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What to Do With the First Quarter Blues

I went for a walk/jog down the Falling Waters Trail a couple days ago. It was sunny and in the mid-50’s. My dog, Samantha, and I enjoyed getting out of the house. There is something about those early spring days when you get that sense of renewal, that rebirth of energy. Of course, today, I stare out at five inches of snow courtesy of our bipolar vortex. Just when you think you’ve turned the corner on winter, Mother Nature smothers you with another blanket of white. So much for that rebirth of energy.

It’s easy to get the blues.

Image result for cabin fever clip artEspecially if you’re a fourth-quarter retailer. January feels like a relief from the exhausting marathon of Christmas. But by February, when the bills have all been paid and it doesn’t seem like any new cash is coming in, it gets to be a drag.

If you’re a jeweler or florist, you get Valentine’s Day. If you’re a toy retailer or candy shop you get Easter. But that isn’t a lot to carry you through the First Quarter Blues.

Here is a list of different things you can do during the quiet times to combat the blues.

  • Paint the store. A fresh coat of paint brightens the mood and lifts the morale of the staff.
  • Re-do all your signs. Print new ones, change wording, make them more fun and in alignment with your Core Values.
  • Work on new selling techniques. Hold trainings, do role playing, practice new techniques.
  • Make displays for out-of-your-category gifts. For instance, January-March are big baby shower months (no one wants to hold them in November/December because of the holidays). Put together an endcap of great “baby shower” gifts – even if you don’t sell baby products! A hardware store could do a display of “build your nursery the right way”. You could also do “gifts for the mom/dad-to-be.” Get creative. The same is true for weddings. The bridal shows are January-February. Bridal showers are March-June. Put together “bridal/wedding gifts” like board games if you’re a toy store (the family that plays together, stays together), or tool kits. I got a drill as a wedding gift from a thoughtful friend.
  • Get creative with your social media. Post often about a wide variety of things (not all related to selling your products). Have a contest among your staff. Make them all admins. Allow them two posts a day. See who can get more comments and shares in a week. Pay the winner $20. Do it for five weeks. It will be the best $100 bucks you spend on social media this year because you’ll see what kind of posts move the needle.
  • Have a contest of some kind. Maybe a raffle for charity. Maybe a “taste-test” where you put two competing products side by side. (I can see this for tools, for toys, for shoes, for cleaning products, for foods, for strollers …) Maybe a competition. We did a five-week March Games Madness where we pitted four games against each other for four consecutive Friday nights. The game voted the best each week made it to the final four. The fifth week we crowned the champion.
  • Spend more time networking. Send everyone on your team to different networking events.
  • Rearrange the floor layout. Stand at the front door and look around. See what catches your eye. Redesign the store so that your customers can see farther into your store. And make sure something cool and compelling is in those sight lines.
  • Clean and fix everything. Everything.
  • Make your bathroom cool. When George Whalin wrote Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best independent Stores in America, he mentioned the really cool bathrooms for 14 of the 25 stores.
  • Make a list of your top 50 or 100 customers with phone numbers. Assign them to your staff to call each person and personally thank them for shopping in your store. No sales pitch. Just a simple, “I want to thank you for being a customer last year. We truly appreciate your business. Have a great day!”
  • Make a goodie-bag for those same top 50 or 100 and personally deliver them. Free. No questions asked. (Thank you Brandy & Eric for this idea!)

The customers will be back soon enough. You have new products rolling in. Take this time to plant the seeds for future sales by refreshing the store, training the staff, and getting creative with your marketing.

That’s how you beat the First Quarter Blues.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I would love to hear your suggestions for additions to this list. I know there are some really good ideas out there. Help me share them with the world.

Two Pictures to Make You Feel Better (Or Worse?)

I started writing this blog August 9, 2008, shortly after my first gig as a public speaker for the retail industry. My first post was about a Christmas present I received and the announcement that I would be playing guitar in public* for the first time at the Nomad Bookhouse.

(*Apparently back then I didn’t consider playing guitar in church as part of worship “playing in public”.)

By October of 2008, a group of us local business owners had launched Jackson Local First, our Shop Local organization for the community, and my blog changed. From that point forward it was less about toys and Toy House and Phil, and more about you, the indie retailer and small business owner finding new ways to compete with national chains and the Internet.

