InsideFurniture

TRUST MARKETING: Decades of honored retailing return big double-digit increases in business for Steve Phillips in Saint Louis

Real simple: Smart merchant Steve Phillips is laughing all the way to the bank. At his Ashley units serving Greater Saint Louis, he will end the year “hugely ahead.”

At a time when other merchants mumble sorry and sordid tales of mercantile woe, Phillips smiles broadly, declaring that investing in building trusted relationships burnishes a glowing reputation that attracts and sustains friends doing business with  and as friends.

Oh, yeh, it's investment marketing because Phillips' simple method of satisfying customers who eagerly become ambassadors, spreading the positive news of honor and ethics. So simple, yet so difficult for other retailers who just don't get it.

For decades, Phillips conveys trust, honor and respect, allowing him to declare with conviction and humility: “We’ve been treating our customers right a long time and it’s paying off . . . with our business ending the year hugely ahead in big double digits.”

Expect more in 2010 from the Phillips honed brand of trust marketing, a natural virtue his family practiced for nearly three quarters of a century. Phillips operates four Ashley HomeStores in Missouri and has reinstated the Phillips Furniture brand in Gateway City and across the Mississippi River northeast in Edwardsville, Illinois.

Converting the couple of Ashley stores to Phillips Furniture, reinforces a trusted name, permitting Steve to compete with his Ashley units comfortably with the complementary new stores featuring more contemporary styles set in a lifestyle merchandising context. He also competes with his brother’s Weekends Only Furniture units, Crate & Barrel, Ethan Allen, Rothman, Value City and others, all of whom maintain the pressure.

Incidentally, what a great story of friendly brothers competing with one another in the same city.

Trust marketing is from-the-heart customer service, a branding distinction, a Phillips tradition he can take to the bank especially in a down economy.

FURNITURE IS HOMELESS: An industry stressing sales over living comfortably perpetuates stress and misery

Ending homelessness in furniture means getting off the street begging for sales and into homes on the sustaining value of living comfortably.

So what business is it, anyway? Selling or satisfying people who want live comfortably?

Both you say with a tight smile. I say you’re wrong.

Furniture is demonstrably about satisfying people wanting comfort, design and style within a context of living comfortably.

Sales is all about selling and satisfaction is all about providing comfort.

Sales is a function and providing comfort is a desired condition, virtue and responsibility.

Sales driven companies do damned near anything and everything to drive sales.

Comfort driven companies reinforce, well, duh, comfort with design and style to live better and, guess what, more comfortably.

As long as furniture marketing stresses sales, with all the diversionary freebies, gimmicks and ploys, the industry will be homeless, out on the street begging and clamoring for attention with sales talk.

Getting inside homes demands the sophistication of total honesty, flowing from a compelling desire to help people live better and more comfortably.

The marketing message is always comfort: What it is, how to get it and why it brings pleasure, harmony and tranquility.

The faster the furniture industry conveys living comfortably provides more satisfaction than a fancy automobile the faster more furniture will have a home in which to furnishing lives with, you guessed it, comfort.

WHAT’S KNOWN BETTER THAN WHAT’S NEW: Having a conversation about comfort with consumers is the marketing comfort zone

The cornucopia of new merchandise can’t overcome and cure the industry induced affliction of ignorant consumers.

Parading newness is an ineffective ingredient in the the rusty cans of moribund marketing polish. All that does is dull possibilities and put a sheen on sales prevention methods deemed to be brightest course of action.

Far too many furniture executives prefer the "proven" reliability, sanctity and safety of rear view mirror marketing techniques, as they speed into the future, driving aimlessly forward into the sales trough of past.

Such hellbent determination proves that the past doesn't work. So what, the guys keep driving a bus without real marketing wheels along a rough road, trying to pick up and transport consumers who are no longer hitchhiking.

This season’s market (trade show) mantra of new goods is so old it’s new again by the antiquity of a few months, make that, just minutes. Hope-based nostalgia is not a strategy no matter how good it feels.

No matter the venue, it’s the same old whine in old-new marketing bottles, whose spin is always the same:

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got, and you'll always feel what you always felt.

