InsideFurniture

LIPSTICK EFFECT: The time for decorative accessories is now more than ever

Will lipstick effect affect the furniture industry? First off, what is the lipstick effect?

The lipstick effect can be defined as: During a recession, the tendency for consumers to purchase small, comforting items such as lipstick rather than large luxury items.

The current economic turbulence prompts behavioral changes, and that changes perceptions of furniture.

As mentioned, promoting big tickets in this economy — case goods and upholstery — may the equivalent of mercantile obituaries. It can be a misallocation of precious resources.

For people fearing their economic futures, they will avoid big-ticket purchases. In response, smart, proactive retailers promote living better with decorative accessories.

The succession of small changes leads to big results. This is the lipstick effect bridging the gap, and creating a vital and prosperous mercantile loyalty.

Stressing accessories is a prudent investment, likely to return future business when the economy turns and big-ticket sales can be justified.

Help indulge people’s desire for better living with decorative accessories. If not putting lipstick on the pig of big tickets is, well, still a pig to be slaughtered by the economy.

WELL SEASONED MARKETING: Innovation, ingenuity always attract attention and confirm authority

Simple and direct, without all the clutter, the Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams message frisson captures attention with delight and aspiration.

What Mitchell and Bob know is simple and direct. Effective marketing is densely direct, taking the ordinary and changing it to appeal to desire, piercing the membrane of resistance.

They have a message and know how to communicate it with aplomb.

Who doesn't want this MG+BW chair? The whimsical headline seasons the image's  impact, as it dances in our minds, pulling our warm thoughts of cozy comfort.

Consider Mitchell and Bob's gift the presence of the obvious package without distracting clutter and the bling of offers, prices, entreaties, deals and steals.

Here's wishing everyone a Merry Charisma!

TEN WORD MARKETING: Sometimes the most effective marketing program is positive thinking to action

Take to heart the two- letter-10-word marketing plan:

If it is to be, it is up to me!

Simple, concise, direct and powerful.

Yeh, what are we waiting for? This journey of a million-billion steps begins with a single step in the right direction.

Magic solutions for complex situations and conditions are nonexistent. Prayers and mantras don’t work if you are unprepared. And by you, I also include myself.

Sure, learning is necessary, but acting is necessary.

Forgive the game metaphor I am about to use. Business is not a game to employ schemes, methods and means to inveigle, wheedle, trick, deceive and cajole to appropriate.

Business is serious interaction to provide honest solutions for mutual rewards and lasting relationship.

Tim to stop because I am still learning:

If it is to be it is up to me!

110% SOLUTION: Giving more to receive more is a marketing investment returning loyalty

Differentiation works, especially when you give more to earn the rewards of establishing a lasting relationship.

Good business is fostering coopeation. My friend Clint Jackson of the Clinton Press in Greensboro is doing just that. In a novel investment that’s a home grown stimulus, he is adding 10 percent to each job.

The difference is how he is doing it. Clint is wrapping the added 10 percent separately, with a challenge that he is giving his customers “added resources” to achieve their objectives.

“More of what I produce is really just more tools for my customers' success,” says Jackson. “These times call for more than business as usual.”

Yes, the idea adding 10 percent more in goods and services may be difficult for furniture retailers and manufacturers. But not doing anything more is worse.

Find a way to be different is a way to thrive and survive.

Here’s the e-mail Clint sent. Can you do something similar? Incidentally, click on the image to capture his unbridled spirit. Call Clint. Ask him how he did it, and my friend will be helpful. I assure you.

 

FURNITURE NEEDS TO J.U.M.P.!: A bailout of solid marketing methods could help the industry to recover faster

The furniture industry needs to J.U.M.P. — Just Use Marketing Principles — as fast and as high as possible to regain stability and purpose: Becoming extraordinary advocates of helping people live more comfortably and better with style and design according to their means.

Retraining to achieve the ability to J.U.M.P. is the way to position for the future, instead of scrambling for business any way you can.

Scrambling is undisciplined action, and is no way to prepare for an eventual turnaround.

What’s more reckless? Scrambling is for eggs, not business because the yoke will be on you if you fail to J.U.M.P!

Following and benefiting from strong marketing principles are achievable, beginning with a few deceptively, interrelated simple questions:

• What is my mission?

• What is my responsibility?

• What is my enduring purpose?

• Why are home furnishings important to better living?

Answer these questions and others fairly and honestly in the context of an uncertain economy, demanding a serious reexamination of values within a world of scarcity.

Need help answering those questions? Talk to consumers, the people who want to live more comfortably and better with affordable style and design.

If you’re a retailer, the fullest answers are not necessarily coming from manufacturers. Likewise, if you’re a manufacturer, the most significant answers are not automatically coming from retailers. 

Then where? The market has the answers, and that means the people who want to live more comfortably and better with furniture.

All of what I’ve presented is easier said than done for a fragmented, headless industry that been running scattered, even amok.

For more than a half century, the debilitating fragmentation has, ironically, congealed and ossified into an institutional, jagged and inflexible Rock of Gibraltar, which rhymes with falter.

An industry unable to J.U.M.P. is paying a dear price: Confusion in the marketplace, loss of credibility, lack of cohesive message except “sale,” and a perverse delight in sales prevention.

Tough, but true. Why? The rule of the jungle prevails, despite all the platitudes from all quarters of the industry that nickels-and-dimes each other whenever possible.

A pernicious, self-defeating industry culture pervades: Get what you can now and the hell with others, which is another way of saying: Kick the can down the road as along and as far as you can, and get out leaving others barely alive and kicking.

As long as the industry prefers fragmented thought and action, its ability to congeal a message with cogent action will be just a wistful whisper of eggheads like me.

Hope is in the air, but hope is neither a strategy nor a tactic. Hope is an attitude, producing a marvelous and superlative alchemy that moves individuals and industry institutions to identify issues and challenge with resolve for the greater good.

While industry fragmentation is collective, defragmentation begins individually, with personal responsibility.

In a mercantile context consider what Sixteenth Century English poet John Donne had to say about the interrelation of who we are and what we do:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man (retailer, manufacturer, supplier, designer) is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

If this is just gibberish and too highfalutin for you, then you can’t or are afraid to J.U.M.P., leaving you on the self-limited ground abandoned to P.U.M.P., Purposely Undermining Marketing Principles.