Well, uncertainty is the new norm, and only the brave, the creative, the innovative will prosper. This is not the time to think like Groucho:

Well, not so in Australia, where despite some campaign innovation appearing last year by NAB and the year before by Bankwest, banks mostly still communicate like the uncaring corporate behemoths they are. (PS for a great insight into just how unhappy some people are with their banks, take a look at unhappybanking.net.au). The recent public outcry when the banks failed to pass an official rate cut onto customers was a great example of how they can misread – or is it wishful thinking – the extent of the public’s disdain for them.

Anyway, here’s one which hit some effective buttons, for me at least. The voiceover at the end is too cheesey, but the message works. What do you think? Would you change banks for this?

At last government regulations in Australia are making it easier to switch banks…perhaps these enormously profitable entities will show more willingness to respond to customer wants and needs.

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During my enforced wait, I shopped around for better phone deals – why wouldn’t I? I also dropped into Harvey Norman to buy a small item. I self selected it and took it to the register…where I stood in line for 15 minutes while an inexperienced check out clerk struggled with every purchase ahead of me.

Retail is faltering against the convenience of ecommerce and it’s not hard to see why,  judging by this experience.  The signs of stress are common – empty retail spaces abound and the forums . Customer service has been one of the hot spots in the debate about what retailers can do to maintain relevance in the connected world.

There is an aspect that I think has been left out of this debate: traditional high street strip retailers often had a more personal relationship with their customers, there was a human scale to the whole setup which encouraged distinctiveness and loyalty. My feeling is that all that went out with the Mall-induced commoditisation of retailing precincts. Personal service was lost and when the store staff were moved into the boxlike tenancies inside Westfiled, they lost their incentive to reach out on an individual level to customers, and vice-versa. So when ecommerce came along and offered even more convenience than the Mall,  the dramatically reduced levels of personal service and connection that the consumer was already experiencing inside the echoing artificial voids of Westfield meant they were going to lose little by moving their custom across to the new channel. That which COULD have provided the reason to stay with conventional retail, had already been considered unimportant by the mall-fuelled behemoths such as Harvey Norman who suddenly, in the face of brilliant new cross-channel retailers like Apple, look frighteningly clumsy and outmoded. . .  whilst focussing so hard on supply-chain improvements and cookie cutter store ops, the big chains seem to have forgotten so much of what drives human behaviour.

Is it any coincidence that Apple stores are popping up on the high street and not in the Mall? My prediction is that new (bricks and mortar) retail might look much more like old retail, with personal shopping experience back at the fore and even small strip-based specialists seeing a revival….the big difference being that in-store technologies will be helping to provide that personally tailored interactive (and fun!!) shopping experience…and in many cases ecommerce will be integrated into the process – yes, in the store itself.

post-script: should retailers invest more in customer service staff? Sure they should, but they can’t afford to. Australian retail  rents remain unsustainably high – one recent report found that it’s more expensive to rent a shop in prime Sydney CBD than on Paris’ Champs Elysees. The irony is that by raising rents too high, retail landlords are destroying the goose that lays to golden egg.

Related articles

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traditional marketday social

Former sociology professor Ray Oldenburg is the author of two books about the “third place,” The Great Good Place (Marlowe & Company, 1989) and Celebrating the Third Place (2001). Oldenburg spoke with us about what he sees happening in the retail sector as it works to create third place experiences. We learned why virtual connections don’t count as third place experiences, the potential value of third place connections and what makes his local Publix supermarket a great good place.

You first wrote about the idea of the third place 20 years ago. Has your definition of what a third place is changed since then?

Not really. I have objected to the common idea these days that there can be virtual third places, that you can do it electronically. There is no comparison, in my mind, between the joys of getting together, of the face-to-face enjoyment and banter. You can’t really compare that with electronic [social networking].

We have evolved to a place where people are interacting with screens as much as with other people. So does this make the idea of a physical third place even more necessary?

