Customer Says It With Flowers

I'm always impressed by the customer service given by my wife Julia and sister-in-law Wendy in our Winchester shop Your Life Your Style.
They seem to know instinctively when to stand back and when to intervene. They listen, they suggest appropriate products, they enthuse, they never push. Customers love them. They tell them about their lives. They come back.
But yesterday was a first. A customer returned with a posy of flowers for each of them because they'd given her such good service.

Why Good Retailers Make The Best Lovers

The manuals and the agony aunts pretty much all agree that the best lovers are the generous lovers who put their partner first. They listen, they learn and they try to to please them.

It strikes me that it's highly likely therefore that the best retailers make the best lovers. After all, like a good lover, a good retailer puts the customer first, listens to what they want, doesn't push their own agenda, improves their service and products in the light of what they learn about customers' needs, in fact does everything they can to make the customer feel like a king or queen.

Carried over to the bedroom, this mindset cannot fail to please a lover and win his or her heart. Like a loyal customer, the partner is likely to stay faithful and even forgive the occasional lapse into selfishness or peremptory lovemaking.

Of course, we can go too far with comparisons. A good retailer will send a customer to another shop if they're unable to satisfy them. Not many lovemaking manuals would recommend that.

Funny Marketing

I was interested to read in the ClickZ newsletter that the late US comedian Red Skelton used to collect the addresses of members of his audience, then write to them next time he was due in town. A simple but very cost effective tool for selling tickets and building a fan base that most acts fail to exploit to this day.

Stop Press! Small Papers Are Victims Of Big Business

Although I'm heavily involved in running a store these days, I still do quite a bit of PR work. The current crisis in local press is proving a real challenge.
A cornerstone for success in local PR is having good contacts but I'm constantly finding that local papers have closed or excellent journalists have been fired.
The headlines say the problem is a decline in property, cars and jobs advertising, exacerbated by the rise in online advertising. Yet some local papers remain profitable.

The difference is almost always the ownership. The ones in trouble tend to be owned by large conglomerates who bought the papers as commodities, financed the purchases with loans, milked the profits, built up debts that cannot be repaid in these difficult times and don't care if they are depriving a local community of a source of news, debate and jobs.
It is a tragedy for local people. The same thing has happened where big corporations have swallowed up and then closed down local shops, farmers and factories in a process of cost saving.
My hope is that the current recession will sweep away a lot of these huge holding companies who only look at the salaries of their chief exceutives and shareholder profits.
Like my wife and me, all our suppliers have gone back to basics and are building enterprising small companies that are sound and profitable because they are run by people who love the business they are in and care about employees and customers.
We're supporting them with a range of Handmade in Britain special gifts at our online store. We'll be looking for more next week at the Britosh Crafts Trade Fair.