InsideFurniture

SQUARE ONE MARKETING: Going forward by getting back to basics helps merchants focus

Successful marketing is all about asking the right questions, the basic ones. Beginning at (or returning to) Square One to achieve Square Won:

• In what business am I?

• What is my business’s responsibility?

A sound, enduring answer is another s series of questions, such as:

• Am I a merchant (or manufacture) caring about consumers?

• Am I a peddler, a seller?

• Am I in business to make to satisfy consumers or make a profit or both?

Merchants and manufacturers need to search their souls to answer the first questions about in what business they are involved and the responsibility undergirding it.

From my perch, good business is mutual, providing goods and services that meet the needs of people, without gimmicks, stunts, tricks, shenanigans or entrapments.

It is a calling that rejects the churn and burn mentality that is gone, dead, kaput. So many reasons abound, but the first and foremost reasons are purpose and place.

The purpose is to help people to live comfortably and affordably, providing them significant options to enjoy life in their homes for better living. That means good style and design.

As for the other questions about caring about people called consumers, the answer is obvious: Of course, as an ongoing process of remaining flexible in always discovering and modifying to meet changing needs of people.

That takes substantive work because home furnishings merchants wanting to succeed cannot be static or curb markets providing just any old house-home-stuffs.

The merchant-peddler-seller question always piques interest. Merchants are deeply involved, in touch and always passionately seeking to differentiate their business to meet the changing needs of people.

Peddler-sellers are selling to sell what seems to be anything: A sofa here, a chair there, get the sale that’s what’s fair.

This sell-anything mentality segues in to the hard question of whether being in business is to make a profit or satisfy people.

The quick, shoot from the hip, not-so-hip, response is both. But it’s not. From my perspective, which is aligned with people preferring a ethics-based marketplace, the answer is obvious.

You’re in business to satisfy people with the reward coming as profits that confirm that all is right with merchandising, buying, operations, customer service and all functions that serve the best interests of people wanting to live comfortably and better with home furnishings.

If all my discussion seems too smarmy, self-righteous and pious, then your feeling confirms you might be out of alignment with the needs of a changing market place.

Serve others as you wish to be served with dignity, distinction, compassion, enthusiasm and an indefatigable desire to know what you are doing will add zest, comfort, stability, beauty and function to the lives of people.

All the rest is just commentary.

POSITIVE ADDICTION: The furniture industry can learn from President-elect Obama’s discipline and leadership

Great organization and a positive attitude are essential to growing and sustaining a viable business.

All you need to do is study and implment the management and leadership techniques and values from President-elect Obama’s tightly disciplined campaign.

Regardless whether you voted for Barack Obama, we can agree he stayed on message despite all the opportunities to divert. He resisted to be drawn into what he and his staff believed to be superfluous issues. All that would have done is dilute his message.

This is a leadership lesson for the furniture industry.

The President-elect planned to work and worked his plan. This is old, but relevant news to furniture merchants, designers and manufacturers wanting to position themselves for survival.

In marketing to consumers, the message is pronouncing consistent value within the context of living comfortably and better.

Resist quick solutions. They don’t exist, and are usually deceiving in simplicity.

A societal value shift is occurring. The home is more important. Appeal to the strength of people desiring to make an investment in their home life.

Given the sense of emerging hope that exists, the essence of the positive American spirit, the furniture industry can begin declaring in many ways: Yes We Can! . . . if you KNOW, KNOW, KNOW what I mean.

ONE-TO-WON MERCHANDISING: The constant, collective power of designers forces an overdue reckoning

Enter the designers, for a change, in an entrenched and idea-receptive home furnishings industry needing a jolt of personal care, the sign of the times is The Designer, Stupid!

Especially in an uncertain and demanding economy, smart merchants and manufacturers need to recognize a match made for haven, the home: Joe and Josephine-the-Plumbers need the personal services and guidance of Brenda and Bill-the-Designers.

