Matt Newell is a partner and CEO of The General Store, a retail specialist agency that deals with strategy, brand identity, advertising, store design, and technology.
When you think about retail advertising and marketing, what comes to mind? Loud, shouting, in-your-face advertising with massive price discount offers? This is the clique many are stuck with. However, in fact, retail marketing is about building a destination brand, either online or in the real world, and optimising the customer experience from beginning to end, with the results of your work known almost immediately.
Matt believes more marketers are realising that the same disciplines that build solid and successful retail brands are the ones that can build all brands in the face of a rapidly changing business environment.
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In our industry, I think we love black and white binary type discussions.
And they always wave red flags to me.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I am Darren Woolley, founder, and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy. And welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review or share this episode to help spread the words of wisdom from our guests each week.
Now, when you think about retail advertising and marketing, what comes to mind? Loud shouting in your face advertising with massive price discount offers?
This is the cliche many are stuck with, but in fact, retail marketing is about building a destination brand, either online or in the real world, or both, and optimizing the customer experience from beginning to end with the results of your work known almost immediately.
My guest today believes more marketers are realizing that the same disciplines that build strong and successful retail brands are the ones that could build all brands in the face of rapidly changing business environment.
Please welcome to the managing marketing podcast, partner and CEO of the General Store, a retail specialist agency across strategy, brand identity, advertising store design, and technology, Matt Newell. Welcome Matt.
Matt:
Thanks, Darren. Happy to be here.
Darren:
Matt, I started my copywriting career in a retail advertising agency called Mattingly back in Melbourne, last millennium, and I hadn’t chosen retail per se, but I really, really loved it for a number of reasons. But I’m wondering what’s attracted you to start an agency with a very retail focus.
Matt:
I started my career at Badjar, down in Melbourne, working on the BMW account. Very much a sort of a global brand in the most traditional sense of the word.
And then later in my career, I worked for an agency called IdeaWorks, which was very much focused on the retail sector. And what I learned in that time was just how dynamic the retail sector is, but also how many creative requirements they have.
They need lots of stuff done. They need stores designed; they need brands created for private label. They need logos done; they need very attractive attention getting advertising. They need down and dirty style advertising. They need websites, they need loyalty pro.
There’s just so much that they need. And I liked the diversity of that creative requirement more than just the single discipline of just making lots of ads all the time.
Darren:
Yeah, the promotion part of the four Ps, promote, promote, promote. But I think what I really enjoy is when you get to work with retailers that are very strategic, but also appreciate the sort of almost instantaneous feedback that they get from customers, either through sales, through floor traffic, or through actual customer feedback on the floor. It makes it quite a dynamic opportunity from a marketing perspective, doesn’t it?
Matt:
You see a lot, I think, in retail and you learn a lot that you can apply to other categories. I think that immediacy is true. One thing that I really enjoy is working in the store design side of our business, because you can physically see the impact that you’re having on customers.
So, in advertising, for example, there’s a lot of strategy, a lot of research, and quite frankly, a lot of imagination. We think if we say this, that people will think about us this way and respond in that way. We think, we’re trying to work it out. We might use research to join as many dots as possible.
But when you do store design, for example you actually see it. So, you imagine up front that this customer is going to walk through the doors and they’re going to turn left. If we design things a certain way, we can make them turn left.
And then we design the store and I get such a kick out of standing inside that store and watching customers turn left. I’m like, we fucking did that. We did that. But you learn a lot and you learn about how people respond to messaging in store.
You’ve got this amazing little environment that you can watch real shoppers interact with products and brands and creativity. You can watch it happen, and you can learn a lot from that.
Darren:
It is true, isn’t it? The retailers, the good retailers know more about their customers than most brands, B2C brands would know because B2C brands are relying on things like research and data and things like that.
But in many ways, the store, whether it’s a real bricks and mortar store where you can stand there and watch customers, as you say, navigate the store layout or even online, following clicks of how they navigate the e-commerce site really is insightful into what’s going on in customer’s minds and what they respond to.
