Retailers are facing unprecedented challenges in the current shopping environment, according to the latest data compiled by the Department of Commence. Year-to-date retail sales for the first three months of 2009 are lagging by 8.2 percent over 2008. Certain types of retail stores are doing even worse than the industry as a whole, with furniture and home furnishings stores, women's clothing stores, jewelry stores and traditional department stores facing double-digit year-over-year declines.
"Now more than ever, retailers need to be at the top of their game," says Pam Danziger, a consumer-insights expert. "With shoppers super cautious about their spending, retailers need to give them a reason to come shopping -- but shopping alone can't be the reason. They need to draw them into the store by offering an experience that makes shopping there fun, engaging and entertaining. That is the key for retailers to survive this difficult market and what my book Shopping: Why We Love It and How Retailers Can Create the Ultimate Customer Experience is about."
In these tough times for retailers, Danziger's Shopping is getting new attention as a resource for retailers to revive their stores by putting excitement into the shopping experience. A recent book review shares how the ideas and insight presented in Shopping can make a difference for challenged retailers:
"Shops that Pop" Are The New Retail Model
Expert Reveals Why It’s All About The Experience
Everything about shopping has changed.
Take it from Pamela N. Danziger, a dedicated power shopper and author of Shopping – Why We Love It and how retailers can create the Ultimate Customer Experience (Kaplan Publishing) www.whypeoplebuy.com).
According to Danziger, "shops that pop" are stores that have a set of unique identifying characteristics that make people love to shop in them.
In part one of her book, Danziger explains the role of the consumer in this new paradigm, which is all about the experience.
"Shoppers don't love a store because they love the merchandise they carry," Danziger says. "They love a store because it touches them personally and emotionally."
A marketing researcher and self-proclaimed passionate shopper, Danziger believes there has been a shift from a products-based business to a people–based business and retailers need to accommodate this shift.
These "shops that pop" have 7 distinctive features that they share that attract consumers:
- Involvement – encourages the customers to touch, feel, taste and try on.
- Curiosity – invites consumers to explore and experience
- Contagious – exudes energy and excitement
- Convergence – captures all the tangible and intangible elements
- Authenticity – conceptually driven
- Price/value – superior value at a reasonable cost
- Accessibility- freedom from pretensions and exclusivity
- She uses a mathematical formula to describe the Four Essential values that factor into a shopper's decision to buy: P= (N+F+A)E2
P- Propensity for a shopper to buy
N- Need, which simulates shopping (desire drives purchases)
F- Features, the hot button that pushes the shopper to buy, what makes one item more attractive than another
A- Affordabilty, the shopper is more apt to buy even if they don't need it if they will "save money"
E- Emotion, magnifies need and the other factors and is how retailers manipulate shoppers to buy
"Need often drives consumers to the stores to shop, sets them on a mission, and moves them to action but there really isn't a thing that marketers or retailers can do abut building need," she adds.
Desire is something they can build and is an emotional response, which is significant, because emotion is the dominant factor. In part 2 of her book, Danziger turns her attention from the consumer to the retailers themselves.
She identifies the Pop! Equation:
- Encourages high levels of customer involvement and interaction, shoppers are not just passive observers
- Evokes shopper curiosity, invite consumers to explore and experience
- Has a contagious, electric quality, exudes energy and excitement
- Presents a convergence between atmosphere, store design and merchandise, these elements work together to create a special place to shop
- Expresses an authentic concept, has personality and charm
Priced right for the value, offers good value at a reasonable price
- Offers an environment that is accessible, nonexclusive and free from pretensions, makes the shopper feel welcome.
- So what exactly does it take to succeed in retail in the future?
"Love your customers by making shopping in your store truly a special experience," Danziger explains. "The focus for retailing success in the future is not so much what you sell but how you sell it."
Finally, in Part 3 of her book, Danziger focuses on HOW to create this ultimate shopping experience.
"The key word for retailers is transformation," she says. "It means examining everything about your store and its operation and reconfiguring it, not for your personal convenience or pleasure, but according to the needs, wants, and desires of the customer. The shopper must be the focus of all retailing objectives."
She believes that people want shopping to be fun. They want an engaging experience. The most important things for retailers to address are the 9 people principles, the 8 product principles, the 4 pricing principles, the 5 promotion principles, and the 5 place principles that Danziger outlines in her book.
"Big retailing companies do a lot of things really well, but what they don't do at all well is innovate and that is what this research and analysis of the new customer and their passion for an extraordinary shopping experience requires." Danziger says.
Retailers, Does Your Shop Pop?
Does your shop create an ultimate experience for your shoppers? Discover how well your store measures up to the Pop Equation in Pam's book, Shopping.
Click here to download a copy of a self-test that will help you find new ways to boost sales in your store by enhancing the shopping experience. Read Pam's advice about how to rev-up your store's marketing in the answer key.
About Pam Danziger and Unity Marketing: Pamela N. Danziger is an internationally recognized expert specializing in consumer insights, especially for marketers and retailers that sell luxury goods and experiences to the masses as well as the 'classes.' She is president of Unity Marketing, a marketing consulting firm she founded in 1992.
Advising such clients as PPR & Gucci, Diageo, Lenox, Google, Swarovski, GM, Orient-Express Hotels, Italian Trade Commission, Marie Claire magazine, The World Gold Council, and The Conference Board, Pam taps consumer psychology to help clients navigate the changing consumer marketplace.
Her latest book is Shopping: Why We Love It and How Retailers Can Create the Ultimate Customer Experience (Kaplan, $27) is in the bookstores now.
Her other books include Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses-as well as the Classes, (Dearborn Trade Publishing, $27, hardcover) and Why People Buy Things They Don't Need: Understanding and Predicting Consumer Behavior (Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2004).
She has appeared on CNN's In the Money, NBC's Today Show, CNBC, CNN International, CNNfn, CBS News Sunday Morning, Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto, ABC News Now, NPR's Marketplace and is frequently called upon by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, American Demographics, Women's Wear Daily, Forbes, USA Today, Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune for commentary and insight.