Since those early days (and you can find every single post archived on my website) my goal has always been to help you feel good about being in this career by showing you concrete ways you can compete and win, while also giving you the background information why those ways work. If you are new to this blog, you might want to sift back through some older posts. There are some true nuggets tucked away for those willing to look. (Okay, so maybe you’re a little busy right now. Put it on your calendar for January.)

This post, however, might not make you feel all that great. I’m going to post two pictures taken in the two malls here in Jackson.

Here is picture #1 …

This picture was taken on the Saturday of Labor Day Weekend—a typical shopping holiday—in Westwood Mall at 11:30am (anchor stores of JCP, Younkers, and Walmart). Notice the lack of shoppers. Now, in all fairness, Jackson is a county filled with lakes, so it is possible the lakes trumped shopping. You could roll a bowling ball the length of that mall without fear of hitting anyone.

Here is picture #2 …

This picture was taken last night at 7:46pm in our other mall, the bigger, busier one with Toys R Us, Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s and Sears as anchors.

Once again, this could be the result of the economic woes in our county and the shrinking population—the two factors that led to our choice to close shop. Or it could be a symptomatic problem with a much bigger cause. (What I find most amazing in this pic is that this is the “walkers” mall and there isn’t even a group of walkers pacing the corridor.)

Malls everywhere are in decline. This problem was reported heavily in 2016. And now with the Retail Apocalypse of 2017, you can expect traffic to decline even further.

Like I said, this may not make you feel better, especially if you are in a mall location.

Here is why you should feel better.

The decline in mall traffic is really caused by two things—cellphones and incredibly poor customer service. Cellphones have replaced meetups. You don’t go meet your friends at the mall anymore because you’ve been texting them all day long. Many people thought teens hanging out at the mall would be a bad thing. It wasn’t. Someone had to drive those teens (malls weren’t typically located in high-density neighborhoods). Parents who drove their teens to the mall would often stop in so as not to waste a trip. That familiarity led to future trips.

Unfortunately, those days are long gone. The mall is no longer a meet-up, drawing its own traffic. You have to want to shop there to even bother making the trip.

That’s where the stores, themselves, have failed. Too many mall stores relied only on the mall and its anchors to draw their traffic. They never knew how to draw traffic themselves. As the malls drew less and less traffic (and/or the anchors kept expanding their departments to eat into the mall stores categories), these stores cut back on personnel to match dwindling sales. Of course, that led to a downward spiral in what was already poor levels of customer service.

Is it any wonder that Outlet Malls, where Transactional Customers don’t expect any service in the first place, continue to draw traffic while traditional malls suffer? When someone else is drawing your traffic and options are fewer, you can get away with poor customer service. That type of retail climate no longer exists.

Nowadays ALL retail is destination retail. People only go to shops by choice.  Since independent retailers have always been destinations by nature, you are best suited to win the brick & mortar dollars of today (of which by last count there are still over a trillion of them). You win in this game by being the destination, the store everyone wants to go to because it is fun, exciting, worthwhile, important, friendly, helpful, surprisingly delightful.

Those pictures aren’t meant to scare you. They are meant to inspire you. The malls didn’t lose to the Internet just because the Internet exists. They lost because they didn’t take care of their customers.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS This does beg the question … If you are in a mall, should you move? The answer is complicated. If you truly have created a destination store, you can make it work almost anywhere. If you are paying mall prices and not getting mall benefits, however, you might want to contact a realtor and see what is out there. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of location later, okay?

Other Uses for Market Share Knowledge

The first time I was truly introduced to the idea of calculating my market share was from Roy H. William’s second book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. It was 2003 and I was trying to learn all I could about marketing and advertising. My math was rudimentary. I didn’t adjust for local economy or youth population. Simply raw numbers. I came up with our market share at about 12%.

At first I was a little disappointed. Roy teaches that the gold standard for any business is 30% market share. That’s a big number. Despite its dominance, even Walmart only has 25% of the grocery market. The optimist in me, however, said 12% was a good starting point and now I had a goal to shoot for. I had just read an article (which 14 years later I cannot find—go figure) that said only 9% of the general public was inclined to shop at local indie stores in the first place. I was already 3 points above that number.

I never did reach 30%, but I did have some other revelations about my Market Share number.

