Retail Sales Quotes

Marketing is an investment. Don’t treat it like sales.

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

Whoever had coined the phrase, ‘the customer is always right,’ had clearly never worked in retail or customer service. And if they had, well, then they’d need to be hauled out into the street and beaten to death with plastic spoons.

I did discover that if you're interested in low wages, a bookstore ranks below retail clothing sales, except the hours are worse.

The way an angry Canadian shopper argues with a retail sales associate who believes the customer is always right is like watching two ducks fight. It’s as harmless as two pillows on a bed, and watching is liable to put you to sleep.

In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson’s had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson’s had done only $44 million—a figure, if adjusted for inflation, about 6 percent of the 1953 total.

Apple Stores produce more sales per square foot than any other retailer in the United States, including luxury stores like Tiffany.

One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.’ ”4

Fast forward to 2014, and Wal-Mart has over $480 billion in sales and employs more than 2.2 million people that serve more than 200 million customers each week at more than 11,000 retail stores in 27 countries worldwide.

I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.

While Millions of jobs have been created in retail sales to move the mountains of imports, the manufacturing jobs that enabled Americans with high school diplomas to live the American Dream have been shipped and created overseas…. In building their new world, our elites treat fellow Americans like obsolete equipment.

The starting point for ‘discounts’ may be the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), an arbitrarily high price that no one will ever pay. By crossing out the high MSRP, retailers are handing shoppers a psychological victory that will make them feel good about the purchase, even if the discounted price is still expensive.

For the record, this is Joe Girard: Most average number of retail vehicles sold in one day--6 Most new retail sales in one day-18 Most new retail sales in one month-174 Most new retail sales in one year-1,425 Most new retail vehicles ever sold in a fifteen-year career- 13,001 Number one retail vehicle salesperson-12 consecutive years Joe's

Globally, international retail sales are expected to reach an eye-watering $31 trillion by 2025. To keep that thermonuclear consumption going, not only do the products we buy need manufacturing, but so too do our desires for them. Hence, in the past forty or so years, the public relations, marketing, advertising and finance industries have boomed.

Buying something you do not need is a waste of money, even if it is a bargain.

For example, local retailers seeking to rev up sales activity can send out promotional messages to consumers within the vicinity or even to people in a competitor’s store.

RULE #1 Market your business to the customer YOU WANT. Most beauty businesses try to be everything to everyone. It's exhausting and expensive promoting yourself to everyone. Most people simply give up. Focus on the customers you really want. What is your passion, what do you excel in? Who is your ideal customer? What would you ideally like to do every day in your business? Focus on what you want to do and the clients you want, and market directly to them and only them.

The last thing the consumer index wants men women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The 1.5$ trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, [...] What they sell is sexual discontent.

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

To re-create the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the sort we’d had at Chouinard Equipment, we broke the line into eight categories and hired eight product czars to manage them. Each was responsible for his or her own product development, marketing, inventory, quality control, and coordination with the three sales channels—wholesale, mail order, and retail.

RIM shipped PlayBooks to major retail clients, such as Best Buy, which had preserved premium display space for the new product. Unfortunately, RIM had neglected to create a demo program to showcase and explain its latest product. With no helpful presentation on the screen of the device, shoppers were left to rummage around PlayBook programs on their own. Countless PlayBooks were immobilized after customers armed the devices with passwords, which the sales staff couldn’t unlock. “This happened hundreds of times,” says McDowell.

In fact, as these companies offered more and more (simply because they could), they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. Whether it was latent demand for niche goods that was already there or a creation of new demand, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that the companies for which we have the most complete data - netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody - sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues - and that percentage is rising each year. in other words, the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional, physical retail stores at all. These infinite-shelf-space businesses have effectively learned a lesson in new math: A very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatives small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number. And, again, that very, very big number is only getting bigger. What's more, these millions of fringe sales are an efficient, cost-effective business. With no shelf space to pay for - and in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees - a niche product sold is just another sale, with the same (or better) margins as a hit. For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