All the virile furniture men keep dreaming about sacking the $hapely women consumers, whose figures on paper assure perpetual arousal without much satisfying results. Go figure.

Sure enough, those boys keep working hard on achieving their mercantile conquests. Too bad all those artificial deals and steals are not resonating with the savvy ladies, especially now when their real needs are top of mind and impractical wants are rightly suppressed. The women smell a rat in the advertising.

As long as manufacturers only want to sell to retailers, not much will occur. And, as long as retailers only want to sell, sell, sell, without properly informing, guiding and educating people, they will get what they’ve been getting, not much.

Look at most furniture marketing. It sucks . . . sucks the vita breathe out of body of reason that walks and talks with the life force of always living comfortably and better with furniture.

Good furniture lex is engaging consumers in a continuous, serious conversation about helping them achieve their needs delivered as practical dreams, wishes and aspirations . . . to live comfortably and better with furniture.

Shouting the same old marketing non sequiturs and hollow bromides of sale-sale-sale are the insulting equivalent of demeaning catcalls or rude whistles.

Making a continuous date with consumers. Talk to them passionately. Open their minds and expand their horizons with respectful home centric words and concepts that satisfy their insatiable need for comfortable living.

The most effective furnture marketing makes love not roar!

NaW MARKETING: Maneuvering out of the recession demands sustained focus on recognizing how people live

Slow business, reflexive marketing myopia and an economy in transition are gnawing at furniture retailers in need of adopting an empathic focus better known as NaW marketing.

What is NaW marketing? It is a revolutionary, sensible and easily attainable principle: Recognizing the difference between needs and wants (NaW), and solving people's needs with authority, distinction, honor and candor.

The campaign for smart retailers is: Just Say NaW to gimmicks, deals and spiels about discount this and special that.

Present compelling reasons for meeting and exceeding people’s needs for comfort and living better with home furnishings.

NaW is obvious, yet befuddingly too simple, so much so the industry keeps missing the opportunity in its blinding, furious pursuit of business.

Most retailers aided by complicit vendors act more like frenzied mercantile dogs in heat chasing bitches than adroit business professionals responding to and satisfying needs.

NaW marketing could have mitigated the crippling impact of the current recession. People act on needs, and that virtue will continue, and that means a rejection of furniture marketing as usual.

People will be “right sizing,”as my friend and writer Gale Steves brilliantly observes: “Right-Sizing teaches and guides homeowners to live with the mandate that ‘less is more’ when it comes to their homes. This is the right time to look into new ways to reinvent their space.

“During these economic times, the word, downsizing, seems to be a pejorative term. No one wants to admit they are really cutting back, but whether they are driven by immediate needs or future ones, this is the time to shift gears. This Age of New Reality frees them from having to keep up with the Joneses," she rightly declares.

You will be hearing and learning more about NaW marketing as it applies to Right Sizing. In the meantime, learn about what to do: Ask people what they need and observe how they live.

The changing economy and prudent consumers are right sizing obdurate (persistently stubborn and hardheaded) retailers and manufacturers facing a new reality gnawing away the inefficient and unresponsive.

FURNITURE FATIGUE: Expect fewer blogservations packing more marketing punch

Sorry if I disappointed you, but probably not. During the past several months, only a few people lamented that I hadn’t blogged in a while. No worries, I am returning to this space with the same insights and intensity, but a little more infrequently.

My feeble excuse for no blogs is simple: I became afflicted by the furniture disease: My verbal chest fell into my empty mental drawers.

During my self-imposed sabbatical, I noticed the most furniture marketing remained rather static, even banal. Wonder why?

Business stinks. A frightened industry declines to modify its timeless and priceless marketing approach: A frontier sale barbeque of variations on the yeehaw theme of “Y’all (consumers) come and git it, ya he-ah.”

Aw shucks, with that kind of persuasive marketing, no wonder many manufacturers and retailers are receiving high marks in their crash course on sales prevention.

Yes, I am working my way through Mike Dugan’s intriguing tome, The Furniture Wars, and trying to devour, The Age of The Unthinkable, both are my evening reading as strange bedfellows for the mind.

In the daze and days ahead, I will succinctly blog on, write on, sharing some thoughts t ignite more thoughts and action.  

