The Naked Truth About Advertising and Underwear

This time of year our shop Your Life Your Style is full of hearts. Glass coasters with hearts fused into them, heart shaped cushions, handmade cards with stuck on hearts… other shops have enough flowers, chocolates and romantic CDs to fill Westminster Abbey. All intended to show we love someone this coming Monday.
Underwear seems a popular choice as a Valentines Day gift but I’m not certain it’s a good idea. I’ve been wondering how men who receive Marks & Spencer’s new BodyMax underwear will feel. To remind you, this is a new range intended to make a man’s abs more flat, his bum more firm, and his maleness… just plain more. All those years your wife or girlfriend has been saying size doesn’t matter and suddenly she buys you ‘frontal enhancement’ underpants.
It's worse still if you buy them for yourself. The trouble with all these body changing clothes, for men or women, is that, once you’ve attracted your potential mate with a bulging crotch or uplifted padded boobs, there comes an inevitable moment of truth. Your pants go down and the mountain brings forth a mouse. The bra comes off and your man’s face drops along with a couple of other things. I suppose we hope that by then our partner will be so overcome by passion, they’ll forgive the deception. Or maybe we just make rely on everything looking better by candlelight.
In business we have no such luxury. The law doesn’t allow us to pretend our product or service is one thing and then hope once the customer has bought it, they’ll just accept the disappointing reality. Nor would it be good business sense. Contrary to a widespread public perception, advertising is not about lying. The industry regulator the Advertising Standards Authority even says in its core statement that advertisements in print, TV and radio must be ‘honest, decent and legal’. It’s about to get tougher for businesses because from 1st March the ASA is taking on complaints about websites.
Shops shouldn’t need legislation to make us honest because truth is our biggest marketing tool. I've always found that if you are honest about your products, describing them accurately, admitting their limitations, even sending customers elsewhere if that is their best bet, and apologising when you get something wrong, your customers will trust you and come back to you again and again.
These days, all good websites allow customers to comment on products and service from the mighty Amazon to our own little (and only slightly enhanced) Your Life Your Style. We don’t always like what is said but it shows customers we have nothing to hide and it is an additional spur to be clear and accurate about what we promise.
Of course you can’t satisfy everybody and we’re all entitled to an opinion. One customer gave a poor review to our ‘rabbit’ draught excluder. There was nothing wrong with its quality but she didn’t like his slightly mad expression! Still, at least we didn’t pretend it was a bigger size.

This article also appeared on the Your Life Your Style Wordpress blog and on the Southern Daily Echo website

Sales Are In The Detail

A blog I always look at is Retail Details. It's a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration on how to improve your window displays, with lots of great photos of imaginative displays. Displays at the Your Life Your Style shop in Winchester are done by Lyn Knott who has a brilliant eye for colour and form.

Too Much Of A Good Marketing Thing

One of the world’s leading internet retailers is bombarding me with emails. A weekly update on their latest offers and new products would be OK. But daily? This is spam, no matter how good the targeting is. It’s a classic marketing mistake and is bound to lead to people blocking their emails. That includes me, much as I like buying from this company.
At Your Life Your Style, we email about once a month, which may not be enough to keep us constantly on our customers' radar, but I'd rather that than become unwelcome in the inbox.

Barcelona- More Than A Club

I love Barcelona Football Club. As they say themselves it's Mes Que Un Club. It's owned by the fans and has long been associated with the free spirit of the Catalonia region of Spain. Despite being in effect a co-operative, they are also one of the richest, most successful football clubs in the world.
As John Lewis and numerous other employee or customer owned companies show, there is an viable alternative to running a business in order to please the short term interests of shareholders. If only some British clubs, currently up to their ears in debt, had adopted the Barca model.

Small Businesses Pick Up The Crumbs

The well known 80/20 rule says that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your products and if you cut out the 80% and concentrate on the 20%, 80% of the sales of remaining products will come from 20% and so on.
This is one reason why the internet is wonderful for small businesses. While the big companies are chasing the 20%, you can go 'under the radar' and make a business out of the other 80% by targeting niche markets.
There are two problems which I find when trying this approach with our own website Your Life Your Style. Firstly, it can be a lot of administration for a small number of sales. You spend the same amount of time loading up text and imgaes whetehr a product sells in the ones or the thousands. Secondly, to reach these niche markets with key words, links, social networking and Google AdWords is very expensive in time and money for the return. But, as we have found, if you get it right there are enough crumbs to make a decent loaf.
By the way, the 80/20 rule applies to all sorts of aspects of life. For example, iIt seems most of us only use 20% of the clothes in our wardrobe 80% of the time.

