LOOKING GOOD FOR THE INDEPENDENT, EXPERT RETAILER

The retail landscape is changing rapidly. The high street or out-of-town superstores are getting bigger, carrying larger ranges and shouting louder about their lowest prices, while the Internet reaches into the homes of our customers with Google delivering access to www.thecheapestanything.com or www.lowestprice.com.

Yet in the face of that onslaught, which threatens to engulf the small, independent retailer, we believe the future is bright and offers a future of increased sales and profitable margins.

While we talk to people who are convinced that the Internet is the final straw that will break the independent retailer’s back, we believe that the Internet is the technology that is going to allow the independent retailer to share their expertise more often with, and more valuably for, their customers. The 64 million dollar message in that belief is “share their expertise”.

When a home-owner visits a Garden Nursery they are NOT buying a Tree, they are improving their garden; when a mother visits a Chemist and Pharmacy they are not looking for a tablet, they are trying to make their child healthy; when golfers buy golf clubs they are trying to lower their scores. These customers want a result which the product on its own will not guarantee.

Supermarkets and Superstores and mass-market Internet Retailers sell ‘products’. The ‘expert retailer’ provides a ‘solution’ that is much more likely to deliver the results that the customer wants.

For the independent, expert retailer the Internet now offers the chance to communicate a number of key marketing points DIRECTLY to their customer:

The difference between a product and a solution,

The bewildering increase in choice that is available to the consumer and the ever increasing marketing noise that exists,

The value of a personal solution; one that fits their specific soil and garden layout, one that fits their body, lifestyle and allergies, one that works with their golf swing, their physical dimensions, athleticism and strength,

The value of a retailer committed to their required results rather than a sale through the check-out,

The value of a ‘personal guru’, keeping pace with the world’s rapidly changing technology, available to assist when they need help.

The Internet, through website and customer emails, offers the independent retailer the opportunity to make sure the value in these messages are appreciated by the customers, so that they ‘value’ the relationship they can have with ‘their guru’.

And it is the email that is going to place the independent retailer ahead of even Google. The independent retailer who is known to the customer by name and introduction, who offers expertise and value (not product and price) through regular, short email, will be welcomed into the ‘inbox’ of the customer as a ‘valued-partner’.

From the ‘in-box’ we can take the customer on a journey through the digital world that offers assistance, help, advice and opportunity with the promise of that all being replicated in the physical world, with a trip into a retail outlet, however small, where they will be treated as an individual customer and receive the same value.

Yes, the Internet retailer and the Superstores will fight out a ‘bloody’ battle around price. But that is their devastated landscape. The independent retailer should be using the connection to their customers, offered by the Internet and Mobile technologies, to make sure that the battle for their customer’s minds and wallets is fought in the area of their expertise.