Merchandising: Don’t Be Boring
4. Mark up your merchandise selection with a red pen. Your customers look to you to be their editors-in-chief, a role you must take seriously. Barry Schwartz, sociologist and author of “The Paradox of Choice” (Ecco, 2004), makes a compelling case against offering your customers too much. “We always think we want choice,” he says, “but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to choose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.”
Mike Bakehorn, president of multichannel merchant American Stationery, recently went through a powerful editing process with his brands. “We realized that in some of our categories, our products were repetitious, and we were giving our customers too many options in some areas and not enough in others,” he says. “We’ve learned to be better editors, and I know our customers will thank us.”
5. Make it personal. It’s an innate human desire to want to be unique. Marketers and merchants who capitalize on this core value will win their customers’ hearts. “We’ve encouraged customers to design their own gifts for several years,” says Wolferman’s Brady. The company started by letting customers pick specific food products for their gift baskets and expanded to offer personalized greeting cards as well. “This personalization makes Wolferman’s gifts seem extra special and helps customers feel more connected to the brand,” she adds.
6. Learn from the small giants. The small giants in our industry are those who do things differently, who are passionate about their customers and because of all that, are gaining more than just their partial attention.
Many small giants are found outside your market segment. Medved acknowledges the importance of looking outside your existing vertical market for that “wow” idea. He recounts the following story from his time leading Walter Drake: “We had a product that was a minimal seller; a small shot-glass sized measuring cup. It customarily sold a few hundred units. I was attending a health care show and saw that same product being used to measure liquid medicines. We reshot the glass for the next catalog and talked about how easy it was to measure medicine this way vs. using messy spoons. We ended up selling thousands rather than hundreds. But we would have never uncovered this product usage if we had not stepped outside our traditional show path.”