Matt:
I mean, spot on. Retailers also know that they have a lot of information and they’re much closer to the customer than manufacturer brands are, and they do exploit that pretty hard. So, manufacturer brands pay a lot of money to retail brands to say, give us what you know about our customers, because the retailers have all the transaction data, they have all the observational data in their stores, they have all the website data, the retailers have all of that.
And the manufacturer brands are in a far less powerful position when it comes to knowing their customer needs. Can I tell — I’ve got a theory on this, by the way.
Darren:
Yeah, sure.
Matt:
I actually think that there’s been a huge power shift in the sort of go to market side of things. In the old days, like in the 70s and the 80s, the manufacturer brands were incredibly powerful entities. And the retailer’s job was just do a deal with say, Coca-Cola, and could I get that manufacturer brand in my store cheaper than my competitor? And I would rely on that manufacturer brand to draw traffic into my store.
So, whoever could get Coke on the gondola end cheaper than the competitor would win on the retail component.
But what’s happened now is the retailers have learned all the branding techniques that used to belong to the manufacturer of brands. So, Coles and Woolies now invest a lot in their brand, and actually people have loyalty towards one retailer over another.
So, now the dynamic, the power dynamic has fundamentally shifted because now the manufacturer brands are begging the retailers, “Please, can I please be in your store because you’ve got all the traffic.”
So, the power dynamic is very much sitting with the retailers now, which again, I think, makes it a very exciting, very interesting sector to work in.
Darren:
Especially when we’ve seen the growth of sort of major category retail plans. And that really started, what, late 80s, early 90s. We started seeing specialists. So, hardware back in the 60s, 70s was lots of little shops. They might belong to a co-op or a collective. And then the big boxes, the Bunnings came along and absolutely dominated the category. We’ve seen the same in stationery and offices with Officeworks.
So, it makes it very hard for, first of all, smaller businesses, smaller retailers, to actually compete because these big category boxes are very good at creating the destination, which is on my introduction now. It’s a destination brand. Retail is all about being the preferred place that the customer goes to get a particular item.
Matt:
It’s fun. I think there is truth in what you’re saying around the aggregators coming in and kind of gobbling up whole categories that very often we tend to work with those big aggregator brands. But can I tell you that the small independents cause so many problems for the big-
Matt:
Really?
Darren:
Absolutely. It’s funny, I always find-
Darren:
Well, no names, but do you have an example?
Matt:
Oh look, make it up. Let’s say in the fast-food sector, you’ve got say burger chains, we haven’t worked with grills, for example, but let’s just use grilled as an example. They’ve got scale, they’ve got supply chain efficiencies they’ve got marketing budgets. They’ve got all these things that the little indie burger chains don’t have.
But what the indie burger chains have, or indie burger stores have is this passion, this artisan, this cult following, all these niggly things. And I always find it interesting that when we do work with smaller brands they always want to try and behave like the big guys. But when we work with the big brands, they always want to try and behave like the small guys. I’m like, stop doing that. Do your thing.
Darren:
Yeah. Well, because to the very point that you made, which is the power balance has really switched from manufacturer to retail because they have mass. If you are not dominating the category, or at least having a significant portion of it, the manufacturers have no need to actually come to your requirements. You are just another one of many.
And look, I’m not making a judgment on it, it’s the capitalist process. There’s going to be those that grow and those that don’t. And there’ll always be challenges, which is the good thing about it.
The other good thing about challenges is that they usually end up getting bought if they’re really good or they get too big and they become the new dominant player in the category. All of this is great for consumers because it gives them choice.
But it’s interesting the power dynamic, because the other thing we’ve seen is now retailers are realizing that they create all these opportunities for brands and manufacturers to communicate with consumers through all of the owned assets, in store video. They’ve done it for years with catalogs, but they’re now getting more sophisticated at actually building advertising opportunities, which they’re calling retail media.
Matt:
Exactly. Look, retailers are basically good salespeople, and they see an opportunity to make a dollar all over their business. So, like you say, they realize that they’re a media asset, a media channel for the manufacturer brands, and they realize those manufacturer brands are spending all this money with other media channels, and they’re just very quick to commercialize it, as they should. They’ve built so much inherent value there by owning the customer.