What we're now starting to see, as online retailers begin to capitalize on their extraordinary economic efficiences, is the shape of a massive mountain of choice emerging where before there was just a peak.... By necessity, the conomics of traditional, hit-driven retail limit choice. When you dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. This is not just a quantiative change, but a qualitative one, too. Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content. Then, as demand shifts toward the niches, the economics of provided them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries - and the culture - for decades to come.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

mark-down, which discounts the selling price to customers and, so long as demand is ‘elastic’, results in increased sales of the product line. However, this is an expensive method of selling products, as it reduces the profit achieved on the products. In fact mark-down is the single largest cost to a fashion retail business after the cost of the products themselves. It is worth remembering at this point that the main – and frequently only – source of income for a fashion retailer is the profit from the sales of its products. Less profit per garment means less income to pay its bills. Furthermore, this tactic is less effective when general trading conditions are poor, as the competition is usually doing the same thing. It is vital then that the fashion retailer knows what its customers want and are expecting. Problems in defining and then keeping up with changing customer needs and expectations are arguably the most important factor in successful selling. Large retail businesses like Marks & Spencer

We had heard rumours of what people referred to as a ‘phantom accounting system’, also called zappers and phantom ware. This phenomenon was unheard of in South Africa at the time. The more formal term used to describe this kind of criminal financial-management software is a ‘sales-suppression system’. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which South Africa has observer status, issued a guide on these systems in 2013.10 On the surface, the technology seems like a supposedly normal accounting system, used mainly by retailers. It has all the expected features: it records stock, sales, invoices, receipts and taxes. It can print daily, weekly and monthly accounting records. Yet the software has a feature that can blank out certain sales and receipts. You can set it to suppress, for instance, every fourth sale, or random sales of a particular value, whichever you prefer. The effect is that, on paper, your stock, sales and receipts would balance for tax purposes. All you would have to do is click on a secret place on the screen, or type a particular code on the keyboard, and the unrecorded sales and receipts would reflect. One would then be able to take this money out of the company’s takings for the day, week or month, and people would be none the wiser.

Then I got to the point: “I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.

Ownership is dead. Access is the new imperative. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of the world’s largest enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences. Focusing on services over products is also a sound business strategy. Zuora’s Subscription Economy Index, which you’ll find at the end of this book, shows that subscription-based companies are growing eight times faster than the S&P 500 and five times faster than US retail sales.

F.W. Woolworth, the founder of the largest retail chain of its time, said, “I’m the world’s worst salesman. Therefore, I must make it easy to buy.

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

The crucial and only difference is that pyramids amass their funds from enrollment fees while the MLM, to be legal, must engage in retail sales of some type of product or service.

Large retailers need to develop models for getting close to people like Sharad Kaka. Spic and span stores, glitzy surroundings, English speaking personnel and above all, the security and the uniformed staff, obviously don’t seem to do it. The unfamiliarity of this format, its association with authoritarianism and policing, turns away many people who would actually stand to benefit from the many sales on offer at any point in a modern store, sales that can be far richer in quality compared to the normal kirana store.

Even those retailers who don’t sell products online or who have substantial offline sales are still impacted by search. Online advertising triggers $6 to be spent offline for every dollar spent online29 and the in-store sales boost from search is three times greater than online display advertising.

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Two changes have weakened manufacturers’ hold over shelfspace. Independent stores, who were heavily influenced by the manufacturers, have declined dramatically in the face of competition from major chains and are now insignificant in most categories The large, sophisticated retailers have stopped seeing their shelfspace as a commodity for sale, and now see it as a crucial resource to be used in pursuit of their own objectives. In particular, retailers who are actively marketing their private label brands in competition with manufacturers will use shelfspace to promote their own brands. They have taken back control of ‘their’ shelfspace.

Consumers can now scan the code on the product when they are running low, and it will be ordered and delivered within hours to their home, completely side-lining all the tools and techniques of competing manufacturers who would wish to get the consumer to brand switch. Tesco’s Homeplus in South Korea also launched a campaign that engages shoppers to buy products using QR codes. Homeplus created virtual billboards of their store aisles in subway stations, allowing passengers to shop while they waited by scanning the products’ QR codes – the groceries being delivered when they arrived home. The goal of the campaign was to help Homeplus compete with the number-one retailer, E-MART, without increasing their store numbers. Since the launch, their online sales have increased 130%, making them the top online retailer in South Korea, and a close second offline.