In public places, you get a mix built right in, because people with different mind-sets, different politics and so on share that space, and they discover one another, and they get along. The problem with so-called virtual third places is that you get like-minded people attracting each other.

So even with the growth of social networking, people are still looking for reasons to come together in physical spaces?

Yes. The problem is, we have a high rate of mobility. We move from one locale to another, and for most people it’s from one suburban development to another, and there’s no gathering place, no place to welcome you into and get to know all your neighbors in a suburb. As I once said, if we left urban planning to General Motors, by gosh, we’d have pretty much what we have right now. It’s a lot of consumption and a lot of loneliness.

Have there been retail spaces that worked as third places?

We had the general store, which was also a gathering place. In the center of it you typically had the potbellied stove, and there’d be seats around that and people would come in and visit there. The best combination of retail and third place that we ever had was the soda fountain. In 1900 there were about 110,000 of them in the United States, and by 1980 we were down to 150, because the bean counters figured out you can make more money selling greeting cards in that space. The great thing about the soda fountain was that it maximized what I call the mix, which is sort of what’s missing in our society these days—the mixing of different kinds of people, all ages, both sexes. Everybody enjoyed that soda fountain.

You’re talking about smaller, independent shops. Today we’re seeing mass retailers creating spaces where people can gather, places where people go to not necessarily buy something but to interact. It’s a more deliberate attempt to create something that used to happen more naturally. Does this make it any less authentic of an experience?

Well, Barnes & Noble always has a goodly number of customers. By definition, it may not be a real third place. I mean, you don’t have a lot of people talking to one another. They are sitting in comfortable chairs, eating their treats. But it is a place to go. It’s a place a lot of people go. I see familiar faces in there. I think there are people that make it a hangout.

Is it less authentic? Maybe not. What’s attractive about a place is vitality. And how do you get that? Well, you get people to come. So that becomes the first challenge. The second is to ask: What about a place, other than the goods you’re selling, might make it attractive? In one of Ron Sher ’s retail developments, called Crossroads , there was a concourse that didn’t get a lot of traffic. He paid $12,000 for a miniature merry-go-round. He put chairs around it so the mothers of small children could sit there, and it nets $16,000 a year from the quarters the mothers put in.

He went so far as to get a mini police station at Crossroads and a branch of the library, and so there’s many reasons now to go to that shopping development, quite apart from shopping.

So it’s less about buying and more about just coming for the experience?

Yes. I think the typical American consumer is always looking for a friendly place. You know, we’re deprived.

How?

There are places where the town square is created or improved or whatever and remains vacant, because the big shift in American society was the home became the center of entertainment. When I was a kid, the home was not a center of entertainment. You got out of the house to be entertained. Now, families got smaller and their houses got bigger, and you’ve brought in everything you could think of. People have little theaters in their home with giant TV screens, and they’re used to being entertained in the home.

Are there any retailing experiences you particularly enjoy?

Well, I enjoy going to my local Publix supermarket. They have a chef, and I’ve met the chef, and I enjoy talking to her. And everybody’s very helpful. They have real meat. They have men who cut meat. It’s wonderful. You can speak to them. For example, they will have beef shanks displayed, but they’re too short. I’ve spoken with the butcher to ask about cutting some longer ones, and they will cut them and bring them to me.

Pittsburg market

So this is a place where you go to get quality merchandise but also get personalized service?

It’s kind of a weird feeling. It’s like being in the old small-town butcher shop, you know. It’s charming, I must say.

You’ve written that what attracts the regular visitor is supplied not by management but by other customers. Have retailers co-opted this? They’re supplying the interaction in many cases, and just like your experience at Publix, it seems like the retailer has replaced the friend. Does this make it any less of a third place?

Ideally, of course, the third place has regulars. But short of that—take this example: Suppose I go to another city and I don’t know anyone, and I want to have a drink. I can walk into a bar, as I have, and the bartender might be down at the end of the bar talking to a couple buddies and paying no attention to me. What I do is spin around, get out of there and find a place where the guy behind the bar is friendly, and then I have my beer. So, while not achieving the ideal typical model of the third place, it’s certainly preferable to the one where the help or the host just doesn’t seem to care.