What’s interesting to me too is you reflect more on that shifting power dynamic. And one thing that manufacturer brands are doing more than they’ve ever done historically is stepping into retail. Building their own retail stores.
Again, to me it’s such a symbol of that power shift and the importance of getting close to the customer. We actually work with a lot of manufacturer brands on that kind of journey, helping them get in and learn to work and think like retailers.
Darren:
So Matt, you’re talking about things like pop-up stores, which were very popular. So, was something that would pop up for three months or less. Or are you talking about longer term presence as at a retail?
Matt:
Both.
Darren:
Because the one that comes to mind is Nespresso was … there’s Nestle, Nescafe wanting to move into the brewed coffee or the espresso coffee, and they’ve built these almost boutique retail, haven’t they? Which gives the product a very luxury premium perception.
Matt:
Absolutely. And this is what I think is so interesting, is these worlds are blurring together dramatically. So, your example’s are perfect one. Those guys stepping into retail stores, going direct to creating a consumer experience. I mean, Nike do it, Apple do it.
I mean, ironically, I think some of the best retail executions in the world are the manufacturer brands executing those because they’ve just got a legacy of great brand management. So, they’re doing wonderful executions.
And conversely, the retailers are seeing manufacturer brands do well in certain categories, and they’re going, “You know what? We’re going to launch our own product. We’re going to become manufacturer brands, launch our own product.”
So, I find this is a useful discussion, when you have a business lens, an economic lens on it. When we come into the ad industry and we talk about retail versus brand, I just think that that discussion falls so far short of what’s really happening out there in the economy and what the real opportunities are.
Darren:
Look, I absolutely agree with you. As I said, I started in what was called a retail agency, except that … and this is God, the 1980s. So, there was a mentality that it was just promotion. It was almost like the client had an in-house promotions department that the agency had taken over. And it was largely a machinery to produce advertising and catalogs and all of those promotional items, communications items.
There wasn’t a lot of focus on things like new product development or any of the other strategic opportunities that were there.
And that’s one of the things that I think is really interesting about what you’ve created with the General Store, the G Store, people call it, is that everything from overall strategy like marketing strategy, not comm strategy positioning in market all the way through the comms, the store design. What else is there? Your online technology presence.
What made you realize that that was the opportunity? Because it really fits very well with anyone looking at customer experience to actually be able to have all those touch points in there.
Matt:
There’s probably two things that inspired that thought. First was I’ve always loved economics and studied economics at uni, and I love that macro thinking on how money flows through the whole community and gets distributed. And so, I think just having a broader view on the world.
But the second one is when I worked at IdeaWorks, and there were two people that ran that business when I was there, which was Steve Kulmar and Jon Bird. And they both very much understood.
Steve in particular had a very strategic view across the broader impact that could be had through creativity. That it wasn’t just an advertising lens on the world. In fact, he was a very, very strategic lens on the world. And I think in many ways outsourced the creative execution to other people on the team.
But I think watching the way that he thought about things I really resonated with and just saw bigger opportunities then bigger impact available than just ads. That we could have a big impact with stores, with websites, with technology, with loyalty programs.
And what happens if you could actually stitch two or three of those together, you get an exponential impact. And so, to me, my passion wasn’t sort of advertising, my passion was that impact. And so, I just saw that as a better way of achieving it.
Darren:
And it is quite different working with retailers at that level because you see, and you get feedback on that impact almost all the time.
Matt:
You could almost say too much feedback.
Darren:
Well, you get the ups and the downs.
Matt:
You get a lot. This is, again, I never wanted to end up just in one of the strategy consultancies as for my own career, because I feel like because they’re not involved in the execution, you miss that big feedback loop.
And to be honest, I think that the real rubber actually hits the road in the creative process because that’s what goes to market. And I can say that as someone that has grown up in strategy departments, I actually think we overvalue strategy now and we undervalue creativity.
Because the creativity’s what actually goes to market and the strategy process, it can be very circular. And you’re in this perfect bubble where logic makes sense, but then you go in the real world and logic will get you so far, but sometimes it doesn’t get you all the way.
Darren:
It’s a nice observation because I think the other problem is that when you have a very good strategy, you need to work then very hard to make sure your strategy’s not showing from the consumer’s point of view.
