SUPPLIER SUMMIT
BMJ BUILDERS MERCHANTS JOURNAL
today’ record it, publish it, target the customers within five miles of your branch, and see what happens.”
Callow finished with a nod to the topic that comes up in every conversation at the moment. Amazon. “We all know that it starts out in books and moves from product category to product category and disrupts that marketplace. Take the big bookseller brands, Barnes and Noble and Borders. Barnes and Noble has lost $8bn off its market capital, Borders went out of business. Independent book stores between 2001 and 2009 were closing left right and centre. However, something changed. Between 2009 and 2015, independent book stores had their fastest growth ever. “The only thing they did differently was to play to their strengths,”
he said. “Independent book stores curate books, the same way that merchants curate the best products and the best deals. They created hubs for their book lovers to come in. The retail space that you have can be more valuable than just transactional. They found people who love books. You have people who love your products. You need to take the knowledge of your staff, hit record and deploy it over social media channels so that it is not just the people you are already dealing with that know just how good you are.
“You actually give a damn. My advice to independents is to keep doing what you are doing but use the technology in your hands to tell more people about it.”
IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS
NBG’s Supplier Summit heard from customer service expert Linda Moir, who talked about building strong brands through doing the basics brilliantly.
L
inda Moir lead the Event Services team at the London 2012 Olympics and was formerly director for inflight services VirginAirlines.
“The principles of driving change and building your strong brands are the same: you start from the inside, rather than the outside. During her presentation she listed some of the innovations that Virgin Airlines brought in to differentiate itself from the competition. “Take our cocktail bar in Upper Class, for example. It costs a fortune to fly it around the world, but business class passengers love it. We always make sure that there’s someone there to chat to the passengers, to ask how they are, what they are flying to wherever for. It makes a real difference.”
When the company launched its Upper Class flat bed, within a couple of months Singapore Airlines had done the same thing. So Virgin Atlantic asked the crew how Virgin could differentiate itself even further. The suggestion was made that the crew make up the beds and add tiny teddy bears to each pillow. “Those bears cost us about 20p each but add so much value to the service to the passengers,” Moir said. “Innovation doesn’t have to cost.”
She also told a story of a father flying to New York with two small children, neither of whom wanted to eat the inflight meal. “So one of the crew members made up special little bags for the children, using the sandwiches and snacks that had been packed for the crew’s own lunch. The children were overjoyed, the father overwhelmed at the service. It was a little thing, but it meant so much.”
When it came to managing the thousands 14
of volunteer Gamesmakers at the London 2012 Olympics, Moir said she knew that it was going to be a very hard task to keep the volunteers motivated throughout the entire Games, especially as many of them would never get to see any of the action. “We knew that we were going to have to treat them very differently if we were going to get some inspirational service from them.” It’s easy, she explained, for the athletes to be inspirational, it’s harder for someone who is simply standing at the entrance to an Underground station directing the visitors, waving a big foam hand. For help and guidance, Moir says she talked to the people who had done it all for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 and that she learned three things: “1. Keep people busy. They like to be busy. 2. Keep people rotated
round different tasks as they like to have a variety of tasks to keep them interested. 3. Recognise your people and their needs and their efforts. So we gave them badges - bronze, silver and gold, depending on how many shifts they did. They were only little plastic badges, but they loved them.” Moir added that at the 2012 closing ceremony when Lord Coe, having thanked the athletes and the spectators said he would like to thank the volunteer Gamesmakers, 80,000 people in the Olympic Stadium stood and cheered for 12 minutes. “Everyone I was standing with was in floods of tears at that point,” she said. “Levels of service can be inspirational. What you all do can be inspirational, if you have pride in what you do and you make what you do brilliant.”
January 2019
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