A home delivery service using local independent shops?

If you don't have time to visit the butcher, the baker and the fishmonger, someone else can do it for you

Growing fast, Hubbub was launched 12 months ago and now uses more than a dozen shops and six delivery vans (bright yellow ones – watch as they crop up everywhere soon). Currently it just serves an area of London which stretches from Kentish Town, via Islington and Hackney to the City, but the plan is to roll it out across the whole of the capital early this year and following that, the rest of the UK.

The clever bit about Hubbub is that if you log on in, say, north or west London, you will be only be served by the shops in your immediate vicinity, so you will be directly supporting your local businesses.

Scale issues remain but once they achieve critical mass, this has got to  be a winner, surely worthy of some support from suppliers and retailers..?

The Iron Lady - Lessons for NAMs in Thatcher remake?

Gordon Reece, a former television producer, has been widely credited with masterminding Mrs Thatcher’s change of image, advising her to adopt a softer hairstyle, get rid of her “fussy” clothes and stick to a high neckline and pastel shades. Crucially, he also advised her to lower the tone of her voice and speak more slowly and closer to the microphone to make her voice husky, intimate and, above all, less hectoring….

A team of well-known experts in their respective fields then focused on each aspect and helped to bring about the subtle changes that all boiled down to being herself, with emphasis..

Politics apart, in terms of learnings for your NAM role, by all means wear a ring in your nose, a pony-tail and goth-gear if that is your preferred weekend presentational mode but it just means that you have to work a bit harder to neutralise the resulting ‘negative‘ influence on a more conventional buyer, more accustomed to visits from competitor NAMs wearing horn-rimmed glasses and hair parted on the left…

However, whilst you may (or have to) be open to corporate advice on how best to present yourself to the buyer, ultimately, like Maggie, you are the one in charge…

A final pre-austerity treat for those not tired of Christmas fare?

For those amongst our readers still awaiting delivery of their Fortnum & Masons £5,000 Christmas hampers we can reveal that the unforgivable delay has been caused by a disastrous IT failure at the store earlier in December. As you know, the £5,000 Imperial Hamper comes packed with Beluga caviar, foie gras truffles, cognac butter, a magnum of Cristal 2002 and a bottle of 32-year-old whisky. 

Full refunds are available and who knows, perhaps a bogof might shift the unsold stock?  

In which case, why not indulge in a final pre-austerity bash this weekend?

‘We are all special cases’ *Meeting a Buyer’s Need For Special Treatment in 2012.

Given current pressures in the market, coupled with a tradition of attempting to meet a buyer’s needs, the new Age of Selfishness can mean that more ‘powerful’ buyers get more than their fair share, in effect making the strong players stronger…

Unless it is your company policy to eventually end up with one customer, it is important to attempt to meet a buyer’s needs within a context of all other buyers’ requirements. In other words, we need to balance resource allocation across the whole customer portfolio to avoid distortion of our consumer base.

Our starting point has to be our own survival in terms of an acceptable ROCE and Net Profit in a flatline growth environment, over the next five years, at least.

Realistically, this means achieving at least 15% ROCE and Net Profit of 10% for our company and for our business with each of our major customers, minimum…

There are two ways of achieving this, either growing the business, or cutting costs. Given the lack of growth, this means cutting all available slack in the system in terms of stock level vs. service level, trade terms and making trade funding investment conditional upon full compliance.

This exercise will help calculate the size of the ‘cake’ available for the customers, divided in proportion to their potential turnover within our total sales performance and profitability (i.e. ROCE and Net Profit).

Given that our competition are under similar pressures an probably fighting for their lives (and perhaps do not even know it), it is crucial that we maintain a realistic view of our competitive appeal vs. others in the category, and again cut away anything not demonstrably contributing to that appeal.

It is only then that we can consider a buyer’s need for special treatment, counting cost and value all the way..

Welcome to 2012…

*Albert Camus

Thinking straight for 2012?

With the most optimistic predictions indicating at best flat-line growth this year, our role in business still remains that of factoring in latest conditions and taking  action that will stand the test of 20/20 hindsight…

Apart from 'normal' competition, we need to cope with unprecedented forces at work in our markets including ‘making do’, delaying renewal/replacement, recycling goods via pre-owned, re-usable, second-hand sub-markets, with charity shops and pound-stores now becoming mainstream, all potentially reducing demand for our new products and services.   

All of these take on whole new meanings as savvy consumerism works its way up the pipeline.

We need to challenge everything to ensure we get demonstrable value-for-money, everywhere.

The age of credit is being replaced by selfishness as businesses struggle for survival by passing risk and cost back up the supply-chain via demands for extra credit, increased trade funding, anything that will improve competitiveness, all at the expense of other parties, any other parties… 

Realistically, in a flat-line market any growth has to come at the expense of the competition.

It is therefore time for really straight thinking in order to assess relative competitive appeal in the eyes of increasingly savvy consumers and  customers. We need to quantify cost and value by reflex, since without calculation and quantification, our reaction is simply emotional…

In fact, deep down, as everything changes and nothing changes, as always, we are on our own.

All we need is realistic optimism for 2012, in the firm belief that there is always room for a good idea.

All else is detail….

The Great British Understatement, a way of coping with 2012?

Slogging through the jungles of Africa in 1873, Dr David Livingstone recorded an extraordinary example of a species that has since become almost extinct:

The Great British Understatement.
The intrepid explorer was suffering from pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, and piles so savage he could barely walk. The roasting heat was punctuated by sudden torrential downpours. Many of his porters had run away, and he had been forced to pull out most of his rotting teeth. He had been attacked by leeches, slavers and hostile African tribesmen. Lurking in his gut was a blood clot the size of a cricket ball that would shortly kill him.

In his tent, by the light of a candle, Livingstone picked up his pen and, using berry juice because he had run out of ink, he wrote these magnificent words:
“It is not all pleasure, this exploration”.

The Times 27th Dec 2011
Ben Macintyre

A Christmas message from NamNews

November, the new January…

From a supplier and retailer branding point of view, pre-christmas discounting became the norm, bigtime....

A time when the need to move product also served to reduce brands to commodities.

Remembering that consumers buy the total package (Product, Price, Presentation and Place) and shoppers buy the total 'shop' (Products & assortment, Pricing, Promotional activities, Place i.e. store location, Personnel, Physical distribution & handling, Presentation of stores & products, and Productivity) it is obvious that price figures highly in each case. However, it can be seen that the retail offering is more complex, and by excessively discounting, given the knife-edge margins, there is simply little scope for permanently reducing prices, without damaging the fabric of the business.

The impact of this will become more obvious tn the new year, when the next quarterly rents become due…

Meanwhile, permanent discounting of brands merely serve to commodify the category, with little benefit for anyone

Again, the new year will allow brand owners to demonstrate their need to rebuild brand equity via direct ATL re-investment, whatever the cost to the diminishing pool of retail trade partners…