Is there something retailers should be doing to create a better third-place experience for shoppers?

One thing that increasingly they’re doing is being very accommodating to customers. This business of “Let me drop what I’m doing and help you,” that hasn’t always been there in our stores. But it is now.

Is there one thing happening in retailing that is a positive way in which retailers are becoming a third place?

Well, as we’ve discussed, your general treatment when you go in is much better than it was, say, 20 years ago. Beyond that, I think the trick for retailers is to find some reason for a customer to come in other than the goods they have to offer for sale.

Nike was one of the fist big businesses to develop such a scheme, launching its Reuse-A-Shoe scheme  back in1990. Since then,   over 25 million pairs of worn-out Nike shoes have been collected, sliced, separated and ground up into a material called Nike Grind, which is then used in creating athletic and playground surfaces, as well as a variety of new Nike products.

Several computer companies including Dell and Apple have recycling programs (although often not in Australia!), but I’ve blogged about the challenges of getting independent and complete assessments of the real impact of such programs and how they compare vs the massive footprints of behemoth corporations. Nonetheless, any program which takes broad responsibility for the entire life cycles of a product is a good start, as well as providing a powerful marketing tool and important corporate statement. Let’s see more manufacturers coming up with such innovative programs and more marketers using them to excite – and reward – their responsible customers.

Nike eco display

I’ve blogged before about Australia’s poor uptake of FairTrade products. Having said that, significant improvements have been reported. However, a new piece of research by a Victoria University branding specialist indicates consumers’ unwillingness to follow ethical convictions through to the extent they actually make a difference. Senior lecturer in marketing Maxwell Winchester surveyed 8,000 shoppers (in the UK) finding that they were more likely to buy larger national brands than fairtrade when both were available.

“A majority of consumers will confess to having strong ethical attitudes and practices including boycotting, but the reality of their actual behaviour was shown to be otherwise,” Winchester said. “Consumers are not taking their ethical concerns to the checkout.”

Of course if more big brands go Fair Trade – so the choice doesn’t need to be made. But unless consumers vote for FairTrade products with their wallets it’s not going to happen…a case of chicken and free range egg?

PS it should be noted that Fair Trade itself has received its share of criticism over the years for being ineffective in its aims to improve the welfare of third world agricultural workers and rural societies. The debate continues…

Pristine wilderness under pressure

Here’s a cautionary tale about the reliance by public bodies on private funding if ever there was one. Coca Cola has donated over $13m to the US National Parks, so, whether they really have any sort of commitment to environmental issues or not,  at the very least they must get the PR benefit of looking like they do, right?

So it comes as a surprise to read how the company turned psycho when the custodians of the extremely fragile Grand Canyon National Park declared a ban on disposable plastic water bottles…and successfully pressured the Parks to reverse the ban.

This despite the Parks having gone to lengths to work with the local retailers who would be affected by the ban. However, possibly assuming that if small retailers could overlook a minor dent in their sales in order to protect a world heritage site so could a global corporation, they neglected to deal with the bully in the room.

Nor the coward, apparently. Neil J. Mulholland, president of the parks foundation, said a Coca-Cola representative contacted him late in the process to ask for details of the bottle ban and how it would work. “There was not an overt statement made to me that they objected to the ban,” Mulholland claims. “There was never anything inferred by Coke that if this ban happens, we’re losing their support.” Nonetheless, he simply folded at the very idea and halted the plan to ban.

A Cocal Cola spokesperson said “Banning anything is never the right answer,” she said. “If you do that, you don’t necessarily address the problem.”