Because people don’t respond to strategy. They respond emotionally to the execution of that strategy. And if the strategy’s showing too much, then they’re inclined to not be engaged in it. You’re telling me what you want me to do. Don’t tell me what you want me to do. Make me feel something so I go and do what you want me to do.
Matt:
Yeah. I love that. But can I pull you up on one comment? Because there are some people who respond really well to strategy, and that’s the exec team and the board.
Darren:
Well, because it’s very logical. One plus one equals two.
Matt:
I talk about this. Can I say again, in retail, the retail execs actually tend to be the best execs I’ve ever worked with on creative endeavors. They’re actually pretty good at it. But what I often encourage our clients to do, particularly CEOs, is to come and be involved in some of the strategic processes that we run and to make sure their teams are involved.
Because I talk a lot about the fact that retail and all business is hugely creative, like X factor wins. And I like the idea that the G Store can not only help execute creative work but can help the clients that we work with be more comfortable with creativity, better at it themselves, better versed.
We do a lot around teaching our clients how to assess creativity. So, we are not the only ones assessing it. Here are the frameworks that we often think through, some method to the madness.
Darren:
That’s a great way of giving ownership to the decision-making process. Because you’re not selling it to them. You’re saying, “Here’s the framework, here’s how we want to frame creativity.” Let’s judge it on that basis, so we’ve got a common language in many ways. And then listen to everyone and their perspective so that we can get to an agreed output. Great idea.
Matt:
I think the days of only creative people get creativity. I think it’s far more egalitarian than it used to be.
Darren:
But isn’t that why you have a creative department? Because that’s where all creativity lives. Outside of that it’s a wasteland of logic and reason and nothing creative.
Matt:
Yeah. Look, and I also don’t want to devalue those creative people, because a lot of them have insane X factor and can make leaps that the rest of us just don’t have, the brain synapses to achieve. They can do it.
But God, man, sometimes these great little nuggets come from our clients, and we can really work with them. And honestly, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes we need to have tough conversations with clients and go, “That idea that you love, we don’t think he’s strong for these reasons.”
We would never steamroll clients. I think those days are just gone. But because we’ve worked on it together, I think you can have those discussions and it’s just far more productive. And ultimately what matters is better fucking impact. We just want to have a great impact, the process is there to guide us to that impact, but I hate being slavish to the process.
Darren:
Now, I just want to pick up something that you said earlier, and that is that you said that many of the retail outlets created by manufacturers, are actually better examples than a lot of retail, not all retail. But I’m wondering if some of that is not that, in that case, the retail store becomes the brand experience of a very well-developed brand?
Because retailers that are stocking lots of different brands in one, have to then create, well, what’s the brand represent? And then how do we make this experience represent that brand whether it’s a hardware or groceries or sporting wear or, or outdoor living, they’ve got lots of brands.
Whereas Nike, there is a Nike brand. So, the store has to become a bricks and mortar expression of that brand experience. Apple Store is a expression of the Apple brand experience. Do you think that’s what gives them, perhaps the edge? Is that focus and that ability to have a successful brand strategy that then just needs translating into the real world?
Matt:
I agree. I think it is much easier when you’ve got such a tight proposition to build a world, a physical world around that proposition. And so, yeah, I think they have a slightly easier job, but they’ve also got a history of thinking about creativity in a way that’s a bit different to the retail brands, which I think also nudges them along pretty well.
The retailer brand needs to get to that. They need to get that yes, although we’ve got lots of different products in this store, that all those products should ladder up to something meaningful, to an experience.
So, Nike for example they’ve got a clear proposition around elite sport and just do it. And that drive form, achievement. Rebel Sport, for example, they’ve got Nike, they’ve got Adidas, they’ve got Under Armour, they’ve got soccer, AFL, basketball.
But that can all ladder up to a pretty beautiful, powerful thing around the role that sport can play in our lives. So, they can find it, retailers can find it.
Darren:
And it’s not taking all of those brand positionings and just putting them into a cauldron and boiling it up and hoping to distill something. But you have to find that your own unique brand positioning or promise that then works for that and then execute it.