Retail brands are just as vulnerable as product brands to a loss of trust based on, for example, a major product quality failure, but the stakes and risks are much higher. A brand such as Tesco Basics has annual sales of £1 billion, so the value that can be lost is huge. Equally, the brand is composed of hundreds of products manufactured by third parties, so the risks of a product quality failure are magnified. Retailers

Retailers have to generate increased sales in each location to justify the investment, and every manufacturer has to demonstrate how their brands help to achieve this versus competitive brands, either through increasing store traffic or increasing basket size, or both.

gaining shelfspace has become a more strategic challenge for manufacturers. Shelfspace has to be won by planning product offerings to satisfy not just consumers’ needs but also the retailers’ objectives. Because the retailer is overwhelmed with offerings that claim to have consumer appeal – that is now a given – it is in being seen to best meet the retailers’ needs that has become the battleground. Store management wants to increase category sales, improve average margins, provide a good range to shoppers and perhaps offer exclusive products, all the while looking to increase operational efficiency and reduce inventory costs by minimising the number of lines stocked and the workload involved in getting products on the shelf. Manufacturers now have to win shelfspace by working through these complex and sometimes conflicting needs.

The sales potential of generics was always going to be limited by their poor quality – imagined or real – when compared to major brands. Since the bottom of the market is limited in size (most people seek average or premium quality), generics can take only a limited share. Retailers realised there was a greater opportunity to compete directly with national brands for some of their volume, and, by not incurring the brands’ advertising and sales force costs, be more profitable. Hence copycat brands, close copies of manufacturer brands, were a natural progression and have become entrenched in the market.

In simple terms, the trade start buying the product on discount to hold in stock for future sale at a higher margin rather than sell immediately. They make money by taking advantage of contradicting discounts and promotional schedules and then selling the product for a higher price at a later date. This is not uncommon. If a manufacturer offers promotional prices every other month, a retailer will forward buy five weeks’ supply at the end of each promotional month. It is not unknown for a retailer to buy a year’s supply ahead of a major price rise. At

A retailer facing competition from hard discounters or Wal-Mart cannot afford to lose their price-sensitive shoppers, because, as we saw in Chapter 2, retailers are sensitive to small changes in sales, and price-sensitive shoppers are a significant segment of shoppers. Dropping

retailers use a master brand model, supporting one brand, the chain, whereas manufacturers primarily use a product brand model supporting a wide portfolio of individual product brands. This gives the retailers an enormous economy of scale advantage because they only have to build and reinforce one brand image that covers billions in sales.

They could see the economic attractiveness of being able to strip out the burgeoning brand-related costs from manufacturer brands and make a very good margin, even if the volumes were going to be low. There is a lot of profit available if you do not spend 5–10% of retail selling price (RSP) on marketing, 2% on product development, 10% on high management costs and 8% on a sales force.

Manufacturers have one advantage that can never be overcome if used with focus, vigour and investment, and that is innovation. Yogurt, seemingly an ideal category for private label to take the lion’s share, has seen private label share decline. The top-five leaders, Danone, Yoplait/Sodiaal, Yakult Honsha, Nestlé and Müller, represent half of all yogurt sales. Their innovation has been developing premium products, like pro-biotic yogurt and yogurt enhanced with fruit, and they launch continually; between 2006 and 2010 Danone introduced nine new products. Although retailers have developed brands, Aldi has Fit & Active non-fat yogurt and Kroger has Carb Master Yogurt, they haven’t won over consumers, owing to their lack of innovation. Both are seeing sales decline.