Erm, so banning plastic bottles doesn’t address the issue of discarded plastic bottles? I’m waiting to hear from CC exactly what their solution might be. It’s estimated that water bottles make up 30% of the Park’s solid waste. A ban isn’t a radical new idea – Zion National Park already has a ban. What perplexes me here is the value of water sales in the national Park vs the damaging PR generated by this story. CC’s behaviour seems like a mean, heavy-handed, ignorant, greedy over-reaction…entirely consistent with the idea of the corporation as psychopath.

Read more: http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2011/11/grand-canyon-trash-plan-coca-cola.html

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-10/news/30380628_1_susan-stribling-coca-cola-officials-dasani#ixzz1fKlPCp

Future additions will include sharing and subscribing tools as well as a range of downloadable white papers on various marketing matters.

Shameless self promotion doesn’t have to be ugly! Having recently criticised the commoditisation of website design, we wanted to produce something that delivered beauty as well as information – whilst being easy to use of course.

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Really, I couldn’t say it better than this:

Thanks to Kreativ Magazine of Hungary

Thylane Loubry Blondeau - ten years old

It’s hard to pin down the reasons why women read magazines showing girls young enough to be their daughters doing thinks they’d be horrified to see their daughters doing. So let’s talk briefly about the perpetrators – or one example at least. I’m not going to comment here on the role of the magazine editors, instead I’ll look at photographer Terry Richardson, a frequent and sought after contributor to the likes of Vogue etc. who has shot for Tom Ford, Sisley, Gucci, Levi’s, Miu Miu and Jimmy Choo. As that list indicates,despite the fact that his shoots are uniformly erotic often playing on the edges of porn… he’s not exactly a pariah in the fashion world.

Now I’m fine with racy shoots, so long as we’re all being adult and respectful, right? (I blogged about the pornification of advertising here).

Certainly drawing lines around what’s OK and what’s not is very hard but Richardson is actually (in)famous for stepping way over them with relish.

One of Richardson’s better known muses is Linsay Wixon, who is often breathlessly described as ‘the current fashion IT girl’ by writers who lean towards such inanities. Lindsay started modelling at 14 – which is actually not uncommon.

OK so she’s young and beautiful…so what do shooters like Richardson (seen here with her) do with such youth and innocence?

Pornify it for our titillation, of course.

This does beg the question: for who’s titillation? The readers? Well, my partner reads Vogue but finds sexualised teens totally distasteful. So it’s not for her, or, one suspects many other women.

14 year old Wexon in action for Richardson

What kind of role does the photographer play in all this? Events last year threw some light on this question, as Richardson was ‘outed’ as a model abuser when supermodel Rie Rasmussen accused him of exploiting young models.

Rasmussen — a vocal advocate of women’s rights — reportedly became upset Richardson used her picture in his “Terryworld” book alongside shots of half-naked young girls depicted as performing sex acts.

“He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures of them they will be ashamed of. They are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves. His ‘look’ is girls who appear underage, abused, look like heroin addicts . . . I don’t understand how anyone works with him.”

This prompted another model, 19 year old Jamie Peck, to make claims against Richardson saying she was left feeling like she needed “two showers” after a nude photoshoot with Richardson during which he stripped and got her to perform sexual favours. “I can remember doing this stuff, but even at the time, it was sort of like watching someone else do it, someone who couldn’t possibly be me because I would never touch a creepy photographer’s penis. The only explanation I can come up with is that he was so darn friendly and happy about it all, and his assistants were so stoked on it as well, that I didn’t want to be the killjoy in the room. My new fake friends would’ve been bummed if I’d said no” she said.

As the Sydney Morning Herald succinctly puts it: To sexualise children in the way that advertisers do – by dressing, posing, and making up child models in the same ways that sexy adults would be presented – also implicitly suggests to adults that children are interested in and ready for sex. This is profoundly irresponsible, particularly given that it is known that pedophiles use not only child pornography but also more innocent photos of children.

And just how does this oh-so-fashion-darling photographer, arbiter of thing stylish and tsateful wish to be presented himself? Here he is, for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy. And under his photo is a shot of his model Lindsay Wixon – modelling and in more natural mode. Make your own decision about how blurred the line is.

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