Image result for upward trend free clipartFirst, after going back and adjusting my market size for economy and youth population, our 12% was really closer to 16%. It stayed in that neighborhood until a Walmart Supercenter opened in 2005. We dropped into the 14-15% neighborhood and stayed there until Amazon became a serious player in the toy industry around 2010-2011. We stayed around 12.5% for the next several years until we closed. Even though you can beat a big guy head-to-head, the more big guys in town, the more businesses taking a piece out of the same pie.

Second, that original 12% number got me thinking. A full eighty-eight percent of the market were NOT currently shopping with me. That’s almost 9 out of 10 people. When you look at it that way, it changes your perspective on a lot of things.

In terms of marketing and advertising I realized I didn’t need to reach the entire market to grow my business. If I could just convince 1 more person out of 20 people to shop with me I would have growth beyond my wildest dreams. I really only needed to convince about 2 more people out of 100 to shop with me to have double digit growth. If you only are trying to sway two people out of a hundred you might say something totally different than if you’re trying to sway fifty out of a hundred. With two you can say something direct and personal to a small audience that gets right to the heart of the matter. Trying to reach fifty, you say something generic and non-offensive hoping other forces will come into play to swing them to your side.

In terms of product selection I realized I didn’t have to be all things to all people. I could pick and choose the products I wanted based on my beliefs in the products and how they benefited my customers. Not only does that help with the buying decisions, it helped us stay true to our core values in terms of what we sold and why.

Speaking of Core Values, we didn’t have to be someone we were not.

Meg Cabot said it best when she said, “You’re not a hundred dollar bill. Not everyone is going to like you.” We didn’t have to be liked by everyone. Sixteen percent is a pretty low approval rating. Yet it was higher than any other single store in our market.

Knowledge is power (France is bacon). Knowing your market share might be the piece of knowledge that finally liberates the way you think about your place in the market and the risks you can now safely take with your business.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Let me first admit that 16% is actually pretty high for an indie retailer. Many of you might do the math and find yourself in the 3-5% range, especially if you have other indie retailers fighting for the 9% that skews shop local. But before I pat myself on the back, you should know that in the early 1980’s we were at that mythical 30% gold standard and then some. Of course that was before Jackson got Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, Sam’s Club, a second Meijer, a new KMart, and a whole slew of other big chains in town (without a population growth to match), and well before Al Gore invented the Internet. We were the large store that was here first. That’s what gave us much of our edge. But even if you do find yourself in the 3-5% range, if the market is big enough, you can do a lot of business with only 3-5% of your market. Plus, when you only have to convince 1 more person out of 100 to get 33% growth, advertising becomes a whole lot more fun.

PPS It used to upset me that about half my friends were not regular shoppers at my store. My parents saw about that same percentage from their friends. Then it dawned on me … Fifty percent of my friends versus twelve percent of the general population. I was ahead of the game. I slept much better that night.

Taking a Deep Breath of Perspective

We all meet interesting people from time to time. For one year I had a person enter my life that gave me a world’s worth of perspective. At the time he was the store manager of one of the big-box discounters in town. While our sons shared activities together, he shared amazing information not only about his store, but about all the big-box discounters in town. It was eye-opening to say the least.

If you have only recently found this blog, you should know that I am a big believer in calculating and understanding your overall market size for your category and knowing your share of that market. The easiest way to find the size of your market is to find national numbers for your industry, divide by the US population and multiply that result times your market population.

For instance, if you are in a $20 billion industry, divide that by 323 million people in the USA to get $62/person. If your market is 150,000 people, then multiply $62 x 150,000 to get a market size of $9.3 million. You can adjust that number up or down based on your local economy (your average household income versus the national average). You can also adjust for other factors like geography (more boats are likely to be sold in Michigan or Florida than Nebraska), or demographics (your percentage of children compared to the national average if your category is marketed primarily to children). It gives you a rough estimate, that if you calculate the same way year after year shows you exactly where you stand in your market.

I’ve been doing this in the Jackson market for decades and measuring our share over the years.

My big-box friend handed me numbers of what the big-box stores were doing in toy sales in our market. Adding them up, the math fit what I already knew about the size of the market in Jackson. The part that made my heart flutter was knowing that I was doing more in my single store than any one of those big guys.

 

Is it a Vase or Two Faces?

