist Barry Schwartz's thesis was that consumers were stunned by the sheer staggering number of product category options, and thus defaulted to making no choice. Scores of CPG clients began the laborious process of attempting to re-rationalize SKUs, until "cease and desist" orders were issued internally. The shelf space strategy was to edit the number of offerings to mitigate the paradox of choice syndrome, until the impact on slotting fees raised its ugly head. Shopping vs Buying The …
For Whom the Retail Bell Tolls
Recent news headline: Retail CEO announces that luxe retail is the new normal. Another recent news headline: Real estate empresario comments on how overbuilt and expensive New York City has become. We were, of course, shocked to learn that real estate was expensive here. Any fair-minded observer can be forgiven a moment of disgust as these particular twin revisionist rationales work to fling more pixie dust on the legitimate question we face, Whither retail reality? Ghost Town It's not all Covid all the time. Think of the forced march to …