Merchandising: Don’t Be Boring

Customers want to be stimulated, surprised, intrigued, involved, entertained and loved. “Just don’t bore them,” says Kevin Roberts, author of “The Lovemarks Effect: Winning in the Consumer Revolution” (powerHouse Books, 2006).

As you draw up merchandising plans for the new year, use these words as a lens to view all brand-enhancing merchandising strategies. You’ll be surprised to discover you usually have more work to do to be truly customer-centric.

Below are six timely merchandising strategies to focus you on delivering an inspired merchandising experience.

1. Break through your customers’ continuous partial attention (CPA). Customers not only are multitasking more these days, they also are multi-minding. With their attentions scattered in so many different directions, your brand is getting only a small piece (if any) of their mind share. In short, your products need to be memorable. Find and create gasp-worthy products.

Laura Brady, general manager of food gift catalog Wolferman’s, says she’s made several changes to Wolferman’s catalog with CPA in mind. The company enlarged the size of its catalog, going from 40 pages at 7 inches by 10.5 inches to 44 pages at 8 inches by 10.5 inches. Wolferman’s also upgraded the quality of the photography and simplified the book’s layout.

“These changes increased sales,” she says, “because the eye-catching pictures grabbed customers’ attention, and the new layout made ordering easier.”

2. Fill the gaps; recognize the power of micromarkets. Consider the long tail theory of merchandising, which says the collective power of niche products allows them to hold their own against the 80/20 rule of blockbusters. John Vitek, president of Saint Mary’s Press, a Catholic educational publisher and online marketer, continually creates products that speak to this theory.

Saint Mary’s Press found a merchandising gap among its niche audience of Catholic teenagers and created the market’s first ever Catholic Youth Bible. This purple cow product captured the hearts of teens and has sold more than a million copies to date.

“The greatest potential for profitability rests in highly focused, niche products that surpass customer expectations,” Vitek says. “There are more niches to succeed in today than ever before. The big companies will always leave a lot of scraps on the table, for whatever reason. A small, flexible, fast company or division that knows how to listen well to its customers can be extremely profitable in even the smallest niche markets.”

Although micromarket merchandising has intensified, some best practices aren’t so new. For instance, Jon Medved, recently retired president of Chef’s Catalog, once sold a small U-shaped alligator clip as a jeweler’s tool when he was a merchandiser at Brookstone. “We discovered that this product was being purchased by model builders as well as jewelers,” he recalls. “A little product found a small, but important, underserved micromarket.”

3. Invite customers to help you merchandise. This is no time to be a “do-it-yourself” merchant. Your customers want to be involved; invite them to the collaborative process.

Sometimes customer collaboration can happen serendipitously. Steve Leveen, president of Levenger, a multichannel merchant of “tools for serious readers,” says his customers use the company’s products to create their own methods for note taking and organizing.

“We sell lots of 3-inch-by-5-inch index cards, and tools to hold and organize them,” Leveen says. “We also sell lots of our Circa notebooks. They use discs and specially punched paper so you can rearrange papers to easily customize your note-taking experience and tools.” He says that customers have been taking index cards and Circa punching them to make a new kind of notebook they somewhat ironically refer to as a Hipster personal digital assistant (PDA), paper PDA or Circa PDA. They do this to “de-tech” from all the life-simplifying gizmos available on the market.

While most of these customers also make heavy use of technology, they’re avid explorers in the new frontier of old fashioned paper, Leveen says. Some customers write blogs and network with others online to share ideas, photos, complaints and reviews. “People on our staff have been listening and responding to some of the innovators out there, and asking if we can give them more ingredients to experiment with and if they would give us feedback,” Leveen says. “We’re developing products now based on their feedback and advice.” As such, he soon plans to add the Circa PDA to the catalog.

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.”

For 2007 and beyond, your brand should become a “lovemark” in your customers’ minds. Start by having a strategic conversation about these trends with your key players. Grade your brand touchpoints. Which aspects of your brand experience earn you an A-plus from your customers? Which need improvement? Create an action plan. Involve your customers. They’ll love you for it.

Key Questions to Ask
● What are you doing as a merchant to break through your customers’ continuous partial attention? Don’t let your competitors win their mind share.
● What “gaps” and “scraps” are yours to do something gasp-worthy with in this new year?
● Are you involving your customers in your merchandise selection process?
● Are you unintentionally causing your customers stress over “too much” product selection?
● This year, how might you make your products more personal?
● What product strategies will you employ to win the battle for your customers’ market share?

Andrea Syverson is president of IER Partners, a creative, merchandising and branding consultancy based in Black Forest, Colo. She can be reached at asyverson@ierpartners.com.