4 in 10 Customers Are Wrong

"4 in 10 people use the wrong postal service" shouts The Post Office's website and display posters. Meaning you sent your parcel second class when you could have used standard parcels, or standard letter when you should have used large letter or Special Delivery when Recorded would have been all right. Meaning you need to check with an assistant before dispatching your package.
It's a strange business that blames the customer for getting it wrong. Most of us would say the blame lies with the Post Office making their charges too complicated. Can you imagine a commercial business finding it acceptable that 40% of their customers find their ordering process too difficult? At Your Life Your Style, it's a flat rate for delivery of orders worth less than £40 and free carriage on anything else.

Help The High Street, Mr Darling

By any standards, my shop is a small business, yet because the rateable value is very high (the new level being £27,000), there's no business rate relief for us, even after the Budget increase in the qualification level. I find it hard to imagine the kind of high street shop that would have a rateable value of under £6000 and therefore gain business rates relief- a tiny newsagent in a deprived part of Liverpool perhaps.
Ironically, if we were to concentrate only on our online business, we could rent a smaller unit on an out-of-town industrial estate and would very likely be able to qualify for rates relief. Yet it's the high street that needs help. Perhaps square footage or turnover would provide better criteria for defining a small business.

Sale Away

The Sales seem to be over pretty quickly this year. Helped no doubt by the Big Freeze, we at Your Life Your Style found that the bargain hunters had dried up by the first week in January and most of our sales were once again full priced gifts and accessories.

We prefer the John Lewis 'clearance' approach, genuinely selling off stock cheaply that we have too much of. I don't like the cynical exploitation of a genuine need favoured by some retailers who buy stock specially for a Sale.
Either way, I imagine Sales did as well for other retailers as for us this year because unlike last year there was very little of the pre-Christmas panic discounting going on and consumers were probably wanting to get their purchases done before VAT went up.

Draught Excluder Sales Boom In Big Freeze

As my mother said to me when I was a little boy and down in the dumps, 'When one door closes, another one opens.' Actually she said, 'When one door closes, another one slams in  your face' but then she always had a good dose of Yorkshire cynicism.
Here's another saying my mother favoured: 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'. Good business advice. It's true that when things go wrong, there is usually an opportunity you hadn't noticed before because you were too busy with things going right. But a shrewd business person will prepare for the bad days. When I was a clothing retailer, I sold t-shirts on hot days and lined jackets when it was cold, wide brimmed hats when it was sunny and wellington boots when it rained.

These last few days our shop in Winchester has suffered from the Big Freeze and everybody not venturing out onto the slippery roads and pavements. On the other hand our Your Life Your Style website has been doing a roaring trade in Dora Designs animal draught excluders. So much so that our total turnover is actually well up on the same time last year.
'Every cloud has a silver lining' as my mother no doubt would have said.

A Door Opens On The High Street

The high street is under threat but there's also an opportunity. Shops that sell mass produced products, shops that have grown too big to care, they may go. But new shops can take their place. It's a rare chance for entrepreneurial independents to break into the high street- businesses more in touch with customers' tastes and needs.
Our local council working with the local paper has launched a website shopinhampshire.co.uk to encourage us to support the local high street. Our shop Your Life Your Styleis there and, given the chance, we'll be on more local high streets as well.

Quality Wins

Your Life Your Style is to be Winchester's stockist of Steiff teddy bears. It may be you haven't heard of Steiff but to anyone who collects these delightful furry toys, they are the number one. Why? Partly because they've been making bears for 100 years but mainly because the quality is superb.
Like many German firms, Steiff bring together good design, precision manufacturing and obseesive quality control. They tried making some of their bears in China but found so many items were below their standard that they went back to making them exclusively in Germany.
Our own manufacturers can learn from this. For years, British goods became a by-word for shoddy, thanks to complacency and lack of worker involvement. Then the far east took over mass production.
When Britain did something well, it was a world beater- Rolls Royce or malt whisky for example. Thankfully a new generation of British manufacturers are in that tradition and recognise that you can't beat the Chinese on price but you can succeed by offering good design, skilled manufacture and quality control.
We visited the Grayshott factory this week which houses Dartington Pottery. As well as the special edition pieces we stock, they provide crockery for many restaurants. The work of these thirty or so people, who operate as a co-operative, is breathtaking in its skill and care. If a customer wants cheap ceramics, China beckons but if they want quality and value, Grayshott is there for them, and offers an example to British manufacturers in the 21st century.

Dora Designs On Facebook- Fun Comes First

Our shop Your Life Your Style already has a Facebook page. We've now started an I Love Dora Designs group. We want people who love Dora Designs to find out more about Doras, post photos and news, and to talk to each other. This is not set up to sell Doras but many successful businesses on the internet have learnt that by providing a useful service first, sales follow. If we do sell a few Doras, we'll be happy but, if not, it's still fun to run a Dora Designs Fan Club.