Providing easy and accessible design services to the masses constitutes positive change for an industry seeking to capture the economic votes of people more acutely focused on their homes.

Designers always had their eyes on the prize, the home, and especially now. Harnessing designers’ collective personal merchandising and counseling power commanded the attention this morning of the High Point Market press corps.

At a tasty and ennobling breakfast under the glass pyramid ceiling of Restaurant J Basul Noble on the first day of the fall market, the assembled scribes dined on nutritious facts we mostly knew, but needed to chew on them in a sophisticated forum.

Organizers of the breakfast briefing, the American Home Furnishings Alliance and High Point Market Authority, declared the High Point Market is a high point for designers, the economically potent and talented chefs of interiors needing the grandest array of merchandise and marketing ingredients for their custom fixin’s.

An assembled panel of leading professionals served delicious marketing morsels on the necessity and vitality of providing engaged designer services, as a sustainable entrée to attract and serve people wanting to live comfortably and better. Panel members included Robin Baron, Robin Baron Design, New York; Fred Berk, Robb & Stucky, with units in Arizona, Florida and Nevada; Todd Hady, Kincaid Furniture; and Farooq Kathwari, Ethan Allen.

Coming as no surprise, each executive expressed an overriding need for simple and comprehensive personal service, as prudent paths to survive across most product lines and socioeconomic strata.

Designer Baron characterized herself as a counselor helping clients save time and money, and leading them to discover contentment to enrich their lives and enliven their homes.

At Robb & Stucky, Berk explained providing designer services is an ongoing entrepreneurial processes of assessing client needs and delivering solutions to maintain lasting relationships.

Kincaid executive Hady said furniture manufacturers wanting future success needed products and processes to appeal to the powerful design segment packing a growing economic impact.

Ethan Allen’s Kathwari emphasized the fusion of design services and technology, in recognition that merchants needed to attract and sustain business with simplified at-home electronic access to the world of home furnishings.

COMFORTABLE LIVING: The most significant element of design and style is conspicuous by its absence in furniture marketing

What people want the most — comfortable living — usually receives short shrift in most furniture marketing. 

No surprise about the reason: The mind-numbing plethora of grocery store-style pronouncements of price and savings always eclipse furniture’s most integral purpose and function: Providing comfort for better living with style.

Presenting style in the absence of comfort and living better undermines credibility, and reinforces cynicism and distrust of furniture merchants among people we call consumers.

The quick fix television programs, stressing design on the cheap, exacerbate the situation with a focus on style over comfort and enduring function.

With discretionary spending tight, people today want lasting value, a virtue my immigrant father inculcated into me: Always invest in the best you can instead of spending more to replace cheaper, less substantial goods.

Harry Cutler’s simple wisdom resonates more than ever. Smart merchants are recalibrating their marketing into home-based messages that inspire people to invest in better quality furniture.

The sooner more merchants and designers congeal and sustain messages of sustainable comfort and living better the faster they will attract and sustain mutually beneficial business.

MARKET GAME CHANGER: A controlled opening of High Point Market Showrooms to consumers preserves supremacy and stimulates the regional economy

From strength to strength, the High Point Market wins in the high stakes mercantile game of home furnishings markets.

Collectively in one deft move, as a conclusive game changer, the High Point Market can irrevocably alter the mercantile landscape — for the greater good of the industry and the region — with a methodical and controlled opening of showrooms to consumers.

With little doubt, the tightly managed and controlled opening of showrooms would ignite an engine of mercantile ingenuity, attracting enterprising and innovative capital for future prosperity in High Pont, Piedmont Triad, State of North Carolina and the region.

The granddaddy of home furnishings markets, the High Point Market, holds the most valuable cards: Reputation, size, scope, merchandise selection, economy, dedication, loyalty and friendliness, plus the overriding asset of a creative class support of businesses pumping billions of dollars into the region’s economy. The region’s attraction and power grows even more exponentially when the breadth of world-class academia is included.

