InsideFurniture

MISSING IN ACTION: The enduring business present is presence or the greatest element of success is just showing up

At lunch today, I showed up and received ample food for thought worthy to share. My lasting mental and physical nourishment came from observing enthusiastic management take orders, prepare, serve delicious food and quickly clean the tables, all with a commanding smile.

The joyous, inspiring management of Panera Bread’s successful Piedmont, North Carolina, franchise (11 units) showed up and showed off how they earned their MBAs (Mastering Business Attentiveness). They do it weekly, with delighted honor and humility. That’s how they roll and earn their dough, literally and figuratively.

Instead of missing in action, the Panera Bread executives showed up and became the “help” and eagerly helped take care of bidness while taking care of business and happy diners at the always bustling Eastchester Drive, High Point, (N.C. Highway 68) location. Clearly, the only loafers were kneading attention.

While observing the enviable professionalism at work, I couldn’t help wondering how many furniture executives actually get off their fat assets and work the sales floor. That’s the school of reality where they can get the education to improve their business.

Sure, many owners of smaller stores actually work the floor. But in all those big stores, is top management missing in action? If so, they will always miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to learn.

In business, out of sight is out of touch. Until management walks the walk, he or she can’t talk the talk with authority. Why? They haven’t touched, smelled, helped in the complexities of the challenging process of furnishing a home.

Retailing is detailing, and it comes from commitment, and that means showing up to show up the competition.

FINDING A WAY: Changing methods and message can make a difference with a plan in place

For an aching industry, the rules of the G.A.M.E. have changed. Generating Astounding Mercantile Excitement is the name of today’s game for tomorrow’s tomorrows. Anything less is less and lost and more yesterdays which are gone forever.

Moving forward, a deserving industry needs different leadership. Holding the rutter is not the same as commanding the rudder and navigating into blue waters of change.

Bold moves and powerful ideas fuel the future, not more chit-chat, annual chest pounding conferences in which the sound and fury of shoulda-woulda-coulda quickly dissipates and signifies little.

Why? No real plan is in place, just fancy talk and the routine feel good palliatives: Same ole, same ole is just the same ole shift to more of the same. Yuck.

Look at most retail furniture marketing. It’s lacking pizzazz. Anything exciting, as in bold measures to help people recognize the importance of their home? Nope. Just more of the same old shift.

Clarifying leadership creates the enduring conditions for the astounding emergence of crackling ideas prompting sustainable action along the entire demand chain.

Ho-hum, another series of costly, vapid furniture advertisements fill the pages. Where’s the exciting calls to action grabbing the hearts and minds, with evocative impulses sending excited people out to attain their dreams of living better with fresh interiors?

I’ll tell you where the action is. It’s in all the other industries that are more in tune with people's lives, even as we striggle through a challenging economic climate.

Cosmetics sell, especially now when looking good makes us feel good. H-m-m-m, a connection to the home. You bet. Yes, and that’s the message. Furniture is house dressing, the home cosmetics that can be in place and deliver the good feeling.

The message for consumers is live life at home, where the action is with all the home entertainment and electronics that need the embracing vigor of home furnishings.

We can never stop finding ways to help people really want better interiors. Because when they want it, they will find a way to get it.

SACRED RESPONSIBILITY: The purpose and meaning of serving consumers comes into sharpest contrast and relief during difficult economic times

BlogNote: Variations of this posting have dignified this space previously, prompting a variety of responses, ranging from praise to derision.

So telling and amusing are the derisive comments, usually delivered in private e-mails or in person, and all typically revolve around an accusatory central theme that I am moralizing bastard.

To paraphrase them: Hey, man, get off your damn high horse. Don’t you know what business is really all about? My answer is always the same, a resounding, “Yes!” Here I go again.

With renewed surprise, it seems many furniture retailers and manufacturers keep rediscovering a verity: Consumers actually affect the nature and quality of their business.

Over the years, myriad stories abound in the mostly sycophantic trade press, continuously propounding, heralding and attesting to the importance of consumers. Those editors possess a firm grip on the obvious, don’t they?

Likewise, in virtually every industry conference, seminar and workshop presented — directly and indirectly — during the past several years, one or more sessions devotes itself to “listening” to consumers. More astounding perspicacity.

Over the years, millions of dollars are eagerly invested in apparently redundant studies and superfluous research about consumers’ attitudes about shopping for furniture.