A Gift From Harrogate

Back from the Harrogate Home & Gift Trade Fair with some great new products, which we'll be introducing to the Your Life Your Style website and shop in the next few weeks. The only downside was lack of sleep.
We stayed one night at the Harrogate Travelodge,looking out over a pub. Drunken conversations wafted up until well after midnight, followed at about 2 a.m. by loud revellers singing at the top of their voices, then at 5 a.m. the emptying of the bottle skip into a collection lorry. The luxurious Queens Hotel in Leeds the previous night was about the same price (special Saturday offer) and was a wonderful experience, topped by a flawless meal in The Restaurant Bar And Grill in Leeds City Square.

Your Frontline Is Your Business

Seth Godin makes a good point in his blog about the importance of managers keeping in touch with the front line. When I took over responsibility for the operational side of a theatre, I spent time doing or shadowing all the various jobs. It was an eye-opener and the experience helped me be aware how much of a gap there is between management theory and frontline practice when you have real people dealing with each other, who may be tired, confused or lacking information. As the CEO of Sony once said, 'The company is only as good as its latest recruit.'
Neither can executives rely on middle managers for a true picture of what's going on. They often don't want to admit that their staff are in difficulty in case it reflects on them. I've seen from close by the disastrous consquences to staff morale and company results, when senior managers are out of direct touch with their employees.
I like the small businesses I'm involved in now because I'm in constant touch with all colleagues and I experience at first hand what's going on with customers and suppliers. I find the Your Life Your Style online shop more difficult from this point of view, because while there is endless analysis available of site visitors and customers, I rarely get to actually speak to them. I like these sites where you can click to 'speak' to a real person.

Protectionism Is Bad For Britain

Britain is a trading nation and any attempt at protectionism would backfire on us. If we stop imports, other countries will block our exports. As citizens, we would pay more and earn less. Look what happened in the sixties and seventies when trades unions sought to protect British jobs by preventing industries from modernising. We lost our competitive advantage.
Let’s continue to import mass manufactured goods cheaply and export specialised products and services for high prices. At Your Life Your Style, we stock many British made goods because they are beautifully designed and skilfully made, far better than their equivalent from overseas. Most of the other items that are made abroad more cheaply than thye could be in this country are still designed in the UK.
Free trade means we survive on our ability to be creative and competitive, something we as a nation are very good at.

The Price Is Right

I love, actually I need to start the working day with a coffee. To be precise, a latte from Costa. And every day I can’t believe I’m paying £2 for a takeaway coffee. How did the coffee houses persuade us to pay such an outrageous price which appears to bear no relation to cost?

To be fair, when we price products for our gift shop Your Life Your Style, it’s not as simple as taking the cost and applying a standard percentage mark up. There are a number of factors we take into account. As I always tell businesses who consult me, you first must consider the market and set a price appropriate to it.

As retailers, we have little say over the product’s position in the market, so we move straight on to how many we expect to sell and how much customers are willing to pay. At Your Life Your Style, we rarely expect to sell products on a mass scale because we offer special gifts and accessories.

However, if we can sell a reasonable number, we can afford a lower margin and make the profit we need through scale. Going back to my old theatre marketing days, I think of the example of Christmas pantomime where the type of audience and the numbers who attend allow for lower prices than for, say, a musical.

On the other hand, if the market is more niche, it is necessary to charge more. Opera comes to mind as a case where, at least when I was trying to sell it, no matter how cheap you made the tickets, there were only so many people interested in buying. At Your Life Your Style, we may go for a higher than average profit margin if we know a product is unique and may take some time to shift.

Of course, how people themselves value the product will have a big influence. And this is where it gets more complicated. Marketing, word-of-mouth and the intrinsic qualities of the product will potentially affect a consumer’s attitude to a product. They may have an emotional attachment to it or make a rational decision about its quality or simply want to show off that they have the taste or money to purchase it. Whatever the reason, if a customer believes the product to be exceptional or life enhancing, they will pay a premium for it.

This is why we don’t automatically charge the lowest price we can afford based on cost. A cheap price means to many people an inferior product because that is what they’ve learned from experience. No doubt Chanel could charge less but their customers want to buy an expensive perfume. In fact, perfume manufacturers and other fashion brands like Levi have fought hard to stop their products being discounted and thereby ‘cheapened’.

Back to coffee (and I am beginning to feel like another latte), Starbucks managed to persuade us that we were getting something special. Special beans, specially roasted, freshly ground, customised to your taste and in a social club atmosphere. Hence the special price. Then everybody started imitating it but the strange thing is, the more popular premium coffee became, the more the price should have come down. Yet it didn’t.

Initially Costa and the rest wanted to show they were the same quality as Starbucks, so they matched the prices. Even so, in all the years since, no-one has broken ranks and reduced prices. I read that at a blind tasting people preferred McDonalds coffee to Starbucks but it will take some persuading people that you don’t always get what you pay for.