The focus on home furnishings generates kindred opportunities for related enterprises: lodging, services, restaurants, entertainment, all of which are vital in an attractive region which is undervalued for tremendous potential.

The potential is mind-boggling. All that’s necessary for assured dominance is whether independent showroom owners and operators overcome any objections and seize a fabulous opportunity. For their survival and stability, they need to congeal and play their enviable and powerful collective hand in concert with the High Point Market Authority. Everybody wins, wins big.

Their dramatic action would irrevocably end the wistful dreams of the Las Vegas Market. That upstart trade show demonstrably lacks the comparative power, prestige, influence and, most importantly, critical mass of world’s leading home furnishings exhibitors based in High Point.

Over the years, the idea of opening High Point’s showrooms to consumers always prompted lively discussions, yet reluctantly ended without any action. The primary reason is fear of alienating North American retailers vigorously objecting to what they believed to be a loss of business from unnecessary competition.

Times, needs and conditions have changed. Any fears retailers might harbor disappear when they are actively involved and benefit in the enterprise. Remember, the operative word is controlled in any plan to open High Point showrooms to consumers.

As envisioned, specific and stringent participation rules would exist to assure fairness. While specific details for all operations need to be established, the presence of strict controls assures fairness. Participating consumers would agree to work with retailers within a 100-mile radius of their homes.

The process of opening High Point showrooms needs to debut modestly, say, for one month in 2009. That’s all it would take to launch a magnetic income producing institution. After evaluation, the duration of the event expands accordingly in subsequent years.

Challenging but not impossible, the project’s benefits outweigh perceived negatives. Of course, organization and execution requires the most courageous and committed people, who are ready, willing and able to achieve sustained success.

Dramatic and necessary for economic survival, transforming the constellation of High Point Market showrooms into a merchandising and marketing cross dock constitutes a conclusive game changer.

Let the game-changing begin.

RECKONING BECKONING: A battered home furnishings industry reckons a beckoning reality that the only sale to fear is the fear of sales themselves

Seems appropriate for the ecoomic times: Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into, Ollie shouted to Stan in the midst of another hapless predicament.

Except today’s mess isn’t slapstick comedy, or that funny, for that matter. It could be tragic for some in the home furnishings.

Why? Adam Smith is mad. Damn mad. His invisible hand is mightily visible. He is slapping us all around, hopefully helping us recognize the big correction is underway.

As an industry and nation, we’ve been slaphappy too long. The reckoning is here.

The rules have changed for real, although this fact has been known for a while, but slaphappily ignored to the detriment of too many.

There’s no sugar coating the harsh realty. Making it in this disastrous economy requires an infusion of intellectual capital for a personal marketing bailout.

Some call the correction an overdue attitude adjustment.

Home furnishings marketing as we know is kaput, a vestige of the mindless sell anything because that’s what we’re supposed to do reflex. What many believe is adroit marketing is really brazen sales prevention.

The problem is consumers think otherwise, have been for a longer time. They don't believe most home furnishings messages.

The buck starts with all the consumers who are exceptionally cautious. They indginately reject the confidence-sapping, loyalty-destroying barrage of subprime-style sales gimmicks, shenanigans and downright fraud.

Instead of closing sales, designers and merchants need to be opening consumer minds about living better and more comfortably. Such precision emerges from a marketing strategy that disjoined sales tactics destroy.

Marketing demands an robust comprehension of consumer dreams, wishes and aspirations. No easy solutions exist.

Involvement is necessary. Disengagement and retreat creates bigger problems. Facile seminars without continuous reinforcement are insufficient.

At this low point in the business cycle, it’s high time designers and merchants high tail it to this month’s High Point Market where their focus needs to be on fresh ideas for differentiation. Those ideas may not be new products, as much as crafting a fresh  market strategy of presentation, message and purpose.

The path to differentiation and consumer attraction comes in small steps, in the form of decorative accessories and home accents. That's not dismissing case goods and upholstery, but recognizing that big ticket sales now cost more to achieve to diminishing returns.

