Category Archives: Retail

One Delightful Thing

21 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Branding, Concentrating effort, Customer Experience, Customers, Innovation, Retail

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NewHorizonsPlutoCharon-1-582x753
Around 500 BC a Greek philosopher named Heraclitus said, “Everything changes and nothing stands still.” Today, we are more likely to hear, “The only constant is change,” and feel like it’s a new idea. The truth is that change has always been, and always will be, regardless when we discover it.

When Henry Ford introduced the automobile he was amused by the idea that people really only wanted faster horses. When your grandmother drank coffee she was, at most, looking for cream and sugar not Butterbeer Frappuccinos from the Starbucks Secret Menu. When the Wright Brothers invented flight they didn’t quite imagine the International Space Station.

Recently, I attended Raylon’s 14th annual Art of Business symposium where I caught Josh Hafetz’ talk. Josh is the 3rd generation President of Raylon Corporation and he made a compelling argument. Like hair that is always growing, salon owners and managers must constantly grow, adapt, and remain relevant. Josh cited several very real examples of changes that are happening—right now—and why many of these changes cause salon professional product sales to remain flat, put pressure on salon service pricing, result in fewer appointments per year, and impact the loyalty of our clients to our salons.

After following Josh on a visual tour of the new ways our clients obtain information on beauty and style (social media, YouTube beauty tutorials, and mass-customization of consumer beauty products) another time-tested truism came to mind.

Consumer expectations are always growing.

The Kano Model (Google it) is a trendy way to understand changing consumer expectations but it too is based on an age-old truth. In a nutshell, what Kano says is this. There are three kinds of things consumers want at all times from any business:

  • Basic things: For example, A salon that is open, furnished, clean, with plenty of parking.
  • Expected things: Great haircuts, artistic hair color, and nice blowouts.
  • Delightful things: Complimentary finishing touches, outrageously good consultations, luxurious washbowl experiences, etc.

Kano also points out that, over time, things that were once “delightful” eventually become “expected,” and ultimately “basic.” This creates one of two situations for every salon owner and manager A) tomorrow we invent something new and delightful, or B) we stop inventing and start going stale.

This presents each of us with a bold and never-ending challenge: Change or go stale. Innovate or die!

I encourage you to sit down tonight, with at least one other person on your team, and list out all the products, services, and experiences your salon provides. Sort your list into Basic, Expected, and Delightful. Then look at your list and push one thing from Expected into Basic. Push one Delightful into Expected.

And then invent one new Delightful thing

Don’t Let Diversion Divert Your Attention

23 Monday Mar 2015

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Oribe

Chances are you can describe your preferred type of client, you have a pretty good understanding of her needs, and you offer her services and products at fair prices. When clients spend money on what you offer, they are validating you as a business. Money is revenue. Enough revenue, combined with responsible financial management, becomes profit. Profit is, a sometimes rare, validation.

  • New clients validate your offering, your space, and your marketing. It’s good enough to try once.
  • Returning clients validate your total experience. It’s worth trying again.
  • Loyal clients validate your total experience. It is better than your competition.
  • Clients who are your advocates validate the presence of a strong emotional bond.

Usually salon owners I meet spend most of their time thinking about getting new clients—and then their attention is diverted. It is the owner’s responsibility, and opportunity, to create a deliberate plan to move their clients through each stage of Client Maturity.

New=>Return=>Loyal=>Advocate

Clients at each stage are open to different messaging and capable of different behaviors. For example, no one would expect a brand-new client to refer all of her friends to you—but for a Loyal or Advocate it would be natural. I argue, “Why do so many salons hand out referral cards to brand new clients?” I don’t think they are capable of “hearing” that message when they are still deciding about you themselves.

Client Maturity planning helps you focus energy to achieve specific results rather than throwing the kitchen sink at your entire client base and seeing what happens. Relating this to our topic of Diversion (and your need to grow your retail sales)

I urge you to first focus 80% of your attention on creating solid populations of clients within each stage and the retail problem will partially solve itself.

The converse is obviously false since focusing 80% of your attention on selling retail will not create Return, Loyal, or Advocate clients.

For any problem you encounter, ask yourself, “What is it about our offering, our price, our experience that is the root cause here? What can we do better to keep this client firmly in the Return stage and potentially grow them to the Loyal stage? If you’re not sure of that, no amount of asking them to buy your retail will help. From the time a new customer starts looking for a new salon, to the time they return, to the time when they rely on you to satisfy more of their needs, to the time they refer their friends; you are in relationship with them. The more responsibility you take for how they perceive and experience your salon, the more opportunity you have to make a good impression, satisfy their needs more deeply, and develop positive lasting relationships that translate into more sales of everything.

