Making An Impact

Analysts Comscore indicate that two and a half times as many people are shopping online on a daily basis than enter out-of-town or city centre premises. The gap grows and grows, but life behind the counter used to be very different.

British Home Stores was founded in 1928 by a group of entrepreneurs who set out to follow the successful model developed by multi-outlet Woolworths.

Within five years it had listed on the London Stock Exchange, boosted by profits from a quick spread of shops. In the 1980s it was revamped as BHS, although the British Home Stores fascia resurfaced 20 years later. Back then, profits had seemed easy to produce.

Woolworths and its 800 UK stores collapsed in 2008, surrendering 27,000 jobs. In so many ways, that signalled bright red for danger in the more traditional retailing sector. BHS, wearing whichever branded shroud, took little heed of the illuminated warning and eventually added 11,000 to the list of unemployed. Over 1,000 have gone from Austin Reed.

STARKLY DIFFERENT

They fiddled while the shopping aisles burned away beneath them. A starkly different, smoke-free atmosphere pervades, catering for more complex lifestyles and discerning buyers. Yesterday is history.

Always, retailers have worked at protecting their customer bases, but traditional loyalties can be relied upon no longer. Fickleness has supplanted fealty. Today’s challenge is to hold on to as many customers as possible in the knowledge that retention rates will continue to decline.

Retailers need to earn the gratitude of those they have been lucky enough to engage with and search for effective ways of continuing to serve them – sell to them – in the short time that they will stay in touch.

The path to repeat business is consistently high quality service in the broadest sense. The best shops are about far more than transactions at the till. They blend their for-sale stock with warm interaction and a variety of positive experiences.

Customers want to be wowed when they walk through the doorway. Happy shoppers will look around and spend more money.

EMBRACING ONLINE

There is room to embrace rather than cower away from the online alternatives, for selling in the shop and online can fit together seamlessly. As stores have a readily available supply of merchandise and staff, they can offer speedy shipping, usually same day, thereby delivering a first-class service to online customers. Many retailers are perfectly positioned to open complementary online facilities.

Their walk-in stores, nevertheless, as with almost all industries, will have to change to survive. Every aspect of design needs constant attention and regular renewal, polishing the offering and revamping presentation. It has to be quick and inventive.

Unavoidably, it seems, this will become a smaller sector. The Centre for Retail Research has published an analysis of how it expects UK retailing to change by 2018 and it forecasts a further 22% fall in store numbers with a loss of more than 300,000 jobs.

There is inevitability, but to avoid BHS-typified disasters, far greater effort and ingenuity need to be applied to make the best stores better, adding to their longevity.

Marketing strategists know that the traditional management structure of retail outlets, large and small, must be superimposed with data-derived intelligence and flexibility.  

Above all, they are fully aware that a radical new business culture, combined with applied desire for coexistence with other channels, have to fill the shop windows. On display: a team spirit that will be more rewarding for customers, employees and management alike.

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