Local independent stores need to offer something different

I was cooking paella last week. An ill advised last minute decision that lead to me wandering into my local fishmongers at 6pm on a Tuesday night. I got the shell fish, I even got some parsley but alas - no Monkfish.

I wasn't too bothered, it was a bit of a long shot, but the gentleman behind the counter couldn't apologise enough - apparently it only sells at the weekend when they're a lot busier, but if i let them know in future, they'll get some in for the following day. Which was nice. And then it got better.

Pauline, the owner, came out of the back with my cleaned squid to explain that she's at Billingsgate Market from 4am till 6:45am each morning so as long as i let her know by text before she leaves the market, she'll add my order to her list, and i don't even have to buy the whole fish! Sure enough, there's a mobile number on my receipt so i can text in my fresh fish order the very same day i want it.

It was great to talk to someone who really cared about their service and how they sourced and selected their fish. Granted, this is a special kind of shop with a special kind of owner (you can find out how she set it up here), but it illustrates that local independent businesses, particular fresh food sellers, can live alongside the big supermarkets, because they can offer a much more personalised service than you'll find at any of the bigger chains.


My local fishmonger



This fishmongers in question also opens late on Tuesday nights to capture the commuters who otherwise are restricted to Saturday shopping trips - another good plan when you consider some recent research out of IGD about the 'Jamie Oliver' generation.

Under 35s that are children of the foodie revolution, they're much more likely to prepare food from scratch (51% versus 35% amongst older counterparts). And while they are feeling the pinch like everyone else, instead of paying less for ingredients, they're cooking more with leftovers, saving money and reducing food waste in the process.

This group are also drawn to specialist food retailers with 19% intending to increase their use of greengrocers, bakers, butchers and fishmongers over the next year.

The study also found that 27% of these shoppers feel quality is more important than saving money, reflected in the fact that 30% are prepared to pay a little extra for premium quality versus 18% of the older generation.

So if the smaller business can get it right - quality goods, product provenance, a transparent story around animal welfare, providing useful tips on minimising waste and delivering a service that's convenient for their customers - there's no reason why the local store can't prosper, no matter who has just opened their doors with a BOGOF on the local retail park.

Press ad of the week

A great ad from Virgin Media in today's Metro newspaper. Great stand out, simple, instantly understandable and best of all, some personality, a trait which sets the brand apart from their main competitor.

Real life experiences in decline at #SMWLDN

After a week of suitably social get togethers at social media week, it's becoming clear that people are less and less interested in that most common of occurances - every day real life.

You couldn't move for Ipads and Iphones - videoing, instagraming, tweeting, and live streaming their way through the very seminar they had signed up for days earlier.

It's bad enough at gigs, but i reckon 75% of people at events i attended couldn't have told you what had just happened in the same room as them - which could be a reflection of the information overload age we live in, craving soundbytes over in depth discussion and thinking, or it could just be a reflection of the subject matter being discussed.

Either way, i thought i was in genuine danger of being thrown out for turning up with something as analogue as a pencil and paper... my battery didn't run out though.

My highly controversial note taking technique at London Social Media Week

Social Media Week

Social Media Week kicked off on Monday and here in London there are more seminars and events than you can shake a stick at. Once you've discounted the sales pitches your still left with a handful worth attending.

One such session was run by Ogilvy at the Design Council yesterday. It featured a panel including Amex (who recently launched the Link Like Love app), IBM and Ford (who launched the Explorer 2011 on facebook). The hour long discussion gave an interesting insight into how big businesses have adapted to the seismic shift in brand communications created by the rise of social.

Three things of particular interest...

1. Social was equally important internally - used in the right way it can galvanise the workforce internally and have a huge impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of internal process, even more so when different global offices are collaborating on projects

2. Culture eats strategy for lunch - coined by Jon Mell of IBM, i liked this phrase. We've all been there - it doesn't matter how good your strategy is, or your social team are, or even how switched on your marketing director is... if the culture throughout the business isn't right, the business is unlikely to accept change and in turn, is unlikely to embrace social. So that means getting buy in from the top down and engaging everyone within the organisation be it through the CEO using You Tube videos at Amex, employees writing the social media guidelines or reverse mentoring.