Because the other thing I think retailers do really well is understand that consumers don’t watch a TV ad and think, “Oh, that’s a brand ad.” And then pick up a catalog and go, “Oh, that’s a catalog.” And then see a price offering on a digital ad and go, “Oh, that’s a …
This is all from the one brand that everything you do, from all the communications and corporate identity right through to the moment they go into your website or walk into your store, that is all brand experience, isn’t it?
Matt:
The brand, look, this matters to me the way that we use this language, because I think as an industry, we’re lazy and sloppy with the language and that can lead to lazy, sloppy thinking that follows.
So, for me, at the G Store I always stop people from using the phrase, this is — we’ve got a brief for a brand campaign, or we’ve got a brief for a retail campaign. Because like you say, the brand for me is the absolute culmination of all these touch points. That’s what the brand is. And the campaign, like you say, that’s not the brand.
The language that we use is that this campaign is about attracting new customers. And this other campaign is about stimulating existing customers. So, if I hit you with a catalog, I’ll use Rebel Sport again. If I hit you with a catalog from Rebel Sport, but you’re completely disengaged with that brand, you’re not in the category, that catalog is absolutely meaningless. It’s not going to be effective at all.
But if I hit you with really inspiring advertising around the power of sport, the power of sport to change your life for the better and bring the family together, and all these sorts of really inspiring, now I hit you with a catalog of here are some running shoes, Darren, and they’re at a good price. That combo is the power combo that will work.
So, to me, I focus a lot more on impact. And the impact we want to have with that first campaign is attracting new customers. The impact we want to have with the second campaign is stimulating existing customers. And I think that language matters.
Darren:
So, what about things like performance marketing, because the number of times I hear, I’ve even met with agencies that go, “We’re a performance marketing agency.” And I go, “Well, that’s really interesting,” because you’re sort of in some ways trying to position the rest of the industry as non-performance, aren’t you? What do you think about that? That whole idea of there is a performance marketing approach.
Matt:
Yeah. Again, language matters. And I think that’s incredibly lazy language. I think it was cleverly created by the people from that part of our history.
Darren:
Probably Google.
Matt:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably Google.
Darren:
We’re a performance media because you can buy search terms that will lead to a direct lead.
Matt:
Yeah. Like you say, all marketing is performance marketing.
Darren:
Or should be.
Matt:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you don’t have that view, you shouldn’t be in the industry. Yes, I think it’s a bit of language that’s emerged by a subset of the category to very cleverly deposition the other elements of the industry. And can I say again, it’s lazy thinking, but it is effective.
The number of times I’ve sat in rooms with clients going, “I don’t know if we should spend on brand because that doesn’t feel very commercial. Let’s spend our money on performance.” I’m like, “Oh my God.”
This is again, where I think if I go to a client and say, “Do you want to spend some money on attracting new customers to your brand?” They go, “Ooh, that feels commercial. Yes, we should do that.” “Do you want to now stimulate those customers using a mix of channels, which could be a catalog, it could be some digital marketing,” which is what performance actually is. It’s digital marketing. “Yes, I would like to spend money on that as well.”
And so, for me it’s like this language matters. It informs our decision making. I try and stamp it out as much as possible. Can I tell you though, it’s a losing battle. I convert fewer people than the other people convert, but yeah, but it’s important.
Darren:
Well, and the other thing is their ability, particularly in retail, and I’m sure manufacturers would love to be able to do this, and in fact we’ll often spend a lot of money with retailers to do this. You have a campaign, that’s sort of a piece of communication outside of the retail point of purchase. Some people call it the last 10 meters or something. The moment of truth is the other one I like.
But you have that campaign and then extending it in. Retailers used to spend a lot of time, money, and effort extending any event that they’d created. Because they were the masters of having retail events. There are still some, but it was like there was a time when every week there was a new event.
Whereas a lot of them have moved away from that. And I think it’s because purely the logistics and the cost of always extending that into point of sale. Have you seen the same trend?