Here’s the perspective part … 

All of these stores do way more volume overall than I do because they also sell grocery, clothing, hardware, electronics, and household goods among other stuff. All of these stores have way more traffic on a daily, weekly, monthly basis than I could ever imagine. All of these stores run weekly sales and discounts with huge flyers in every Sunday’s paper to go with their national TV campaigns and other advertising efforts. All of these stores focus on the hottest TV-advertised toys every year, adding the vendors’ marketing efforts to their own. All of these stores get full-blown media coverage, too.

Think about that last one for a second. This holiday season you are going to hear stories about Amazon, Walmart, and Target. All. The. Time. You are going to hear about their sales. You are going to hear about their overall volume. You are going to hear about their strategies to draw more traffic (more discounting—you read it hear first!) Your customers are going to hear all that, too.

Yet locally, without the discounting, without the hot items for your industry, without the national TV campaign and Sunday flyers and vendors marketing for you, without all the grocery-driven traffic, without all the media hype, you’re going to stand toe-to-toe with these big giants and still do amazing numbers in your category, maybe even equal or better than they do individually.

When people tell you it is all about price, and that discounting is the only way to get sales, go ahead and nod your head in agreement until those uninformed people walk away. Then remember that a guy in a small, depressed, blue-collar city in Michigan with all the inherent disadvantages was able to beat all the big guys through better service, better staff, product knowledge, smarter marketing, and higher prices.

You will, too!

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Calculating Market Size and Market Share can be incredibly helpful, even if your business is growing. If your market is getting bigger, but your share is decreasing, then even though you are growing, you are still losing out to competitors. Something needs to be fixed. It can also help you understand why sales are decreasing and when to get out of the market. We saw our market shrink to a size that wouldn’t sustain us in our current model. Our options were to shrink to fit the market, move to a different market, or close. We chose the latter so that I could spend my time helping a bigger market … you!

PPS That store manager left Jackson the year after we met to run a larger store in another part of the country, but not before leaving me with a wealth of knowledge and a perspective for which I am eternally grateful.

The Scary Truth of Averages

“Have you ever noticed that everyone wants to be normal but no one wants to be average?” -Roy H. Williams

Did you hear the one about the statistician that drowned in a river with an average depth of three feet?

Image result for averagesIn business, everyone wants to know the averages, the average cost of rent, the average sales per square foot, the average level of inventory, etc. Averages are interesting. They can be a nice benchmark, but they can also be misleading, and sometimes downright dangerous.

Take, for example, average inventory at cost (a number you should all be tracking). If you were an average toy store doing around $500,000 a year in sales, your average inventory at cost would be around $100,000. But if you are that same toy store, your Thanksgiving to Christmas sales will likely be around $200,000, or pretty much all of your inventory if you only had the average on hand. As nice as it would be to sell to the walls, so-to-speak, you know you can’t sell it all. You also know you need some inventory in January for birthdays and post-Christmas.

Just trying to keep your store at the average will kill your holiday sales. You’ll need a lot higher inventory to start the busy season and much lower inventory the rest of the year. Rarely will you ever have the “average” amount of inventory on hand.

Another problem with that average is that $100,000 worth of toys looks a whole lot different in a 2,200 square foot store than it does in a 1,100 square foot store.

The bigger the store, the more creative you may need to be with your merchandise to keep the store looking stocked and full. The smaller the store, the more creative you may need to be with your merchandise to fit it all in. Sometimes your store space dictates your inventory levels more than just sales or industry averages.

Averages are a nice starting point, but it is worth exploring all the reasons you might deviate from the average, and be okay with those reasons.

For instance, my payroll at Toy House was a significantly higher percentage of our expenses than the average toy store. But I could afford that because my rent was significantly lower. Our sales per square foot was extremely low compared to the average, but that was because we had wide aisles to allow for shopping carts, four cash registers lines, a large gift-wrapping area, and a stage with seating/playing area—in other words, a lot of square footage not used for showing merchandise. Our average ticket, thanks to shopping carts and toy demos however, was significantly higher. Each deviation from the norm was on purpose and with a purpose.

I do many talks about the financials of independent retailers. Whenever possible I try to use an average store for that industry. But I remind everyone in attendance that these numbers are average and they should be striving to be spectacular. If all your numbers are average, you haven’t found the place to stand out and make a name for yourself.