Owing to the ever-increasing pressure on space, as retailers continue to extend private label ranges, there is a risk of branded products being moved to less-optimal locations, having fewer promotional slots and facings or being delisted. Manufacturers cannot wait for this to happen before reacting; they must be proactive in making the case for their brands. While the absolute cash and margins on private labels may be higher for the retailer, the manufacturer has to shift the focus to total system profitability. Many factors favour manufacturer brands when total profitability is considered, including: Sales velocity: Shelfspace turnover is often higher for manufacturer brands. The velocity of leading manufacturer brands is often 10% higher. Profit per linear inch of shelfspace. Discounts and off-invoice allowances: Includes slotting allowances, listing fees, promotional deals, advertising and merchandising allowances, and credit for return of unsold merchandise. Promotional and advertising fees. Provision of ‘free’ logistics services: Includes transportation, warehouse and store labour, and merchandising help for the retailer. Manufacturer brands usually retail at higher-than-average prices: Even when the net margin on manufacturer brands is lower, the absolute cash profit per unit may be higher.

if management is under pressure to deliver profits in the short term, quick-response promotions are a more attractive investment than design improvements. Short-term actions are also favoured in industries sensitive to changes in volume sales, like retailers. Shoppers tend to react more quickly to price promotions than to store layout changes.

Manufacturers’ allocation of funds between consumer investment and retailer investment continues to swing inexorably towards the retailers, who attract in excess of 20% of a typical FMCG manufacturer’s net sales value, compared to 5% spent on advertising. Cost-cutting

Top brands stayed on top because of the continual investment and commitment of the manufacturers during a time when mass media gave them an affordable and highly effective route to the consumers’ minds. They were able to defend their positions because they could afford more R & D, more advertising and a bigger sales force than any interlopers. Manufacturers became used to the idea of owning space in the consumer’s mind and believed it was theirs by right. But brand mindspace is not a permanently acquired asset that continually delivers profits. Rather, it represents a position that must be continually defended, especially today, where competition from retailers comes as a shock to most manufacturers.

Thanks to the success of private label strategies (see Chapter 9), five of the top eight FMCG manufacturers in the world are actually retailers; giants such as Unilever and Coca-Cola are no longer even in the top ten, their global sales dwarfed by products under the names of Wal-Mart (now the world’s largest FMCG manufacturer), Carrefour, Tesco, Aldi and Lidl. The

One retailer told us that, as a rule of thumb, sales of a brand will be reduced by two-thirds if it is moved from an eye-level to a foot-level position. Presence

Originally developed as a cost-saving efficiency tool, once all product categories adopted UPCs and computing became powerful and cheap enough to handle the unimaginable quantity of data, the benefits of retail information dwarfed the anticipated cost benefits from efficiencies. Real-time knowledge of sales at the item level dramatically illustrated the truism of knowledge equating to power, especially when the data could be measured at the individual shopper level through loyalty cards.

Within the category, what is the optimal combination of brands and formats to cover the maximum buying intentions, and what is the optimal price structure for discriminating without losing sales? Retailers

A well-planned category will satisfy the largest proportion of shoppers, actualise every potential sale and prompt unplanned purchases. Profits will be affected by the mix of sales: the range should price-discriminate, satisfying price-sensitive customers while earning higher margins from quality-sensitive shoppers. For many retailers, category planning also involves promoting their private label brands.

Category captains are recognised by retailers as having the greatest knowledge of consumer behaviour and mechanics in a category, and usually will have the most comprehensive range. Retailers believe that stocking this manufacturer’s range, backed with their understanding of positioning, merchandising, shelf allocation etc., should optimise sales. This

To the extent that retailers can achieve this goal, they will be rewarded in higher sales and profits.

End-aisle-displays, other free-standing product displays, and the in-store flyers (weekly circulars) receive the most exposure in the store. It is not surprising that 30 percent of all store sales come off end-aisle displays. On the other hand, we have found that even very limited exposures can be highly effective in producing sales.

But any alternate display, even on an aisle not frequently visited, has more potential to increase incremental sales than another, expanded main aisle gondola location.

Across many studies, I have found a basic principle: The faster you close sales—the less time wasted for the shopper—the more sales you will make.