Matt:
Yeah. Look, it is costly and it’s less effective than it used to be. I mean, that’s a blanket statement. It’s still super effective in certain categories and for certain retails and less effective in other categories. But that tends to be the thing that happens, isn’t it? Is a technique arrives in our industry. We flog that technique to death. Like Black Friday’s an example of this, that arrived on our shores.
Darren:
Which actually starts on the Tuesday before and goes to the following Thursday.
Matt:
Yeah. We’re going to flog it to death. We will kill that technique. It’ll get less and less effective. Well, I say less and less effective. We’ll water it down. It’ll end up being pretty sort of, of neutral benefit. When you look at Black Friday and Christmas all bundled up and January sales all bundled up together. We’re just sliding sales around.
But all these techniques arrive in our arsenal. We all then overuse them. We all then bastardize them and they become less effective. That’s fine. That’s cool. We’ve just got to be ready to innovate and look for the next technique and try and work out where to swim with the current and where to not swim with the current. So, I think that’s fine. Yeah.
Darren:
The other one is, and particularly with COVID, the idea of e-commerce versus bricks and mortar. Because during COVID, a lot of retail businesses quickly had to speed up their ability to transact online and have a fulfillment logistics, which meant that sales and revenue from online went through the roof.
Then after COVID, there was a big crash in a lot of categories of online, largely because people just were happy to get out of their homes and go and shop. And everyone was saying, well it was just a blip. But now we’re seeing it steadily climb back up to more than pre COVID levels. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because from the consumer, it’s not either/or, it’s this and this, isn’t it?
Matt:
In our industry, I think we love black and white binary type discussions. And they always wave red flags to me. And so, I agree with everything that you just said, but especially the it’s both comment. More and more the pure play online retailers that we work with, they’re often exploring stores or physical executions of some sort.
Again, I don’t think shoppers care, whether it’s an online purchase or a physical store purchase. I think they just want great experiences, great stories, great products, great value, if that comes from online. Great. I think those days of — it was funny actually, maybe about four or five years ago, all those online retailers started talking about the next big innovation in online retail is mass media. I’m like, “Oh, guys.”
Darren:
Yeah. Wow. It goes, what goes around comes around.
Matt:
Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s, I mean, I always watch out for the hype curve. I mean, there’s a lot of hype around AI at the moment, which I think is pretty overheated. And obviously 12 months ago it was sort of virtual worlds, virtual reality that was quite overheated. But look, the hype curve peaks and I’m always trying to cool it down and then it tanks and I’m always trying to hype it up. Because the truth is somewhere in between.
Darren:
That’s your surfing metaphor, isn’t it? You want to be on the face of the wave, not sitting on the-
Matt:
Top or the bottom. Yeah.
Darren:
And get crushed.
Matt:
I mean, you must see this a lot in your conversations with clients, how much we trip over the language that we use and how much that can lead to poor decision making.
Darren:
Yeah. Look, there’s definitely a problem with not having a common language. People talk about why isn’t marketing considered a profession? Well, most professions have a set of vocabulary of words that everyone knows what they mean.
Lawyers know what the different legal aspects are, tots and things. Accountants understand accounting terms, whereas in marketing, almost some of our best creativity comes in making up new words. Or new terms for something because we’re trying to sell. And we think that if it’s got a new package up the old thing, slightly polish it, and give it a new term, it’ll somehow take off.
But it means there’s a lot of inefficiencies in the way marketers and agencies will communicate with each other. Because very few people, for instance, when we help a client choose a new agency and we talk about onboarding the agency, most clients will believe, “No, we’ll just get on with it. It’ll just work.”
And then, invariably six months down the track, 12 months down the track, there’s some real issues because they never really sat down and had the conversation of, okay, how are we going to work? Who’s responsible for this? What do we mean by this? What do you need from us when we talk about a briefing? What’s the strategy actually mean to you? To us?
It’s almost like everyone just thinks that these things will happen. And yet it’s those very basic things which wouldn’t take a lot to address. Could be done very easily. I think there’s a real need for people to just, after appointing an agency or even every 12 months sitting down with your agency, take a deep breath and go, “Okay, let’s just review everything, make no assumptions and make sure we’re absolutely aligned here.”
Because it doesn’t happen. And yet invariably, they’re the things that lead to irritations and pressure points in the relationship.