With precious open-to-buy dollars scarce, prudence dictates investing in lighting, top of bed, table top, wall décor and rugs will likely provide a greater return.

Staying in touch with consumers on the design-style strength of decorative accessories and home accents can start and sustain important relationships.

Managed properly, smaller tickets can pave the way to bigger sales tickets.

High Point Market’s constellation of decorative accessories and home accent showrooms reigns significantly, and can make the difference that counts: More consumers in the studio and store.

RENDERING TRENDS: All the babble about fashion and business trends disappears under the fierce urgency of now

Safe to say all merchants, manufacturers and designers are painfully aware of a harsh reality: Business stinks, people are frightened and want stability.

They don’t need to read about what they know. Moreover, all the perfumery about style and color trends hardly registers, either.

Why? Because most of the prevalent trends stories are blatant info dumps. Most of the cloying verbiage, sound bites and blather are disconnected data.

The struggling stores, studios and factories want to know what they can do stimulate and sustain business. They want paths to implement the information, better known as bona fide guidance.

The most important introduction at next month’s High Point Market is confident stability of all participants.

Next comes the role of a highly fragmented Humpty Dumpty industry putting the pieces together in a clarion call about the power of home furnishings.

The power is better living, in all ways a cohesive message informs, guides and educates.

The rest is commentary.

GO SLOW FOR SPEED: A struggling furniture industry will prosper when it discovers how to connect with people’s dreams, wishes and aspirations

Perhaps you’ve seen it? A pervasively circulated message of reason grips us all. But we need to invest the quality time to savor its message.

For a moment, transcend yourself. Mentally leave the hectic, chaotic and frustrating furniture industry and savor the message appearing below.

Many people have received this message. My copy arrived in my e-mail box from my sweet wife.

The anonymously authored message contains some marvelous marketing advice for personal and professional achievement and actualization. Anyone of us could have produced this message, but we are too busy to do it.

Create the time and the honest pathways to inform, guide and educate people, and they will become loyal.

Life is more than selling sticks and cloth. Life is for living.

READ SLOWLY TO FIND YOURSELF.

Too many people put off something that brings them joy just because they haven't thought about it, don't have it on their schedule, didn't know it was coming or are too rigid to depart from their routine.

I got to thinking one day about all those people on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night in an effort to cut back. From then on, I've tried to be a little more flexible.

How many women out there will eat at home because their husband didn't suggest going out to dinner until after something had been thawed? Does the word 'refrigeration' mean nothing to you?

How often have your kids dropped in to talk and sat in silence while you watched 'Jeopardy' on television?

I cannot count the times I called my sister and said, 'How about going to lunch in a half hour?' She would gas up and stammer, 'I can't. I have clothes on the line. My hair is dirty. I wish I had known yesterday, I had a late breakfast, It looks like rain.' And my personal favorite: 'It's Monday.' She died a few years ago. We never did have lunch together.

Because Americans cram so much into their lives, we tend to schedule our headaches. We live on a sparse diet of promises we make to ourselves when all the conditions are perfect!

We'll go back and visit the grandparents when we get the kid toilet-trained. We'll entertain when we replace the living-room carpet.

We'll go on a second honeymoon when we get two more kids out of college.

Life has a way of accelerating, as we get older. The days get shorter, and the list of promises to ourselves gets longer.

One morning, we awaken, and all we have to show for our lives is a litany of 'I'm going to,' 'I plan on,' and 'Someday, when things are settled down a bit.'

When anyone calls my 'seize the moment' friend, she is open to adventure and available for trips. She keeps an open mind on new ideas. Her enthusiasm for life is contagious.

You talk with her for five minutes, and you're ready to trade your bad feet for a pair of Roller blades and skip an elevator for a bungee cord.

My lips have not touched ice cream in 10 years. I love ice cream. It's just that I might as well apply it directly to my stomach with a spatula and eliminate the digestive process. The other day, I stopped the car and bought a triple-decker. If my car had hit an iceberg on the way home, I would have died happy.

