How can your brand infuse its products with double benefits? Double meanings? What would it take to accomplish something even more meaningful with your product development team?
This summer, why not chat about the strength of your merchandise’s kindle factor and see if there aren’t ways you can turn up the inspiration intensity of your product offering?
To “live curious” as a merchant means to dig deeper, pay more attention to details and patiently sift through the mundane to find the remarkable. And sometimes it means making the mundane simply remarkable.
Stop and ask yourself: Do your merchants think of themselves as servants? That is, do they come to work each day thinking about how they can create products that make your customers’ lives better in some way?
It turns out that consumers don’t necessarily buy more merchandise just because you offer them more merchandise. Consumers tend to have a “budget,” if you will. In other words, customers are only capable of spending so much on any family of merchandise categories, regardless of how many items or SKUs you choose to offer.
I follow Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s axiom as my merchandising golden rule: “A product has a job to do for your customer.” I also add to that: “A product has a job to do for your brand.” These guiding factors play out in all the best merchandising strategies. Customer-centric products have only two paths — they can either enhance or detract from the brand.
A recent visit to a major B-to-B cataloger (sales in excess of $100M) proved to be quite a revelation for me. During the course of my visit, it was revealed that the company was struggling to maintain its fill rate. When I asked what its fill rate was, the answer was shocking — below 80 percent! It’s been almost two decades since I’ve heard a number that low.
Once again, this example reinforced for me how important it is to make sure the basics are right in our businesses. With such a low fill rate, I suggested this company slow down on all other
I find it surprising how much time and energy gets spent these days on the smallest details of a myriad of marketing communication activities while how little time and attention gets placed on effective product development. At our core, catalogers are merchants live and die by our ability to bring new, exclusive (or at least hard to find) products to the pages of catalogs.
Yet, how much real time, effort and resources is your catalog team allocating to this effort? Here are some guidelines that I highly recommend to you.
1. Challenge your product team to deliver 25 percent-plus of annual sales from
