The Numbers Don't Lie by Kristin Hanish
Southern California has been a test bed for many industries, especially home furnishings, to measure success due to its multi-cultural demographic. Over the last few decades, we have seen a decrease in furniture retailers; they have either left the market, or simply gone out of business. At the same time Southern California has experienced an increase in boutique furnishing shops and interior design firms. Currently, we are experiencing a resurgence of large-scale home furnishings retailers in this market. As well, the large chain retailers are adding home furnishings departments or stores.
In recent television history, TV campaigns were used and understood as a tool for long-term imaging and branding. Companies placed large amounts of time and money into the creation and placement of such campaigns. The continuous increasing types of media, and competition brought the cost of doing business via television down as a whole. The media changes include an increase of television broadcast and cable stations, an increase in new media solutions, an increase in new social media, and an increase in production equipment, tools and methods, just to mention a choice few.
Television is now being used as a proper and more reasonable sales and marketing medium by many industries to increase sales and store traffic, because now they can. Companies can now run short-term events and multiple image concepts. The conversion rate is higher and higher due to the natural impact and reach of the television medium as a whole. Given all of this, all other traditional media tools cannot compete with the natural impact and reach of a television campaign. Now is the time to utilize this impact-full media tool, and this is why we focused on television in our research study.
We created a relative trend ranking system (see Table 1) where the select stores are analyzed on how well they performed against their previous week metrics with respect to their competitors trend. That is, this study only focused on who most benefited from current opportunities against the competition. We have utilized non-invasive methods to measure store traffic and traffic rate. This study discounts any other sale event, actual sales, or other metric, which is a function of many variables.
Table 1
A - It is highly likely that the store both had an increase in traffic and took advantage of the competition.
B - It is highly likely that the store either had an increase in traffic or took advantage of the competition.
C - It is highly likely that the store performed similar to the previous week and is neutral against the competition.
D - It is highly likely that the store either had a decrease in traffic or lost against the competition.
E - It is highly likely that the store both had a decrease in traffic and lost against the competition.
The city of Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles County, was selected to compare the trend of store traffic for 12 home furnishings stores for the Memorial Day weekend sales event and the week prior to.
Hermosa Beach has a population of over 20,000 people, 53% of which is female, 81% is in the labor force. The median household income is about $81,000. The 12 stores selected were: Ashley Furniture Homestore, Thomasville, Ethan Allen, IKEA, La-Z-Boy Furniture, Pier 1, Crate & Barrel, Macy's Home, Plummers Furniture, Easy Life Furniture, Living Spaces Furniture, Mathis Brothers Furniture.
As we expected, there was one top grade of A which means that It is highly likely that the store both had an increase in traffic and took advantage of the competition. There were also two E grades meaning that it is highly likely that the stores both had an decrease in traffic and lost against the competition. The only A grade was obtained by a national home furnishings company which is known to be highly accessory driven. National retailers obtained the two E grades as well.
We found that the local retailers, in general, performed better than national retailers. Apparently, people respond well to true local brands that have instant product and aesthetic updates from many manufacturers. As well, these local businesses do not have the constraints of a national business model. Therefore, the local business model can adapt to the ever-changing local needs, be it cultural, climate, social, economic, etc., especially in Southern California due to its dynamic nature. This could be due to the fact that local retailers tend to have a stronger pulse on the local community participating in local events, and charities. Stores that spent their media budget across stations performed better than stores that focus on fewer stations. The major networks discussed in this research piece were daytime viewing of broadcast networks over Television advertising, including NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX.
We advise our network of friends in the home furnishings industry that it important to be present in the television medium even if it is with a smaller budget. Secondly, we advise those who are currently present in the TV medium to be present across as many stations as applicable to their demographic even if it is only one spot. The applicable stations are the ones that your company deems fit to meet your need and demographic. Be sure to keep in mind your current and prospective demographic, as well as your dream demo. Make your company available to a broader scope of people by at least lightly blanketing your brand over your choice stations rather than backing out of television or placing your total advertising budget on one (1) station. These days the viewers are clever, responsive, broad and checkout many station. We also advise to change-up your advertising to fit the station demographic of placement. For instance, if you are advertising your adult and children's bedroom collections, then create and place your adult bedroom collection spots for appropriate stations like CNN, FOX news, etc and separately create and place your children's bedroom collection spot on station such as Nick, TLC, etc. Small focused details and specialized advertising over the television medium will make a huge impact to your bottom line.
For further and detailed results, please contact Kiki's Ad Shop (KAS) - www.kikisadshop.com, info@kikisadshop.com, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kikis-Ad-Shop/41140174550
Kristin Hanish is the President of Kiki’s Ad Shop, Inc. Kiki's Ad Shop KAS is a full-service agency that is specifically sales-oriented, geared towards increasing sales such as 'call to action', direct response, numerical analysis of competitors and current trends across multiple industries. The industries we focus on our retail home-goods, sports-goods, food/beverage, automotive, hospitality, and healthcare.
Questions on any aspect of marketing, sales and current advertising trends and/or creative production can be directed to Kristin Hanish at kristin@kikisadshop.com. She can also be reached directly at 310.804.7750.