3. Measurement is still a challenge - this is turning into a real bug bear for me. Too many speakers and agencies are talking about social in a way that carefully sidesteps the golden question about proving return on investment. The client knows what they're getting when £200k goes into TV or into a sales promo, so it's only fair they understand what the return is if it goes into social. Ford's Alex Hultgren gave a well reasoned argument for taking the debate away from ROI and into long term employee and consumer value and the notion of 'calculated risk taking' and constantly working in Beta were interesting points that I'll return to in a post at a later date.

In the meantime, if you fancy attending an event, they run until Friday night and most are free, just sign up here.

"ecommerce will be the saviour of the High Street"

I attended this debate last week at Portcullis House run by The Debating Group. The evening pitched Dominic Allon of Google and Richard Eyre of the IAB against Matt Stringer, MD at Carphone Warehouse and Paul Martin, MD at Planet retail. The former pair arguing for the motion against the latter.

Clearly the answer isn’t quite so black and white and as you'd expect, the debate took the well-trodden path of how e-commerce can aid the high street through multichannel communications and used recent Christmas sales growth as an example of reinvigorating the retail sector. This was countered with cold hard facts of shop closures, redundancies and empty units up and down the country, 1 in 7 according to Mr Stringer, not to mention the fact that Amazon haven’t rushed into 'bricks and mortar' in order to offer a multichannel service.

Aside from the usual rhetoric, a few interesting points did come out of this session.

• Understanding the customer - e-commerce has given more power to the shopper and with more choice and information comes a more efficient, more competitive, polished service, except that’s the problem – with the high street, it doesn’t. The High street hasn’t evolved, it hasn’t played to its strengths and now, in an open market, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that a stronger competitor has come along with a better service. Being online doesn’t equal success, just look at MySpace. Amazon doesn't just have lower overheads, it's an extremely well run business that understands what it's customer wants and has built a customer experience and product offering accordingly, and that's what is giving it the edge. Ten years ago we were having this same conversation, except it was Tesco that was 'killing local businesses'. This current battle will come down to consumer choice, if the High Street continues to fail in adding value to it's offering and instead enter a pricing war it will only serve to encourage consumers to opt for the short term price benefit and that's a battle that bricks and mortar stores will never be able to win.

• What do we mean by the High Street? Big cities, smaller cities, market towns and villages all have them, but they tend to look very different and serve very different purposes. In a new digital age with no post offices and fewer and fewer local pubs, maybe we need to consider what the broader role of the High Street ought to be. You could argue that the web, and to a certain extent e-commerce has actually levelled the playing field for those much smaller businesses. A local craftsman doesn’t just have to rely on a classified ad in the local paper and passing trade, he can cost effectively target the whole country without needing to master coding and complex e-commerce systems in the process. 

• The mobile opportunity - I was surprised at how little discussion there was about mobile in all of this. Even Facebook (in its recent S-1 report) has flagged the fact that it needs to better adapt to the on-going trend to access the web through hand held devices. For me, it represents a real opportunity for retail. Yes, people can compare there and then in store but it also allows retailers to target passing trade, provide a real personalised experience in store and improve the face to face customer service through leveraging a broader support network (such as Twelpforce at Best Buy).

In reality, it’s only the High Street that can save itself and to do that, businesses need to evolve with the consumer and play to their strengths. Look to the successes and consider what drivers are at play for each of those retailers. When you consider that brits see shopping as a national pastime, its clear that an almost primeval desire is already in place with the audience, what stores have to do is reignite that passion and meet the demands of a new type of information laden, savvy shopper. Of course people want a competitive price and convenience, but they also want to talk to someone, to hold something, touch it, feel it, a physical and sensory experience that can be shared, that's great fun and that gets them wanting more - all the High Street has to do is supply it.

