All industries undergo change, and none more than newspapers. (The Fairfax 'cost-cutting' exercise is a case in point.)

But - where there is flux, there is opportunity. As publishers cut costs, they become ever more dependent on being fed the news rather than finding it. Most retailers don't use PR as well as they could, and often because they don't appreciate how much 'news' the average retail business can generate:

• Every new product launch
• Every spike (up or down) in sales
• Every change in fashion/ style
• Every change in supply/ supplier
  
• Every change in price

Need I go on?

To capitalise on this opportunity, the press release must work well and we recommend that each release contain these basic elements. (There is no need to be different or creative - just provide the info in a manner that journalists are familiar with. It is really about the newsworthiness...)

1. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: These words should appear in the upper left-hand margin, just under your letterhead.
2. Contact Information: List the name, title, and telephone and fax numbers of the company spokesperson. Give a home number since reporters often work on deadlines and may not be available until after hours.
3. Headline: Use a boldface type.
4. Dateline: This should state the city and the date you are mailing your release.
5. Lead Paragraph: The first paragraph needs to grasp the reader's attention and should contain the relevant information to your message such as the five W's (who, what, when, where, why).
6. Text: The main body of your press release where your message should fully develop.
7. Recap: At the lower left hand corner of your last page restate your product's specifications, highlight a product release date.

 A few general tips:

• Make sure the information is newsworthy.
• Start with a brief description of the news, and then distinguish who announced it, and not the other way around.
• Make sure the first 10 words of your release are effective, as they are the most important.
• Avoid excessive use of adjectives and fancy language.
• Deal with the facts.
• Make it as easy as possible for media representatives to do their jobs.
• Publicity and advertising must complement each other.
  
• Unlike most advertising and personal selling, publicity does not include a specific sales message.

 Have fun... and/or browse here for more stuff

Dennis

Promise me your eyes won’t glaze over if I say … multi-channel retailing. Stay with me for a moment. I wrote earlier about channel integration, but I suspect eyes might’ve glazed over because ‘multi-channel’ retail just sounds so much like a buzzword that it does not even bear thinking about. 

But there is a fundamental shift happening in terms of what is possible, and this shift is described by the ‘long tail’. Read the back story here if you will - or just trust me when I say that the Long Tail is creating opportunities for retailers. In fact the opportunities are created for everyone – the question is simply why retailers are not first to take advantage.

The long tail theory posits that there is a business to be had in (very) niche markets – enabled by the internet and such technology. The Long Tail is enabled by the internet but it is not about the internet. Examples of long tail businesses are:

• Provide advice, tool and merchandise for Pre-WWI gun collectors
• Run a fan club for an obscure form of the Blues hear only in the south-western parts of one state in the US
• Sell 18^th century porcelain dolls

I think you get the idea: the long tail redefines what we mean by ‘niche.’

But here is the KILLER: Even if you have a very small, single-site operation (say <$500k p.a.) then you already have a significant advantage over any website operator (start-up) in the same space.

Why couldn’t the…

• Independent fast food joint also run the mobile hot dog stand at the local footy club?
• Local fashion boutique not run a thriving internet business, selling 18^th century belt buckles to a global audience?
• The local jeweller run a direct mail catalogue selling precious stones into the Asian Market?

I could go on, but the point is not to identify every opportunity, but simply to encourage existing business owners to think about the countless niche businesses that already reside within their existing business.

These niches waiting to happen are typically exploitable through another channel – outside the traditional physical retail channel. These opportunities are ‘long tail’ opportunities and can effectively leveraged into entirely new businesses, using the skills, scale and access offered by your existing retail business.

The days of standing behind a counter and waiting for passing trade is long gone. Multi-channel is the new black.

 

 

Lots of doom and gloom around; especially the spectre of inflation. But, at the risk of showing my age, I cut my teeth in a highly inflationary environment, so here are some lessons/strategies from ‘that’ era:

• Being slightly over-stocked isn’t as much of a killer as before. The value of your inventory will rise even as it remains unsold. This is a hedging strategy in its simplest form.
• You can buy in slightly bigger quantities, getting better rates, and so benefit even more from the rise in value of your ‘stockpile’.

(These ‘benefits’ of inflation will of course come back and bite your arse if you overdo it, and if inflation comes down again and you retain such lazy practices in a then very different environment.)

• Inflation is good for the value –operators, as people become more price-conscious. And if value is not your strong suit, it becomes strategically more important to acquire the very useful skill of finding and articulating an alternate value proposition.

• The smart way of dealing with inflationary prices is apply Webers Law: make small increments regularly that remain below the customer’s perceptual threshold. (This is valid for most products, but more especially those that are NOT bought very regularly.)

 From a marketing point of view, the retailer must either:

• Promote a loss leader very judiciously. Pick a product smartly (i.e to which customers are price sensitive) that will get the customers in the door and then add value and upsell. Or, alternatively
• Promote the product/category that has NOT increased in price much heavily to convey the message of being a price leader.

And finally of course, great customer service (if properly understood) remains a very effective differentiator, no matter what is happing to prices.

Hoep that is food for thought...

The 6 Enemies of Happiness here...

Retail checklists galore...

Have fun

Dennis

Category Management has not been adopted by smaller retailers. I suspect that some vendors (and chains) have made this seem more complicated than it should have been. Category Management is as simple as giving an employee ownership of a particular category (amongst other things.) It is actually a really powerful tool to help make sense of the plethora of data retailers are confronted with.

Category management is the process by which we manage our business at the category level to deliver better product, pricing and service to our customers. A category is a group or assortment of merchandise that the customer finds interchangeable; i.e. customers define category structure.  As a rule of thumb:

• No more than 10 departments per store
• No more than 10 categories per department
• No more than 10 subcategories per category

In practice it would look like this for a newsagency:

Store                                     Newsagent

Departments                     Magazines, Newspapers, Gifts, Stationery

Categories                          Women’s Interest, Teenager, Adult

Sub-categories                 Bridal, Gossip Weeklies        

Items                                    Woman’s Day

Consider how categories may be differently defined if you were for instance determining the categories for a Discount Department Store?

Category management means:

• Display at the category level
• Planning at the category level
• Open to Buy at the category level
• Reporting at the category level
• Price analysis at the category level

When open to buy is determined, look at price point history by category. Use this information to buy replacement and new products in the category and avoid “price point proliferation.” The retailer must judge as accurately as possible what the sales potential of any given product is, and buy that amount of merchandise (in bulk) and sell the individual units at a profit.

The first step is therefore to develop a sales plan. Merchandise Management follows these five steps (although each step can obviously be divided into further sub-steps.)

Of your core product categories, what proportion of annual sales goes to each core product category and what proportion of floor space (shelf space) does each require?