Now...go on and have a nice day. Do something you WANT to...not something on your SHOULD DO list. If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?

And why are you waiting?

Make sure you read this to the end; you will understand why I sent this to you.

Have you ever watched kids playing on a merry go round or listened to the rain lapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight or gazed at the sun into the fading night? Do you run through each day on the fly? When you ask, 'How are you?' Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head? Ever told your child, 'We'll do it tomorrow.' And in your haste, not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch? Let a good friendship die? Just call to say 'Hi'?

When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift . . . thrown away. Life is not a race. Take it slower. Hear the music before the song is over.

Show your friends how much you care. Send this to everyone you consider a FRIEND. If it comes back to you, then you'll know you have a circle of friends.

To those I have sent this to... I cherish our friendship and appreciate all you do.

'Life may not be the party we hoped for... but while we are here we might as well dance!'

DEBT ON ARRIVAL: A lethal credit crisis discredits ‘no-no-no’ for the charade it is

Holding our noses for all those high-risk lenders of last resort — the paper boys bundling and bungling debt — now in a mad rush to an deserved vacation on an island of shame.

No-no-no is debt on arrival, as a wicked wheedling and cheap marketing trick, backfiring on hollow-the-lender merchants swatted severely by Adam’s Smith invisible hand. Ouch!

No-no-no is costly credit few are buying that will hasten its dying. Rest in Peacelessness.

Clearly, know pain is slow gain. So what are the marvelous merchants manqué to do without gritty and grimy gimmicks? For starters, they could become the real intrepid rugged mercantile individualists they have pretended to be.

On the dole of trick-down marketing for all the years, many merchants eagerly followed the false prophets of doing the least to get the most from perpetrating a thin boast. Now, many of them are toast, or at least, a ghost of what they thought they were.

If I seem mildly sardonic, even tamely sarcastic, you are right in grasping a firm grip of the obvious. Too bad most merchants didn’t get a grip but now have a gripe.

The way out is to weigh in with innovation to get an ovation from people (consumers) scared and scarred from the economic effluence deposited by Wall Street’s financial angels fluttering wings of wax rapidly melting from despairing heat.

Now is the time to earn market share, with feel good merchandising methods that transport consumers to comfort.

Think of home furnishings, especially decorative accessories as mercantile cosmetics. Not so much as a cover up, but an affordable antidote.

Fall promotions need to be just that, falling for small to create big changes with color, sparkle, function and fun. That’s wall décor, table top, lighting and rugs, all presented as simple ways to savor the change of seasons and changes for sustainable business.

The new mercantile mantra for consumers is to know, know, know you is to love, love, love you with enduring and endearing comfort.

INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Too many ‘me-too’ merchants and manufacturers too challenged to innovate out of the malaise

An over-stored and vendor-heavy industry stays fat, leaning on thin sameness while expecting to chase and catch consumers fixed to their homes.

Some shrewd observers might casually suggest the industry’s reflexive marketing focus on case goods and upholstery constitutes bizarre mercantile obituaries.

Sorry to say, the advertising tombstones etched with bedroom and dining room are dead wrong in this economy, with the exception of media room storage systems and seating. Even so entertaining those thoughts might be too risky.

Seems that all those merchants backed by an abundance of desperate vendors could be out of synch with people certain about their uncertainty, yet possessing a desire to live comfortably, one piece at a time.

Small changes lead to the loyalty of bigger changes. In abodes of all kinds across the land, the precedential campaign emphasizes small changes people can believe in, and afford.

That means voting for the secure change decorative accessories can deliver. Their efflorescence can make a difference in small-big ways, delivering an economy of style and design.

Smart merchants and designers will focus their precious High Point Market attention on consumer floors, walls, table tops and what to illuminate them with all the lighting that bathes affordable distinction.

October’s High Point Market is all about accessories that sparkle and shine. Now and through 2009 will be the time for accessories and home accents to spice up life in the studio-stores and the rooms needing the excitement.