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

Red Dino Sdn Bhd aims to provide e-commerce solutions to setting up marketplace accounts, managing and retaining seller's accounts, along with photography and graphic design - for ease of retailers and manufacturers to kick-start their online businesses. Using our platform - DinoSync, we integrate multiple marketplaces, website providers, point of sales system (POS), multi-warehouse and shipping management, and business analytics into a single web application.

Mom.” “What?” She was trying to help. In her own way, this was warm and fuzzy. “Thanks for supper.” “It wasn’t even on sale,” she said. “I paid full price for that crap.” “When someone pays retail, that’s love,” Jared said.

Founded in 1994, RDTS offers innovative sales and merchandising solutions to manufacturers and banners across Canada and Europe. RDTS is a company offering sales and merchandising services for various banners and brands operating in the retail field. With a team of more than 300 members, we have been helping our clients and partners achieve their goals for more than 25 years in more than 1,500 stores across Canada.

Those retailers are simply fated to live in the inflexible world of racks and aisles, where products must obey the uncompromising physics of atoms, not bits. One of those unfortunate rules of corporeal matter is that it cannot transcend time and space. Obviously, a physical item can be in only one place at any given time. For instance, a can of tuna cannot exist simultaneously in multiple categories, even though the interests and browsing paths of each shopper might suggest many: “fish,” “canned food,” “sandwich makings,” “low-fat,” “on sale,” “best-selling,” “back-to-school,” “under $2,” and so on. A physical store cannot be reconfigured on the fly to cater to each customer based on his or her particular interests.

In the case of Trunk Club, they led with a simple polarizing message related to how their target customers generally feel about shopping. By saying “men want to dress well, but they hate to shop,” they intentionally called out shopping as the enemy of their service. And if you are a man who hates to shop, you will rapidly align with their message without much thought. The beauty of this approach is that it has the opposite effect for clients who are a poor fit for your solution. For example, if you’re a man who loves to shop, you may be immediately turned off by Trunk Club’s value proposition. While being excited about customers not liking your solution may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually a good thing! Bad-fit customers who buy your product are more likely to become dissatisfied and hurt your brand. They may also provide errant feedback that can quickly derail your product or company roadmap if you decide to follow it. In short, polarizing messages can serve double duty by keeping the good-fit customers in and helping the bad ones self-select out. In the case of Trunk Club, this approach worked: they were acquired by US luxury retailer Nordstrom in 2014 for $350 million.

In a traditional camera store, cameras typically are not ranked number one versus number ten. But online retailers make it easy to list products in rank order by customer ratings, or to filter results to include only products with every conceivable desirable feature. Products with lower rankings or only nine out of ten desirable features receive disproportionately lower sales from even small differences in quality, convenience, or pricing performance.

When you ask people at a party about what they do – keep your ears strained for how many of them project themselves as unique . Most of them might say I work for ABC company that ‘s into software or XYZ company that is into retail without implying what is perceptually unique about their companies

As in all branches of the retail trade, the key to success was skill at sales.

As I was to learn, the process for creating the digital media business would be quite different because there was so much more to creating a great digital media customer experience than simply adding the next retail category to the Amazon website. The first part of the process went as normal. Our team of three or four people developed plans using the tried-and-true MBA-style methods of the time. We gathered data about the size of the market opportunity. We constructed financial models projecting our annual sales in each category, assuming, of course, an ever-increasing share of digital sales. We calculated gross margin assuming a certain cost of goods from our suppliers. We projected an operating margin based on the size of the team we would need to support the business. We outlined the deals we would make with media companies. We sketched out pricing parameters. We described how the service would work for customers. We put it all together in crisp-looking PowerPoint slides (this was still several months before the switch to narratives) and comprehensive Excel spreadsheets.

But this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

Visulon Inc.'s merchandising planning software offers a comprehensive suite of features, enabling retailers to effectively manage their inventory, allocate shelf space, and monitor sales performance. By leveraging powerful analytics and intuitive design tools, retailers can make data-driven decisions and customize their displays to drive sales and enhance the overall shopping experience.