In retail, there isn’t a prize for being normal.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS The upside to averages is that they give you a quick check of the health of your business. If you have a number way off from the averages and you don’t know why, that might be a good place to focus your time and energies on changing. The downside is that you don’t ever want to be an average store. You are destined for greater than that.

PPS Rent per square foot and sales per square foot go hand in hand. You need to be selling at least 10x more per square foot than what you pay in rent (if your profit margin is around 50%). That’s a far better benchmark than average rent or average sales per square foot for your industry. Those averages tell you nothing.

When It Is Time to Move

Maybe it is declining sales in your current location, or maybe you’ve peaked out your sales and don’t have the room to expand. Maybe the demographics of your location have shifted or maybe your store’s product mix doesn’t fit in with the surrounding stores. Maybe a new development has made you an offer too good to be true.

There are dozens of reasons you can justify for moving your store (and just as many for staying put – too costly, lost sales during the move, will the customers still find us? can we afford it? is the grass actually greener? etc.)

The decision to move your store has to be something you research and consider the issues carefully. A bad move will sink you. A great move will grow you. A lateral move will wear you out.

Here is the short version of this blog…

  • Don’t move unless you have to – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
  • Prioritize what you need from your new location – More Traffic? Parking? Accessibility? Visibility? Better Demographics?  Do your research
  • Plan for extra expenses – moving costs, lost sales, etc. all add up quickly
  • Buy what you can afford – yes you expect your business will grow eventually, but make sure you can afford it on day one.

NO LONGER SUITS YOUR NEEDS

The first decision is the desire to move. You move when your current location no longer suits your needs. Your business model is working but your location isn’t the ideal spot. It’s too small, too big, too quiet, too expensive, too hard to find, wrong demographics, wrong part of town. There was an auto dealer in San Diego that was constantly advertising that if you would work with their location, they would work with your price. It became their gimmick, but at a great advertising expense. That low overhead from the lousy location was instead spent on advertising and profit margin.

Moves are risky. There are no guarantees your move will grow your business. If your current location suits your needs, the risk factor for moving goes up exponentially and it is often better to stay put.

WHERE DO YOU GO?

Just making the decision to move is huge, but you have to also know where you want to go. What are you lacking at your current location? Is it traffic? You’ll likely have to pay more in rent to get better traffic. Is it space? You can find bigger spaces, but you might have to give up something else like traffic or parking.  Is it better demographics? Do you know your demographics well enough to know what “better” demographics look like? The most important question is this…

Can you afford the new location with the money you’re making currently?

We all would like to think our business will grow hugely at the new location. But that isn’t always the case. Plus there are a lot of costs involved in moving that eat up any extra sales and profits. You have the lost days of sales while you move. You have the build out of the new place. You have the changing of phone and address and lost mail and lost shipments. You have the revving up of the new location as your regulars try to find you before the newbies have discovered you. You have the advertising of the change of address including the banners at the old location, the grand opening banners at the new location, the advertisements and the big grand opening event itself.

PRIORITIZE YOUR NEEDS

We moved once in our 67 years in business. The store started in a house. We bought neighboring houses and tore them down for a parking lot and a couple expansions. But we maxed out our location at about 10,000 square feet. My grandfather wanted three things in his move. First he wanted a larger building. He drew up two plans for a 20,000 sq ft building and a 24,000 sq ft building. Second he wanted to be along the busiest road in the downtown district (suburban shopping malls were not yet a thing in 1967.) Third, he wanted his own parking lot.

He found his location – an easy right hand turn off the busiest road in the downtown with plenty of room for parking in both the front and back of the building – and opted for the 20,000 sq ft building because that was all his current level of business could afford. He also had the expenses of moving. Even as a big fish in a small town, the newspaper didn’t cover our move. He had to take out his own ad in the paper. He used this picture with the headline,

“But Grandpa, Momma Won’t Like it if We Play in the Mud”

Yes, his business grew – fast enough that he needed that extra 4000 sq ft only five years after moving. Fortunately he also had the foresight to buy a piece of property that would allow such growth, and he now had the money to pay for it.

That location served us well for many decades even as new competition came to town. But when the demographics of the whole county changed, so did the options for moving. The criteria that served us well before were no longer the criteria we needed. Our options were downsizing greatly or moving to a new community, neither of which we wanted to do.