Knowing the price people will pay forces Your Life Your Style reluctantly to turn down some excellent products where the cost is too high, taking into account all our overheads. For example, we have found that some (not all) products hand crafted in Britain are so expensive to produce that the retail price looks hugely expensive when compared with either something handcrafted in the third world or something mass produced. Every product must earn the time and space it takes up.

There is always an element of trial and error in pricing. We know there is a tipping point at which a product sells, so it’s easier to start with a higher price first and, if the product doesn’t sell, lower it. This then gives us the opportunity to employ the other great pricing tool- the bargain. Some more cynical businesses deliberately charge a high price to establish that something has a value, not expecting the product to sell, then cut the price. This way, people don’t see it as ‘cheap’ but rather a ‘bargain’.

We prefer to price fairly from the start, because we know that customers have no respect for cynical businesses. Their spend with a gift-cum-lifestyle shop like ours is entirely discretionary so we need their respect. To me, getting the price right is a constantly challenging element of running a business. There is no easy formula but if you get it wrong, all your other good work goes out the window.

Barcelona's Victory Is Good Business

We English are expected to support English clubs in Europe but I don't much like the English Premiership set-up so I prefer to support a team I do admire like Barcelona.

Compare and Contrast. Man Utd, like all English clubs, embraced the free market and in their case ended up owned by an American company who saddled them with £700 million in debt. Barcelona are owned by their 113,000 members who elect their Board and President. They even turned down a £20 million sponsorship of their shirts in favour of promoting UNICEF. Football clubs started as teams with fans- Barcelona have stayed that way and still manage to be more financially successful than Man Utd.

There is a lesson. Don't underestimate co-operatives as a way to run a business- John Lewis, The Co-Op Bank and the Phone Co-Op all do very well, as do many of the trusts that run arts organisations. The danger of the more common business model is that shareholders come before customers and employees. The result is bigger and more remote (geographically and emotioanlly) companies.

Giving power to the people who are the company- the employees or the customers- ensures that the business doesn't forget why it was created in the first place.

Small Is Beautiful In A Recession

High street shops in the UK are struggling. Shoppers, worrying about the pound in their pockets, seem to be turning their backs on the throwaway products mass produced in China. By contrast, sales at our independent 'lifestyle' shop in Winchester and on our website yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk are actually increasing.

In a recession, value is what people look for, and that doesn't automatically mean 'cheap'. We concentrate on stocking products that are beautifully designed and made to last. We have found that our customers recognise Britain as a world leader in the quality of its design and craft. They see handmade British products as something of lasting value, something that will make a special gift. We have responded by launching a Made In The UK collection on the website.

It's a joy to see and touch hand crafted wooden flowers by Martin Jones of High Wycombe, fused glass bowls and coasters by Jo Downs of Cornwall, Yorkshire based Rosie Soul’s jewellery, Naturaleigh of Dorset’s organic soaps, fabric door stops and notice boards by Pins And Ribbons from the North East and top London designer Margo Selby’s scarves and clutch bags.

They're all people with an artistic eye and the skill to create lasting beauty with their hands. Just looking at one of their creations is a delight. But when you touch it and feel the care and attention put into it, it's like a personal contact with the maker.

What is also crucially important is that they are part of a new breed of crafts men and women who are serious business people. They want to satisfy a growing market and understand that retail success requires consistency and competitive pricing.

It may not be a bad thing for Britain's high streets to be cleared of some of the dross that people bought when they were encouraged to consume for its own sake. The recession is a real opportunity for retailers and producers who can offer something of quality and value.

Marketing Sends Environment Down Toilet

The news that 98% of Americans use toilet paper made from new wood rather than the recycled kind is a perfect example of the power of marketing to cause damage, in this case to the environment.

Again and again we have seen corporations use vast advertising budgets to persuade people to buy products they know or should know are damaging - cigarettes, gas guzzling cars, sugar-rich children’s cereals and so on.

How can one of the toilet paper manufacturers to say consumers have the choice, when they spend huge money on marketing brands of soft multi-ply tissue produced from what are called 'virgin fibers'? Consumers can only really make a choice if they are properly informed. What a difference it could make if U.S. toilet paper manufacturers put equal marketing resources into persuading people to help the environment by using recycled paper.

Like consumers, we marketers have a choice. Whether we run our own company or work in a large corporation, we can use their powers of persuasion responsibly or irresponsibly.

Profit Is A By-Product of Customer Satisfaction

More words of wisdom from Simon Caulkin. His response to the recession is 'Quit thinking about cost - give people what they want.' He points out they aren't interested in your costs. They just want your product or service with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of convenience.
Forget productivity, work on quality.
Economies of flow and effort far outweigh dinosaur-like economies of scale.
Learning and improvementonly happen when people control their working lives and are proud of what they do.
Build co-operation. Internal competition is usually a wrecker.
Read the full article.