Shift Your Thinking about Diversion

22 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Branding, Customer Experience, Customers, Management, Product, Retail

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MoroccanoilWhen it comes to selling professional hair care products, every competitor thinks about how to exploit her unique advantage.

  • Big box retailers take advantage of their location, their ability to offer a wide assortment, their purchasing power, lower pricing, etc.
  • Specialty retailers take advantage of their location, their appeal to a niche—or a specialized assortment, their product knowledge, etc.
  • The Internet takes advantage of convenience, low price, low overhead, high volume/low price, etc.

The salon distribution channel has powerful advantages too. Think of it like this. Imagine yourself talking with one of your good clients—not your best client because she already buys her product from you. To your good client imagine yourself saying this,

“Instead of giving your business to them, what if you let me earn it?”

This question is designed as an in-the-moment tactic to help you start a conversation with a good client. It is also intended to be strategically helpful as way to start a conversation with your staff.

As a salon owner, this is your tremendous advantage:

 “You have a personal relationship with your client and you, uniquely, have the expertise to diagnose her hair.”

Getting your staff to use this powerful advantage is more about shifting their perspective than it is about sales commissions or training. They need to shift their idea from “Just doing hair,” to “Serving their whole client,” and respecting their own work. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, famously said,

 “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Only a true professional hairdresser says, “I’m not going to allow someone to sell my client random hair care products she doesn’t need and that won’t solve her problems. She is my client before, during, and after her appointment and I’m going to make sure she buys the right products so she can feel as good about her look at home as she does when I do it here.”

Yes, sales training is important too. It is. But this single shift in perspective will help your staff grow into their potential, develop their professional status, serve your clients more deeply, and ultimately earn more retail sales.

Why Customers Buy into Diversion

21 Saturday Mar 2015

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Pureology DuoIf you ask me, “Why do my customers buy their professional hair care products from big box retail, drug stores, specialty retail, or Internet distribution channels instead of buying them from me?” I have a pretty simple answer.

The first purpose of any business is, “To create a customer.” Doing that successfully usually means:

  • Precisely identifying your target customer
  • Understanding her needs
  • Having an insight into how to meet her needs better than the competition
  • Putting the right product within reach, at the right time, in the right quantities, and at the right price with the right support.

The fact is you already understand this. Think about it. You already create customers for professional hair care services. You have a salon. You have a staff. You have a list of services with prices. You have clients. However imperfect it may be, you have figured out how to create a customer for a hair cut, a hair color, a blow out, and so on. My educated guess is that you spent a lot of time thinking and dreaming about owning a salon. You studied and trained for years. You had your ups and downs but you stuck with it. You thought of nothing else but “doing hair” for decades. Some people have thought about it their whole lives.

Well, as it turns out, retailers spend the same amount of time thinking about how to sell retail product to consumers. In fact, some of them have been doing it for generations and others have been doing it long after their companies’ founders retired or went to the “big box in the sky.” In other words, they got good at because they focused on it. And guess what? It makes your job harder. But, guess what else?

They have not made it impossible.

Diversion!

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Branding, Contribution, Customer Experience, Customers, Product, Retail

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Enjoy DuoManufacturers of professional hair care products are not restricted to a single channel of distribution. Historically, brands have established their reputations and built their images through the salon distribution channel. Today the salon distribution channel moves an ever-smaller portion of a brand’s total volume. Other channels such as big box retail, drug stores, specialty retail, and the Internet make up the bulk of all sales volume and growth. You might consider this diversion but it certainly isn’t the grey market. Most manufacturers are well established in several legitimate distribution channels. You are not alone if you feel they unfairly exploit the salon channel and leverage their own success at the salon owners’ expense.

When I think of diversion I think, in particular, of the unscrupulous brand who has pressured a salon to take on too much inventory—more than they can possibly sell. Or, on the other hand, an unscrupulous salon owner who intentionally buys too much knowing she will offload some of that product in the grey market.

One of the biggest grey markets of professional hair care products operates completely in the open. Amazon.com. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Amazon is a bad company at all. And, frankly, they are at least three degrees of separation away from the real problem, that is, too much inventory getting stuffed into channels beyond their normal business capacity.

If you haven’t already done it, then look for yourself. There are many examples of hair care brands who purposely do not distribute their products through Amazon.com—and yet there they are. Why? Because some salon owner, or middleman, has the ambition to buy up excess inventory and resell it below “retail” (and “at or above” in some cases) directly to consumers. This, of course, offends the brands themselves, but more to the point, injures salon owners who play by the rules. They are the ones who build the customer relationships, diagnose individual needs, recommend effective products—while their customers often buy hair care products on line, or from other channels, to save money.