The pop-up store that will allow you to pay with 'social currency' instead of cash

                                                                                                                                           pic: Velcro

According to The Daily Mail, the Velcro Brand Holiday Hackshop has declared Monday, December 15, its 'Social Currency Day,' when customers can pay for select items with 'retweets, posts and more' in which the brand is mentioned. The company is hoping to get more followers on social media sites by running a holiday pop-up shop in lower Manhattan where customers are encouraged to post about their experience.

Velcro missing a trick?
In the excitement of combining pop-up shopping with social media optimisation and despite illustrating 19 different uses of Velcro in POS, the company might have capitalised on the creative potential and reach of their new audience by building in incentives to think up additional ways of using the product and crowd-sourcing ideas via the network…

Other NAMs missing a trick?
Think beyond adhesion to the process operating here and its potential as a way of stretching scarce promotional monies for your brand.

Go even further and think amplification of message, in the way that some major retailers optimised their dismantling of Sunday trading legislation, all those years ago.

As a reminder of the method, say a branch in Neasden decided to open on a single Sunday in breach of the legislation, and were promptly brought to court and fined £10k. The resulting media coverage was invariably worth in excess of £250k, advertising their role as ‘champions of the people’…

The authorities eventually saw the wisdom of acknowledging real-world consumer need by allowing 24/7 trading… 

Landlines giving a final boost to mobile usage?

According to the BBC, the major landline providers are raising their line rental charges to approximately £17 per month, three times the rate of inflation.

Ofcom figures confirm that while the number of residential lines has risen, this has been more than offset by a fall in the number of business lines.  However, call usage on landlines has fallen by 12.7% in the year to June 2014….

Given the increase in mobile usage, the ultimate move to user convenience, this makes the idea of having to be anchored to the home ‘to receive and make calls’ seem Neanderthal…

It seems obvious that any increase in landline installations is surely arising from a need to bring wifi to the household, a position increasingly under threat from mobile operators willing to develop a pricing model that ‘wifies’ a home at something less than £17 per month.

In other words, in the way that the Post Office price-increases & and postal strikes boosted the growth of fax machines, so too are price increases drawing attention to the increasing redundancy of that old fashioned telecommunications technology on the hall table… 

What if a supplier was running Tesco UK - as Dave Lewis takes charge of helping the consumer to buy...

As NAMs we have all stayed in hotels, supped in restaurants and bars and concluded that a NAM in charge would make a real difference.

Ditto with retailing

Given that much of our effort in front of the buyer is devoted to fighting the consumer’s corner, then perhaps with Dave Lewis’ decision to work ‘hands-on’, a NAM dream has been realised and we are entering a new era with Tesco?

Think about it:

As a brand marketer, Lewis’ starting point has to be consumption, in the home. This means that Tesco will at last acknowledge that the process starts with ensuring that the consumer’s needs as a consumer are met, in that the contents of the box are fit for purpose and exceed expectation.

The next step is to ensure that the product is made available wherever, whenever and however the consumer-shopper chooses to buy -  a multi-channel approach, writ large…

When it comes to bricks & mortar, 100% on-shelf availability is a given, with no excuses.
It follows that category-based in-store presence via aisle-based shopper-marketing will be made conducive to optimising repeat purchase, with theater to match…

This means 100% zero-defect delivery, all based upon sales-based demand and fulfilment.

That only works if the brands are purchased within a realistic competitive-set, with private label having its fair share, instead of being an over-faced passenger  ...and never forgetting that the guy in charge knows more about supply than Tesco could only dream about….

And patently, given the stock-market impact of the Tesco crisis, the financials have to stack up…

In other words, the next three months are going to make or break Dave Lewis, so I don’t mind betting he will give it his best shot, in the only way he knows…

NAMs and other retailers might well profit by taking a leaf from his new book, and attempting to turn around their entire approach to helping consumer-shoppers to buy, again and again and again and again…

Tesco's poetic response to a rhyming complaint

According to an article in Metro, Isabelle Bousquette, 20, and Tomi Baikie, 18, students at St Andrews university, wrote to Tesco after discovering their Tesco store in Fife no longer stocked salted Popcorn Sensations. They used the 'only language' they knew - a Shakespearean sonnet.

They were astonished to receive a Shakespearean sonnet in reply.