Moving is a big deal and can be a huge benefit for your business. It can also sink you. Make sure you are moving for the right reasons.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I didn’t discuss renting versus owning. That is a topic worthy of its own post (or three).

In Retail it is All About Location

Let’s get the elephant out of the room right away.

How can I write a blog about being a successful retailer when I closed my retail store? I can sum that up in three words…

Location. Location. Location.

Yes, we were having a tough time with cash flow. That’s the usual culprit behind any store closing. Much of that was due to our location.

Location Issue #1

The population of Jackson has been stagnant at best the last several years. The youth population, however, has shrunk considerably over the last several years as birth rates declined for all groups but teens, and school enrollment is down huge since 2007. On top of that, average household income in the city fell from around $35K per household to $27K per household (well below the national average of around $56K).

I have constantly talked about paying attention to your Market Share. To know your Market Share you first have to know your Market. Our market has shrunk over 40% since 2007. Fortunately, our Share of that market had stayed the same. We still had our piece of the pie, but our pie had turned into a tart.

Location Issue #2

We own and occupy a large building on the north edge of downtown. We have been a large toy store for decades, carrying toys, hobbies, baby products, sporting goods, scouts, and more. When the market could bear it, we had a ton of inventory, but scaling back inventory to match the needs of the community meant less efficient use of space and less of the “impact” of being that large store that had everything.

We discussed converting to a smaller store, more in alignment with the population and income, but that would have led to many long-time customers lamenting that we just weren’t the store we used to be or the store they remembered. Better to close while the memories were still positive.

Location Issue #3

I am a big believer in downtowns. Call me naive but I still believe downtown shopping districts can be successful. It takes dedication from the shop keepers, the landlords, and the city leaders to make it work. It takes smart policies, united fronts, and strong relationships to make it work. We have some of that in Jackson, especially among the retail owners. We also have a city council dedicated to improving the streets and sidewalks and green spaces in our downtown. Unfortunately, that also means a ton of disruptive construction. Two years of it! (and counting.)

Our city leaders are not retailers and don’t understand how construction affects retail. They saw an opportunity to get roads fixed and attract new development (all good things), but didn’t see the consequences to the existing retailers and restaurants. When you are trying to dig out of a cash flow hole, having the busiest street in town—the one that goes right by your building—be restricted from three lanes to one with backups that stretch for blocks for an entire spring and summer is not a good recipe for success. At one point we had so much construction downtown that one detour actually led you to another street closure dead-end, and only if you had local knowledge would you know which alley would get you back to open road.

In a couple years, our downtown is going to be new and fresh and repaved and ready for business. But the last two years were pretty tough on the businesses already here, especially for us as our market declined.

Yeah, Amazon is a deal-changer for many retail categories. Yeah, our own vendors are making decisions that hurt the indie retail channel. Yeah, customers are as fickle as ever and have power like never before. None of those are insurmountable. You can still compete. Even as we closed, we were holding our own for our market. We just didn’t like the direction our market was heading.

If your market is your problem, you can do one of four things, Move, Close, Change or Wait. We chose to close.

Now you know.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I’ll discuss the other three options and what would make them attractive in future posts. Right now I have to go let the big elephant in the room out to roam the savanna.

What I Learned in 2016

2016 was a learning experience for me. I went through two life-changing events that taught me a lot about myself and about business. I got a divorce and I closed my toy store. Although they weren’t the kind of things one typically wishes for, they were incredible experiences filled with lessons I will share in 2017.

This blog is back. You will be getting posts on a regular basis filled with thought-provoking ideas and simple things you can do to make your business better.

 

Although I cannot put all the lessons from 2016 into one blog, I can sum them up for you in one sentence.

“Life and business is all about the relationships.”

We’ll explore how to build better relationships for 2017.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS My first goal will be to rebuild my relationship with you. Sorry for not blogging in 2016. With the store closed you are my main focus for 2017. Let me know your fears and obstacles and challenges. We’ll find ways to overcome them.

The Chasm Between Early Adopters and Early Majority

Back in 1962, Everett Rogers introduced us to the Diffusion of Innovations that shows how people enter the market for any given idea, product or service. There are five groups of people who look at new ideas and products distinctively different. The percentages shown are consistent across the board in study after study. Here is a quick definition of these groups through the prism of the smart phone industry.