Oh, I had some fun on a recent California vacation, clicking some quick pix of Pottery World north of Sacramentoin Rocklin for Susan Dickenson of Home Accents Today. She posted them on her blog, Retail Update. Thanks Susan.

UNGROWTH CONSERVATISM: Rising infrequency of furniture purchases grow from sustainable values about quality, function and lifestyle

Get ready for ungrowth, a powerful reality forged by rising scarcity and sustainability of resources.

Ungrowth recognizes we cannot have everything, limitlessly, all the time forever. As a virtue, the ungrowth influence will only intensify, especially in consumer goods.

Discernable product quality in the right size and providing the right function are critical elements of progressive and sustainable marketing successes.

Ramifications and implications of ungrowth will affect all we do as individuals and in business.

In home furnishings, the public's emerging ungrowth state of mind will sharpen their focus. That means they are less susceptible and vulnerable to the typical onslaught of variations of false and misleading marketing.

The need for greater leadership and professionalism across all industry segments cannot be emphasized enough.

Ungrowth underscores a buy once, buy right mentality of personal conservatism. Across the socio-economic spectrum , people will be investing wisely in what they purchase for a new and sustaiable standard of living.

In home furnishings, it means greater infrequency of purchases, especially in casegoods, with multifunction as the bonus. For upholstery, the ability to reupholster will be an important factor.

Interior designing will give way to individualized home dressing, and that will elevate decorative accessories. They will be in sharper focus and a more frequent purchase as economical cosmetics for home sparkle.

The growth of ungrowth as an economic force has always existed. Its reality heightened with our painful, acute awareness of the implications of our current economic travail, which may be, thankfully, a needed life-saving attitude adjustment.

Smart merchandisers will benefit from the precious wisdom of sensibly appealing to hearty 1930s Depression Era virtues of intelligent frugality and the need to identify real value from bona fide quality, value and function.

Ungrowth's smart parsimony emphasizes: Buy the best you can and keep it as long as you can.

The marketing message will be critical. That is the reason telling and retelling the story of quality will resonate and drown the hollow buoyancy of cheaply made furniture that only looks good and will need replacing.

The Greening of the Consumer means a total rejection of built-in obsolesence.

The marketplace response to flashy price-driven marketing will be consistent with the current societal transformation recognizing real value: Been there, done that. Been screwed before. No more. Go away. You are not interested in my values.

PIECE ON DEARTH: Less is more from distinction and differentiation critical in marketing to smart consumers as rugged individualists

Wither the big brown furniture boys futilely flogging their flagging collections in the winds of change blowing them away.

The winners at the Spring High Point Market are conscious purveyors of distinction, primarily from aggregating and presenting a delicious assortment of individualized looks, styles and designs.

It is crafted produce from the fields and orchards of ingenuity, an ordered chaos of  attractive harmony. The appeal is timeless differentiationn, an individualism that people feel, want and need, especially women whom the furniture boys pejoratively call the end-user.

In procreating comfortable interiors, the distinctive design impulse arises from gender survival and preservation. Honed for millennia, women seek attraction and flourishes to validate themselves, family and friends.

Yes, the impulse incorporates home furnishings. Home dressing is so much a part of a woman’s soul. It influences most decisions from shopping to home life.

That’s why big brown banal furniture collections repel women precisely because the suited output is illsuited and lacks individualized distinction we all cherish.

In much the same way women cringe in the midst of another woman wearing the same garments at a special event, a similar drive for home distinction directs her attention in the world of home furnishings.

All these years later it’s back to the future with a fresh sense and appreciation for real eclecticism, a key element in effective marketing.

The future is in bold and subtle statements of distinction that command attention and validate personal discretion while preserving the need and integrity of sustained comfortable living.

Bid farewell to the banal big brown furniture boys and their tailored suites of sameness sinking in a sea of change.

LOW PRICES HIGH ANXIETY: Dropping prices to induce sales is desperate flypaper marketing

You can always sell a salesperson. Just look what’s happening now. In a flurry of e-blasts, desperate vendors are eagerly dropping their mercantile trousers to get business. A hairy sight, for sure.