Useful travel app for the snow please

I got caught in last weekend's snow in the Peak District. With no 4WD it was looking highly likely that we'd be going nowhere unless the road was cleared and gritted. The next morning we did a local reccy and the road looked fine after said gritter lorry passed through. Our route was taking us onto main roads and so we could be relatively confident that a safe journey was possible.

But what if we were one of the 9.8 million people that live and work in rural areas that can't rely on motorways and major A roads? I need to know if a road is passable, that largely depends on whether it's been gritted but because national and local news needs to cater to the masses, I'm unlikely to find out if my particular route is safe. That uncertainty leads to dangerous journeys being made, cars being abandoned or essential journeys being aborted when there was actually no need to stay at home.

Pre gritter - sledge friendly

Post gritter - car friendly

So why not have a simple 'gritter' application? A simple overlay onto Gmaps, the AA or the RAC maps. Every gritter lorry is tracked and their route recorded live on the map. Over time the colour of that route fades to show how recently the road was gritted, if at all. The application can simply track the GPS location of the truck, or to make it even simpler could track the location of the drivers phone so that no extra hardware is required.

That way, we can provide highly detailed, up to the minute, local information for drivers without having to build a new resource or interfere with the primary job in hand, making the roads safe.

Super(snow)man

An early morning wander around the Peak District last weekend uncovered a potential new superhero.


To make yours, just take one broken mudguard, one twig and a bit of snow...

Telesales, Nespresso style

I got a phone call this week from Nespresso. They asked if I received my recent order. I did. Where’s this going I thought? Friendly chat? My views on the product? Maybe even a free trial? Sadly not, a young lady paused for a quick breath before launching into a sales script of everything from de-scaler to new types of coffee available.

Why Nespresso is behaving like a life assurance company I don’t know but the whole experience was a big turn off. A friendly ‘feedback’ chat would have been fair enough, but the scripted hard sell was not only wasting my time, it was unlikely to ever be effective. Why tell me I can get de-scaler online when you’ve contacted me on the telephone and why offer me more coffee less than a month after I bought a 6 month supply, that you’ve just called me to check I received?

A shame the smooth advertising doesn’t extend to the after sales service.

Return of the Tiger bread story

I received a few tweets last week that lead here. Bitter Wallet had picked up on a particularly friendly bit of customer service from Sainsbury’s who had received a letter from Lily (aged 3 and a half) who thought tiger bread ought to be renamed giraffe bread.

What’s interesting is that despite loads of coverage on Twitter and FB, the article and the whole incident, took place last June.  Only this January have we seen a second spike of activity which has been larger than the original viral effect last year.

This chap has looked at what made it spike again and it seems we can base the phenomenon on 4 factors.

Two obvious ones:

1. A great response from Sainsbury’s to spark the ‘story’

2. A key influencer posting the image on FB to a large number of active fans

And then more importantly:

3. Media blogs and key (media) individuals amplifying through their own personal networks

4. The ability to better share images on face book now (versus last summer)

All of that has culminated in a bigger second spike, resulting in national media coverage and Sainsbury’s changing the name of their bread yesterday.

Which they’re now promoting on Twitter…

A few things to think about:

1.   Images are less of a turn off, they are quicker, easier and  stand more chance of being shared than copy – even though this was an image of two letters!

2.   Old news isn’t necessarily old news, interesting content endures and doesn’t serve as a barrier if people have never seen the content before and trust the source

3.   The importance of connectors, in this case media industry individuals and a few ‘trend threads’ such as contagious, purely because of how interconnected and active (professionally and personally) most employees are on social networks, compared to the norm. This provided a tipping point in Jan that didn’t appear to materialise last year, and this increased noise has since propelled the story into mainstream media including The Sun and The Telegraph.

4.  Finally, nothing beats a good bit of customer service. It’s a mark of how thin on the ground it is when acts such as this garner such widespread interest. Many brands spend months discussing ideas that could ‘go viral’, when in truth, to get talked about all you really have to do is please your customer and they’ll do the rest.