Innovators: They don’t find what they want on the market so they make it. They didn’t get what they wanted from the new iPhone 5S so they hacked into the programming and made their own apps and programs.

Early Adopters: They want the newest, latest, most unique. They loved the iPhone 5S, couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Yet, there they were standing in line one year later for the iPhone 6+ because it was newer and more unique.

Early Majority: They want the new, too… but only after it has been proven to work. They prefer tried and true over new and unique. They bought the iPhone 5S, but three to six months after it launched and have proven itself. They’ll get an iPhone 6 eventually, but probably not until it is time to upgrade.

Late Majority: Unlike the Early Majority, these people are waiting until it feels like everyone has one. They will only buy the iPhone 5S because they found a great deal on it, and figured they might as well join the crowd.

Laggards: They aren’t buying a smart phone. They don’t need one. Oh, they might get one, but only after all other options are completely gone. They will buy the iPhone 5S when they have no other choice.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR MARKETING

The chasm you see in the chart is the monumental mind-shift that takes place between the Early Adopters (EA) and the Early Majority (EM).  The EA want their product now. They want “new and unique” and don’t care how much it costs. They’ll pay full retail to get it first. To them, the words “tried and true” are the kiss of death. The EM’s, however, live for the words “tried and true”. They want the proven item, the easily available item, the commodity.

If you try to market to the EA’s, you will completely turn off the EM’s. Words like new, innovative and unique are scary to the EM’s. If you try to market to the EM’s, you will completely turn off the EA’s who don’t care about tried and true.  In other words, you have to choose which of these two groups to market, then make sure your message and your offerings are tailored to that group. If you try to reach both, you’ll reach neither.

If you try to market to the Late Majority (LM) or Laggards, you’re just a fool. The LM’s only want the commodity at a discount. The Laggards don’t want it at all and only buy it as a means of last resort at the cheapest price.

You can look at the five groups like this…

  • The Innovators push the development of the product forward. 
  • The Early Adopters buy that new product as soon as it is available. 
  • The Early Majority buys the commodity version of that product. 
  • The Late Majority buys the discounted commodity version of that product. 
  • The Laggard only buys the discounted commodity version and only when forced to buy it.

The profit margin, therefore, is in selling to the EA’s. The volume is in selling to the EM’s. Everyone else is a race to the bottom that you can’t  (don’t want to) win. The choice is yours, but it is definitely a choice you have to make. Otherwise you will be stuck in the chasm between the two with ineffective marketing to both of them.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS One other thought I have been having on this topic… My toy and baby customers turn over so fast that even the tried and true product to me can often feel new and innovative and unique to a brand new mom-to-be. In other words, if you have a fast-changing market, don’t throw out the tried-and-true products just yet. They may be new and unique to your new base.

Putting Amazon and eCommerce Into Perspective

It is about that time of year when you start hearing all the news about Amazon and Wal-Mart and low prices and discounts and the death of mom & pop shop retailers.

Yeah, Amazon is huge. In 2013, they did $75.4 billion in sales. That was 28.6% of all US eCommerce!

But it was only 2.5% of all retail. In fact, if you take gasoline and groceries out of the mix, eCommerce only accounted for 8.8% of all retail dollars last year.  (see references below)

Think about that for a moment. All the hype about Amazon and the Internet, yet over 9 out of every 10 dollars spent in retail were spent in a brick & mortar store. Brick & mortar is so far from dead, that any report you hear otherwise should be discounted immediately.

Yeah, Wal-Mart is huge, too. Almost four times bigger than Amazon. In 2013, they did $279 billion in sales in the US. That was 9.2% of all retail – more than all of eCommerce!

But once again, that shows you there is still plenty of room for you to do business. Add up Wal-Mart and all of eCommerce and you still have 82% of the retail dollars going somewhere else. That’s almost $2.5 trillion dollars going somewhere else.

That somewhere else ought to be you and me. If we quit worrying so much about Amazon and Wal-Mart and the demise of the mom & pops and start focusing on making ourselves better, it will.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I used two sources for the numbers you see above. The first source here from emarketer.com claims that all retail was $4.5 trillion. But I felt that number was inflated by things like gasoline purchases and other non-eCommerce retail, so I also used the numbers from the US Census here to get a true product purchase number just over $3 trillion.

PPS And the number from Amazon is their total sales, not just US sales, so their percentage of the US market may be a little bit lower.