Fooling themselves, manufacturers want to fool retailers. It may work again only to peter out for no other reason than artificially dropping prices without in-place operational efficiencies can be lethal. Death not be proud, the profit poet writes about a wrong.

Instead of a executing a flexible business and marketing plan based on meeting needs of consumers, too many furniture makers reflexively feel comfortable in retrogressing. They are doing what they know best — desperate price cutting — because they may not know what else to do because they don't ask or think they know it all. H-m-m-m-m-m. Have you heard? Some KIAs (know it alls) are going out of business.

Rampant price cutting a path to the next turnaround is cutting off your knows to spite your place really to succeed, and that place is identifying ways to meet the needs of consumers. The next turnaround in the making now is the mother of all turnarounds, taking no prisoners attempting a hope-filled mercantile Bataan death march back to business.

Manufacturers only wanting to sell, sell, sell rely on their own hope-based voodoo methods. They have a surprise coming. Hope isn’t a strategy to stimulate sustained business. Hope without a substantive plan is skywriting always blown away by the winds of reality.

My friend and fellow marketing dude Eric Bauer sums up the current spate of sales prevention tactics, saying, “Too many desperate companies are doing anything just trying not to lose.”

If you’re in business trying not to lose, then you’re not executing a plan to win. In the game of business, hoping not to lose means every moment, metaphorically, is being at bat in the bottom of the Ninth Inning with two out, two strikes, no on on base and down by seven runs.

Unfortunately, the game is over for hope-based marketing.

 

NEW BUSINESS FROM OLD: Marketing to satisfied consumers may be the salvation

If good business is all about building and sustaining lasting relationships, it seems to make sense for merchants to call on satisfied consumers.

Instead of investing precious dollars on attracting new business from new customers, perhaps getting new business from old customers will be more economical and advantageous.

Savvy merchants can mine detailed customer lists, providing they have them, and the probability is the data is too hard to retrieve or nonexistent. Too bad for the unprepared.

A satisfied customer confirms a relationship, permitting respectful queries about needs and wants within a friendly marketing context.

The message is the same: living better and more comfortably with furniture. Be a friend of people who want ways of seeking comfort in their homes, where they are spending more time.

A honest message will resonate among people adopting a Great Depression Era virtue of finding and honoring real value from trustworthy friends and merchants.

The new normalcy of the economy benefits the purveyors of trusted relationships.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: Lack of message cohesion, professionalism and congealed focus on consumers and more . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the inconvenient truths about the furniture industry:

·         Always misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity

·         Fair, tough czar needed

·         Innovate or evaporate

·         Fragmentation kills, breeds mediocrity

·         Manufacturers only want to sell to retailers

·         Retailers know little about consumers

·         Too much retail and manufacturing duplication

·         China forces race to the bottom

·         Advertising lacks practicality, incisiveness

·         Honesty and truth builds and sustains relationships

·         Fear of mutual collaboration

·         Most executives are marketing challenged

·         Consumers are smarter than industry

·         People distrust furniture advertising

·         Celebrity licensing usually fails

·         Retail "clearance centers" erode sales of running line goods

·         Smart differentiation succeeds

·         Comfort, design and living better outsells price

·         Too many egos not enough wisdom

·         Manufacturers caught with their plants down

·         Marketing is antiquated, self destructive, misleading

·         Trade show (Market) model inadequate

·         Trade publications are witting enablers, pander to advertisers

·         All that’s Green isn’t gold

·         True analysis missing in industry news

·         Best practices need greater awareness

·         Trade associations lack progressive punch

·         Conscientious retailers prefer to work showrooms into the evening instead of attending costly market entertainment

·         One all encompassing association needed for progress

·         Warring High Point showrooms diminish market cohesion

·         Industry recycles failed leaders: Screw up move up

·         Most market seminars are self-aggrandizing fluff

·         Retailers are undisciplined

·         Regional Las Vegas Market siphons precious marketing funds

•   Manufacturers mismanage, distrust sales representatives

·         More professionally certified retail designers needed

·         Off shore manufacturing killed brand equity

·         Real merchants are in touch with consumer dreams, wishes and aspirations

There are many more inconvenient truths. Please share them for the common good: ivan@insidefurniture.com