Department stores in particular had difficulty surviving the onslaught of low-price competitors. Their inability to adapt to changing consumer tastes and the emergence of new retail channels that targeted specific market segments—the so-called category killers in hardware, toys, and furniture—deeply eroded their market share. While in the 1960s and 1970s most clothing was sold in full-service department stores, by 1990 such stores accounted for only 29 percent of sales.

My mother holds these markers all over town; people who owe her a favour. It might be a peek into planning documents, or preferential treatment at an up-coming retail sale, or even a private viewing of a property before it hits the market.

207, 2nd Floor, 3rd Main Rd, Chamrajpet, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560018 Call – +91 7022122121 ### The Development of Kannada Literature and the Rise of Online Accessibility The rich history of Kannada literature, which stretches back more than a millennium and is littered with vibrant narratives, poetic forms, and academic works, is extensive. The development of Kannada writing has been both rich and varied, ranging from the ancient texts of the 9th century to contemporary novels and essays. The way readers interact with their literary heritage has changed significantly as the digital age has progressed, making Kannada literature significantly more accessible. Thanks to platforms like Veeraloka Books, readers can now explore the depths of Kannada literature without being restricted by location. By making it possible for customers to purchase books with just a single click, these online retailers have created a link between readers and authors. This progress from customary physical book shops to computerized stages has been critical in advancing Kannada writing, guaranteeing its significance in a quickly impacting world. The extensive selection of titles offered by Kannada books online is one of the most significant benefits. Poetry, fiction, historical novels, and biographies are all forms of Kannada literature. Stages, for example, Veeraloka Books curate a huge determination of these works, taking care of different peruser interests. Because literature has become more accessible to everyone, you can find something that piques your interest whether you're a casual reader or an avid collector. In addition, readers can get their beloved books delivered to their homes through Kannada books online, saving them the hassle of going through crowded stores or standing in long lines. People who live in remote areas or in areas with few bookstore options will appreciate this convenience. Online platforms remove barriers and foster a deeper connection between authors and their audiences by delivering Kannada literature to your doorstep. Sales alone are not enough to stop the digital transformation of Kannada literature; It also includes promoting fresh and upcoming authors. Online platforms make it easier for aspiring authors to have their voices heard in a more democratic setting than traditional publishing avenues. Self-publishing on platforms like Veeraloka Books has helped numerous authors reach a larger audience than ever before. This change ensures that the literary landscape remains dynamic and vibrant by encouraging experimentation and innovation in Kannada writing. E-books and audiobooks have also become more widely available, making them more accessible. These choices provide readers who prefer digital formats with portability and flexibility. Younger readers who are accustomed to using smartphones and tablets can now more easily access Kannada literature. Audiobooks cater to those who enjoy listening to stories during their daily commutes or while multitasking, while e-books are portable, making it simple to read on the go. Moreover, the web empowers perusers to draw in with writing in manners that were already impossible. Discussions of books, authors, and literary themes can flourish on social media, online forums, and other platforms. Perusers can associate with one another, share surveys, and effectively partake in the abstract talk encompassing Kannada composing. The community of readers of Kannada literature is also bolstered by this interaction, which not only enhances the reading experience. In conclusion, Kannada literature faces both challenges and opportunities in the digital age. Platforms like Veeraloka Books make it easier for people with disabilities to access literature, allowing it to flourish.

In recent years it has become popular for some retailers to begin their Black Friday sales on Thursday night. Do not support this inane trend. If you feel like you want to replicate the experience, blindfold yourself, tape $150 to your forehead and roll yourself down a hill in a shopping cart.