                                                                                                           pic: Facebook

Key learnings for NAMs:

• If Tesco still have a sense of humour after this Annus Horribilis, they are on the way back...
• They may be expecting NAMs to rise to new heights of creative endeavour in their 2015 trade strategies
• For our part, as an aide memoire for NAMs, we are looking into adding some rhyming couplets to our treatment of trade finance...
• (Don't hold your breath, writing poetry ain't for sissies....)  

Christmas & Thanksgiving: a contrarian view...

                                                                 ...from a key stakeholder

Hat-tip to Mike Greene for pointer to pic

Multi-Channel Retailing - a business consulting role for NAMs?

John Nevens’ article in yesterday’s NamNews revealed an unanticipated consequence of the development of Multi-Channel Retailing: the resulting need for NAMs to be experts in all routes to consumer. 

This requirement, coupled with the need to place all initiatives within a continuous ‘time-framed’ strategy, can place an impossible burden on busy NAMs with barely manageable workloads.

But it can and should be done – the real issue is how?

Essentially, NAMs should see themselves as business consultants to the customer, providing a unique insight that answers the fundamental question in a buyer’s mind: How am I doing compared with the other guys? (They are looking for context)

A retailer/buyer is an in-depth but narrow expert in their own business, and a ‘permanent’ fire-fighting mode coupled with excessive buyer-churn can prevent them from taking a strategic view.

A NAM can provide solutions for these deficiencies in the buyer role, and transform relationships in the process.

As a business consultant that happens to carry a supplier’s bag, the NAM needs to be an expert in how the consumer can be helped to buy the category, however, whenever, and wherever they choose – a truly multi-channel approach to retailing…

However, it is not necessary to know as much as a dedicated expert in a particular channel.  The NAM is meant to be a broad but, of necessity, a relatively shallow expert in how their category functions and can be optimised in each of the different routes to consumer.

In other words, a NAM needs to know enough about a channel to be able to place their brand and its category in that channel in a way that meets consumer need and does not compromise other routes to consumer, especially that of the buyer in question. The NAM also needs to think short, medium and long-term in order to be able anticipate and respond to opportunities down the line..

It is for other people in the NAM’s business to take an overall view of the different roles of all channels for the brand, and label the channels invest, maintain or divest, as appropriate. It would obviously be unwise of a company not to involve the NAMs in these deliberations….

(I personally believe that being able to translate everything into cost and value, within an ROCE and commercial context, can then help place the trade initiatives within a strategic context and makes the NAM job manageable)

So, applying the NAM role in terms of broad, but shallow multi-channel category expertise, and combining this insight with the narrow, but in-depth expertise of the buyer can help the NAM to meet the increasing demands to create and sustain strategic rather than purely transactional relationships with retailers.

A small step on the way to fulfilling the new requirements of the NAM role identified by John…. 

Making a 'shelfie' pay, on your next OOS shopping trip

If we accept that a complaining customer is someone trying to give us a second chance, then why not help them over the final mile by using aisle-engagement to simplify shopper reporting of Out-Of-Stocks?

...and instead of an insincere apology, acknowledge their help via reward points, and better on-shelf availability...

US based Datacrowd* have launched an app that allows consumers to take a ‘shelfie’ of an empty facing and shelf price-tag, and email it to Datacrowd with the GPS location.

This entitles them to reward points that can be redeemed in-store, whilst Datacrowd passes the information to the supermarket, hopefully resulting in remedial action. 

Datacrowd have obviously taken the logical step of going directly to the retailer, but NAMs will appreciate that passing the information to appropriate suppliers would add considerable leverage to the process.

In other words, given that brand owners have both an interest in maintaining high levels of on-shelf availability, and ensuring that agreements with the buyer result in on-shelf execution, a shelfie becomes a very powerful enforcer of in-store compliance…. 

*Currently available in the US, but patently a no-brainer for the UK..

What if Aldi UK keeps going?

Given its UK 2013 sales of £5,275m and growing at 25%, Aldi could reach £16bn by 2018.
In a flat-line market, this would make it twice the size the Co-op Foods business and say 50% of a major multiple, given zero to very low growth of its competitors in the meantime.

Apart from a ‘handful’ of brands, this means that most of its business would be in surrogate brands, at the expense of national brands, effectively taking demand from the branded market.

This suggests that brand-suppliers have to find a way of dealing with Aldi, either via 1-off discontinuous promoting, or through supply of surrogate labels…

And with Lidl showing similar signs, they should be added to a new trade strategy

Perhaps yesterday’s news of changes at the top of Aldi UK - our biggest story of the day - provides NAMs with an excuse to help your company revisit corporate policy re the discounters?