Most of the findings are always the same. JUST IN, BREAKING NEWS!: People, also known as consumers, dislike the furniture shopping experience for all the reasons known: blind item, inability to discern value, no quality benchmarks, logistical frustrations, yada, yada, yada.

Incidentally, the more important research — the valuable ethnographic insights — on how people use, buy and think about furniture is neither conducted enough nor frequently to be of real significance.

Consumers, who pay the bills for the furniture industry, repeatedly respond to researchers with unambiguous declarations (fulminations) of frustration and disgust about their furniture shopping experience. In many stores, the consumer-respondents say they want to be treated honestly and deserve respect.

H-m-m-m, maybe some kind a problem (for the optimists: an enshrouded opportunity) really exists?

If not, why would so many people voluntarily speak out? Only to get a better deal? To wait until Y3K to pay? To exult in blowout prices? To praise clever advertisements that expect people to become mercantile lemmings and just buy? Not likely.

GRATITUDE

PROCESS OVER RELATIONSHIP: Perpetual emphasis on price and financing dashes consumer dreams about living better

Overcoming the obvious is not too obvious within the furniture industry. So, what’s so blindingly obvious, yet virtually invisible?

It’s the obvious process all consumers know: You gotta pay for what you buy, and that there’s always some kind of financing method available. Duh!

Blatant price-financing promotions interfere with dreaming. Yes, dreaming, the potent state of mind that establishes and sustains want and desire.

In most adversetisements (my neologism), the timeless seduction of living better with home furnishings is reckless presumed. You might say it’s homeless.

By way of contrast, my good friend Mary Frye, president of Home Furnishings Independents Association sardonically observes, “What would you think if you saw a huge banner on New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, proclaiming, ‘Air Conditioned Rooms and Suites?’”

Such a declaration would produce obvious derisive laughter and ridicule because today air conditioned hotels is essential for business. Yet, furniture merchants are wont to shout what is expected and a recognized process. But most remain silent about declaring the images, factors and elements of living better with home furnishings.

Go figure, and that’s what consumers do. They respond to living better with automobiles, travel, electronics and products and services that deliver enjoyment, contentment and pleasure.

If Preparation H can simply and successfully detail the obvious relief it delivers, the burning question remains: Why can’t furniture merchandisers and merchants apply the ointment of better living?

They obvious answer is they can, but choose reflexive and less sophisticated tactics — gimmicks, games and price, financing offers — that seem to enrich the consultants (also known as insultants) offering quick solutions for complex, yet obvious situations.

Stop selling and start facilitating an enduring dreamstate for people (consumers) wanting to live better with home furnishings.

Declare the many ways of comfort. Stimulate the desire to make a house a home where the interiors and their function contributed to the joys of living.

Inform, guide and educate people about sensibilities and benefits of an enriching homelife and how furnishing interiors produces the good life.

That means Make Love Not R.O.A.R (Really Offensive Advertising Regularly).

MARKETING TO GO: Projecting Cindy Crawford’s home collection into non Rooms To Go markets is the shape of brilliant research

Strutting the Cindy Crawford Home collection into markets where Rooms To Go isn’t — yet — constitutes good business on an obvious level and, on a higher level, one of the most brilliant marketing strategies.

Think about it. Positioning Cindy Crawford’s line — the proprietary merchandising group from the Seaman & Son merchandising wizards — in other markets is more than great marketing. It’s brilliant marketing research and astounding stealth marketing with other retailers participating with their eyes wide shut.

Do you think for a moment that Morty and Jeff are just selling furniture to their friends? Yes and know. These savants are propheting and profiting in the best business school case study tradition.

With each sale of Cindy’s line in non-RTG markets, RTG receives valuable marketing research on style, design and other factors.

Should RTG ever want to penetrate new markets, they have a shapely business model in Cindy Crawford.

DATA VERSUS DITTO: Still too many retailers wanting different results while doing the same things

Am I nuts or what? Even though times have changed, and retailing is not as we knew it, many merchants keep believing it is and command themselves to continue fishing with flaccid snag lines.

Data are the bait to attract and identify the fish and whether they are biting or likely to bite.

Why fish where the fish aren’t. Or, for that matter, gamble on clumsy snag lines, make that, chorus lines of no-no-no to the tune of the finance dance-prance.

Seems to me that what appears in most furniture ads is just bait: nice pictures that are just there, without much research to support their presence.