Although in 2005 compact discs still represented over 98 percent of the market for legal album sales, Morris had no loyalty to the format. In May of that year, Vivendi Universal announced it was spinning off its CD manufacturing and distribution business into a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company. Included in EDC’s assets were several massive warehouses and two large-scale compact disc manufacturing plants: one in Hanover, Germany, and one in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Universal would still manufacture all its CDs at the plants, but now this would be an arms-length transaction that allowed them to watch the superannuation of optical media from a comfortable distance. It was one of the oldest moves in the corporate finance playbook: divest yourself of underperforming assets while holding on to the good stuff. EDC was a classic “stub company,” a dogshit collection of low-growth, capital-intensive factory equipment that was rapidly going obsolete. In other words, EDC was a drag on A that added little to B. Let the investment bankers figure out who wanted it—Universal had gone digital, and the death rattle of the compact disc had grown loud enough for even Doug Morris to hear. The CD was the past; the iPod was the future. People loved these stupid things. You could hardly go outside without getting run over by some dumb jogger rocking white headphones and a clip-on Shuffle. Apple stores were generating more sales per square foot than any business in the history of retail. The wrapped-up box with a sleek wafer-sized Nano inside was the most popular gift in the history of Christmas. Apple had created the most ubiquitous gadget in the history of stuff.

The author contrasts leadership styles he describes as wholesale and retail. The whole sale leader rallies groups to an overriding vision, and to him individuals are interchangeable. The retail leader knows everyone's details and uses personal touches to motivate.

add-on to Phoenix, part faux cowboy tourist trap—the West’s Most Western Town—part artist’s colony. Now it sucked up capital, development, and retail sales from the center city like an Electrolux. Yet it never seemed like a happy place. The politics were poison. Every section and street seemed to vie for the power to look down on everybody else. Scottsdale wanted to be Santa Fe or South Beach, but it was neither artistic nor sexy. Nobody would set a cop show in Scottsdale. A golf or plastic surgery show, maybe. I suffered the unending traffic jam south past

There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it's simplicity.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

Retail is for Losers Haiku Retail is for losers. That's why I only buy at auctions and estate sales.

Retail [10w] The first and last sale of the day are best.

Retail Haiku [7w] Lollapalooza Liquidation Blowout Sale. Everything Must Go!

Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon’s infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world.

Likewise, Jimmy Swaggart Ministries lost its bid to avoid sales taxes,4 Native American believers had no right to direct how the federal government develops federal land,5 Jewish merchants could not force the weekly day of no retail sales to coincide with their Sabbath,6 and a Native American family could not refuse to obtain a Social Security number for their 2-year-old daughter as a precondition to getting federal welfare.

The organizational and technology challenges are significant, and we have touched on only a few of them here. But we’ve seen big pay-offs for retailers who can follow individual customers across media and channels. Increasingly,

The objectives that retail advertisers design to communicate their brand to the target market are slightly different from consumer advertising objectives. It is primarily inclusive of establishing brand awareness about the retail outlet amongst the general public. Once the awareness has been established, the creation of understanding of store products and services becomes the second most important objective.    Next in line is the art of convincing consumers about the ability of the retail outlet to meet their respective product / service needs. While designing these objectives, the objective that should drive all these previously mentioned goals is the objective of prompting out a buying behavior from the target market. Lastly, the retail advertiser should also strive to establish customer loyalty for the retail brand that would lead to further visits and hence greater business.

Retail advertising is characterized by four main aspects: Creating an image of the shop Establishing its location Variety or special kind of goods offered, and Competitive price offers The

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

Despite initial enthusiasm from Page’s distributors, as an overall category, innerwear remained a low-profile product in retail stores. This would ultimately necessitate a high-pitched, pan-India advertising campaign from Page, but the costs were prohibitive. Competitive intensity from incumbents had already increased substantially during 1995–2000. When the company reached sales of Rs 21 crore in FY2000, Rupa and Maxwell were already at Rs 150 crore each. One level above them, in the mid-premium segment, brands like Liberty, Libertina and Tantex (TTK Tantex) were firmly ensconced. Associated Apparels (Liberty and Libertina) reported sales of Rs 100 crore during the same period. In a stroke of luck for Page, both TTK Tantex and Associated Apparels fell prey to labour strikes. TTK Tantex saw labour-related plant shutdowns in 1997 that lasted for two years, sending the company’s revenues into a steady descent (see Exhibit 55). The TTK Group had twenty companies across many sectors and, due to lack of management bandwidth to handle the crisis, sold the innerwear brand in FY02. In the same year, Associated Apparels had a labour strike in one of its factories that disrupted its supply chain. The exit of both TTK Tantex and the crippling of Associated Apparels played into Page’s hands as all the large innerwear retailers (dealers) in northern and western India shifted to Jockey.

Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

In addition, discussing these things and making decisions at the outset of the collaboration can help to define non-writing roles. For example, who will publish the book? How will expenses be covered? How and when will royalties be dispersed? How often will sales reporting be done? At the time of this writing, it is not possible to use any major retailer’s platform for a royalty-split project. In other words, one person will have to handle the publication and then be accountable to the other.

Exhaustive analysis of the findings indicated principles to improve in-store visibility. Based on these, Guinness created a prototype fixture and installed it in test stores, as shown in Figure 2.1. The extruding fins were highly visible, ensuring that the offer would reach shoppers at the end of the aisle. The fins also broke the linear nature of the aisle, helping to stop shoppers by the display. Product layout was clear and authoritative. All these elements were within the cone of vision. Strong brand block and the use of signpost products reduced visual “noise,” strengthened impact, and acted as guides around the fixture. Figure 2.1 This Guinness display, using fins to break the aisle, helped stop shoppers and increase sales dramatically. Guinness monitored checkout scanner data in the test stores. It then modified the design in response to these findings and installed the display in various retail sites. Guinness then installed the new display in ten sites and identified another ten control sites for a formal test. The new fixture increased sales dramatically. Why? The new display was able to pull customers through the three moments of truth: reaching, stopping, and closing the sale. The fixture made stout easier to find in this busy category, so the display reached out to shoppers. The time until the first customer interaction decreased from an average of 38 seconds to 11 seconds. The majority of stout purchasers went straight to the fixture, so it did a better job stopping them in front of the display. The total average visit time reduced from 2.08 minutes to 1.53 minutes, indicating that it is easier to shop from the new fixture. U-turning in the middle of the aisle halved, to only 24 percent. More customers were now shopping the whole aisle. And, finally, these customers bought Guinness in much higher numbers. In the test stores, Guinness draught sales increased by 25 percent in value and 24 percent in volume. Total stout sales grew by 10 percent and total beer sales by 4 percent

As aisles become more crowded (higher aisleness), the time it takes for shoppers to spend a dollar increases. As we have noted, the faster customers spend money, the higher the overall store sales. Aisleness is a significant factor to consider in thinking about store navigation.

This manifesto is a distillation of critical action points that will lead to double-digit sales and profit increases, and which have actually led some retailers to achieve as much as five times more sales over the past many years. The adage, “The good is the enemy of the great,” is possibly nowhere more applicable than in retailing. With a global population nearing seven billion, the world demand for goods and services is swelling. The movement from developing societies (traditional retailing) to highly developed societies (modern retailing) continues apace. Demand alone has been the driving force behind good retailing, globally.

1. Focus on the short trip. For supermarkets around the world (the same principle applies to all classes of trade), half of all shopping trips result in the purchase of five or fewer items, with one being the most common. These short trips typically account for one-third of store sales. The new strategy is to increase the size of each of those baskets by one or two items. Quick trippers spend money very fast, and getting them to buy one or two more items is far easier than motivating stock-up shoppers to buy ten or twenty more items. This focus, focus, focus on the quick trip could deliver an easy 30 percent sales lift (and a lot more when the synergies with other types of trips become apparent).

The most important promotion is place, not price. In a typical store, probably 2 percent of the total items in the store at any one time are being promoted on end-of-aisle displays or other secondary promotional displays. This 2 percent of items may constitute a full 30 percent of all the sales in the store. However, half the shoppers purchasing an item from one of these promotional displays are unaware that it is at a reduced price. Of the half who are aware, half of those really didn’t care about the price. Good retailers are locked in a mindset that price considerations dominate shopping.

9. Reach you can buy, but stopping power and closing power are inherent to the product, primarily through the package. Both stopping power and closing power can be measured for individual products, as well as categories. The significance is that some products are good at attracting attention, but poor at closing the sale, whereas others are good at closing, but can’t seem to stop the traffic. Besides remedial package design, appropriate shelf management and promotional strategies can increase the stopping and closing power of existing products.