Matt:
Yeah. I think a lot about the training and how different marketers and different creative people are educated into this industry. And I sit on the board of the Masters of Marketing program down at Swinburne and I see their syllabus and I think there is quite a bit of consistency at that level.
But like you say, as soon as you get into the industry, we’re such a hyper creative industry that we just like to reinvent the same thing. And I’m in my mid-40s, but I’ve been around the block enough times now to go, “Oh my God, it’s just a new word for the same thing. And do we need to do this journey again?”
Darren:
Well, yeah. But that’s why one of the things I like about retail is in some ways its simplicity and its sophistication. And so, when you and I were talking before the … and the reason for doing this podcast was I thought it was really interesting because I could see in the things that you were sharing and you’ve been sharing today, that there are a lot of things that manufacturers, major brands could embrace here to actually improve the way that they engage customers.
Now they call customers consumers, and they call retailers customers. So, there’s the first thing. Whereas retailers call consumers customers. So, already we’ve got some language issues, which I think most people can learn, but to your point it’s worthwhile just laying the ground rules, isn’t it?
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. And I actually agree. I actually think that some of the best technical marketers I’ve worked with are all ex-Unilever and P&G. I think they train marketing technique so well, and I find it’s almost like a holiday to just go back to that straight advertising marketing kind of world. It’s quite refreshing and I quite enjoy it. Because the retail world, it’s so complicated and there are so many parts to the machine that we’re trying to link together.
And I think a lot of the retail marketers could learn a lot of technique from the manufacturer brands. And the manufacturer brand marketers could learn a lot from retail for, I’ll give you one example. We often talk about, obviously we’re all talked about the single-minded proposition, and that’s something we inherited from the godfathers of modern marketing being Unilever and Proctor & Gamble.
We inherited that idea. And that works to an extent in FMCG and manufacturer of brand marketing. I can come up with one message for a tin of baked beans. It’s going to sit on that shelf and it’s going to be famous for deliciousness or healthy or hearty or whatever it is. It’s going to be famous for one thing.
In the retail world though, there are just so many touch points. So, the single-minded proposition falls apart very quickly in that whole journey. It works very well if it’s retail brand X stands for family fun or whatever it is.
But then in the research phase, it’s going to need to have other messages, in the conversion phase, it’s going to need to have other messages, advocacy, loyalty programs. There’s this whole suite of messaging.
And if we apply that single minor proposition, you’ll absolutely be underoptimized. But increasingly for manufacturer brands, they need to think about more levels in the customer journey as well. So, I think they can learn some of those more complex kind of comms matrixes from the retail world. But the retail world can learn a lot from some of the technique and discipline that-
Darren:
The disciplines probably. I remember an old retail marketer saying to me, “There’s only really three positionings. It’s either price, you’re either discount or premium, never be middle market. Don’t worry about convenience. The customer will decide whether you’re convenient or not.”
So, that leaves service or product. Sorry, do you have the product they want and then service. And he said, “The problem with service is most retailers think that that’s showing lots of happy, smiling staff being there ready to serve the customer.” And that’s why you end up with so many ads for retailers showing the staff, because it’s invariably where people land, marketers land in a retail environment.
Matt:
I hate service as an advertising proposition. I love service as a customer experience or business strategy. Supercheap Auto is a great example actually of retailers are trained to think about product, they obsess over product, and they don’t think as much about making money out of their team.
And about, I’m going to say eight years ago, 10 years ago, Supercheap Auto launched a range of services in store that you could pay $4 to have your wiper blades actually fitted to your car and that they could make money out of that service.
So, there, I think that’s just a great example of retailing service, but smiley people in ads is …
Darren:
And how many times do you see it?
Matt:
Yeah.
Darren:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Look, Matt, thank you for coming along today. We’ve run out of time, but really appreciate you coming and sharing the sort of origin story I guess, of the G Store, the General Store, but also, some of the things that you see through working not only with retailers, but then carrying that across to working with brands. So, thanks very much.
Matt:
Thank you, Darren.
Darren:
One thing before you go, so of all of the stores that you go to, because you are a customer, which one’s the one that gives you the best customer service?