That’s ditto marketing and merchandising versus data mining that identifies what people likely to do and the merchandise they are probably predisposed to acquire.

Ditto marketing is a misallocation of so many resources: time, money, spirit and satisfaction.

With data, technology can economically tailor specific messages. That’s putting the tastiest bait on the unbarbed hook that’s really a handshake.

Ditto promotions just blur and are mostly dismissed.

Data marketing is code breaking in winning the whirr of words with resonance that enriches all concerned.

Data defeats ditto all the time, in every way except the old ways.

Fish if you wish, but the old lines can’t catch anymore.

ONCE UPON A TIME: Telling the furniture story with passion and honor

Blognote: A couple of times a year, I feel compelled to remind all of us just what busines we are in and the attendant responsiblity to serve the greater good to assure the personal goodness.

Once upon a time, a wise furniture manufacturer sat a few of his favorite retailers on his knee and told the great story of how they all have a responsibility to help people — men and women, boys and girls— live a better life.

“It’s really a sacred responsibility we have, and few of us recognize what we’re really supposed to be doing in the marketplace,” he told the doubting, yet curious and squirming merchants who only wanted to go back to their stores and sell furniture.

“Be patient and quiet for a few moments, boys, and I’ll help you recognize that selling furniture alone is insufficient. All of us are really in the business of satisfying people. Working hard to satisfy instead of selling actually produces stronger business because it impels people to seek our counsel within a trusting and respectful context.”

In response, one retailer blurted, “That’s all well and good, but it’s mostly warm and fuzzy mental stuff. I’m in business to make a profit, and that comes from selling furniture, old man! I discount my merchandise and advertise regularly that we have low prices.”

Putting his arm on the vocal boy’s shoulder the avuncular manufacturer said, “Young man, sure you’re in business, but your primary responsibility is to know that the homemakers who come to your store are there for an important purpose. They come not to be sold something or anything, but to be satisfied, to fulfill their dreams to live better.

REFLECTIVE ADVERTISING: The composition and format of advertising usually defines commitment, motif and motive

Furniture advertising can be and usually is a collision of thoughts and action. All that’s necessary is a discerning eye — which most consumers possess — and the motive of the store or seller comes into focus.

Most furniture ads, print and broadcast, possess varying degrees of masculine desire for mercantile conquest. Of course, the male impulses for a quick sale contrast with the deliberative, validating demeanor of most women — the dominant and influencing shopper-buyer.

In most instances, women can detect bona fide value, as well as come on versus legitimate sale.

Look at the image below and see how long before you realize that a man is responsible for the sale of the dining room, reportedly offered on eBay.

As mentioned, all ads reflect their originator and purpose. If you are unable to discern the male influence, all you need to do is look closely in the mirror, both literally and figuratively.

As you can see, this dining room is nakedly priceless.

What is the naked truth about most furniture advertising? And do consumers accept or reject the implied and express motive.

What’s reflected in your mirror? Is it noble or embarrassing?

SUSTAINABLE OBSOLESCENCE: Green with envy over industries benefitting from planned obsolescence, some furniture people quietly pine away for un-Green sustainability

Despite all the Green talk, the nobility of sustainability may only be sales patois among some furniture people predisposed to honor feel good words and warm phrases just to stimulate business.

Of course, sustainability is not bunk, but a virtue. But that cherished virtue hasn’t squelched a secret desire that furniture needs to possess the delicious sales stimulant of planned obsolescence.

Green as a virtue and marketing tactic will grow. Among people wanting to invest in furniture and home furnishings, the idea of planned obsolescence is repugnant. Nothing will harm a vulnerable industry more than gushing claims for Green as the only factor possessing some sustainability.

If I heard the phrase “planned obsolescence” once, I heard it many times during October’s High Point Market. In fact, the sell-anything-who-cares crowd has always embraced a throw-away furniture ethic.

When I would ask about stimulating sales, some variant of “What we need is furniture with built-in obsolescence” would worm its way into the conversation.

That thinking, as anachronistic as it may be, still smolders beneath the sustained surface of an industry struggling to find ways to furnish homes to sustain business.

Here’s wishing the Green movement keeps more than the faith and acts aggressively to be sure to banish any charlatans within its midst, so the great Irish ballad holds true, as we all sing:

Green grow the lilacs, all sparkling with dew

I'm lonely, my darling, since parting with you;

But by our next meeting I'll hope to prove true

And change the green lilacs to the Red, White and Blue!