Poets Inspire Your Life Your Style Customers

This article also appeared on the Southern Daily Echo website and on Paul's Shop Window on Wordpress:

With Valentines Day approaching, I’ve been busy updating the Romantic Quotes page of our website www.yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk. I introduced it to help inspire customers looking for words to go with their gifts. I know lots of us find it difficult to put our feelings into words. So often you end up with clichés or simply something that doesn’t really express what we really feel.
Great poets have the ability to find images and combinations of words that get to the heart of our emotions and make a connection with us. Apart from Shakespeare who unfortunately has become a cliché, I particularly like e.e. cummings’ poem that begins ‘I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)’ and Khalil Gibran’s ‘Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.’
The best song lyrics do the same when they’re not rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’. I love the way Ira Gershwin expresses the way romantic love combines little things, memories and the deepest feelings:
‘The way you hold your knife / The way we danced til three / The way you changed my life / No, they can’t take that away from me.’ But then I am an old romantic.
Being romantic and funny is the hardest challenge. The late Hovis Presley had the Northern talent for veiling deep emotions with humour:
‘I rely on you like a camera needs a shutter / like a gambler needs a flutter / like a golfer needs a putter / like a buttered scone involves some butter / I rely on you’.
Even writers such as journalists or advertising copywriters, whose work is not likely to be remembered beyond the weekend, have to emulate the immortals by finding the right words and eschewing clichés if they want to make a connection with their readers. The greatest love of my working life has been writing copy but sadly I could never get near the genius of Ira Gershwin- or even Hovis Presley.
I always enjoy copywriting, so if you need any help with sales letters, press releases, website text or brochure copy, drop me an email at admin@yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk.

Are We Being Served?

This article first appeared in the Southern Daily Echo:
Customer service is flavour of the month. Last week Michel Roux Jr was on BBC2 teaching belligerent teenagers how to serve fine diners. This week Channel Four has Mary Portas Secret Shopper on a mission to improve standards of service on the high street.
For a retailer, Ms Portas’ TV programmes are required viewing. She has a proven record in shop displays and has become an expert in all aspects of retailing. The trouble with the first programme was that criticising the likes of Primark, Top Shop and Pilot was like shooting fish in barrel. Seeing staff ignore customers, overhearing them chatting about their private lives- these things are hardly shock revelations. Anyone familiar with these stories experiences this every time they go in.
I suspect the problem for many low price clothing chains is that they treat their staff with contempt and that’s passed on to the customers. Mary’s mantra of ‘Smile Speak Serve’ is quite right but too simplistic. It has to be backed up with training in customer psychology so they know when and what to say and even more importantly how to listen; product knowledge so they can genuinely help fulfil the customer’s requirements; involvement in the whole business so they understand the importance of their role in it; respect so they respect the management and customers; trust so they make the right decision for each unique customer without fear of criticism.
I know Mary’s expertise is in shop design but I think she let herself be distracted by the appearance of these cheap and cheerful shops. She criticised Primark for its queues and clothes on the floor. I suspect this is a deliberate tactic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw a few items on the floor themselves each morning and deliberately create queues, because it all creates an image of fast sales from frantic bargain hunters. On the other hand, even a bargain hunter may need help in finding a particular jacket or get annoyed if there’s a queue while members of staff are standing around chatting- and that does mean lost sales.
It’s all so much easier for a small family-run shop like Your Life Your Style. My wife and sister-in-law lead the staff by example. Shoulder to shoulder with employees, they greet customers, offer help when it’s needed and care about satisfying them whether that ends in a sale or not. Staff are praised when they do well and helped to improve where necessary. But big stores can do it too- look at John Lewis or Apple.
The biggest shame attaching to the owner of Pilot was not his rude staff or his shabby shop, it was the fact that his employees had never met him. How could he expect them to care about his business?

Recommend A Rival

This is what I wrote in the Southern Daily Echo today:

Here's the dilemma. An item is out of stock but you know your competition has one. Do you tell your customer or do you pretend your competition doesn't exist? What if you know your competition is cheaper? I recently had reason to be grateful to a rival shop. And, more surprisingly, I noticed ASDA had reason to thank Marks & Spencer.
Stylish Life not only sound quite like my shop Your Life Your Style, they also sell similar gifts. In particular they always come up alongside us in a Google search for Dora Designs animal door stops. Naturally I think of them as an arch rival. So I was pleasantly surprised to receive a telephone call from a customer wanting to buy a particular door stop, saying she had been recommended by Stylish Life.
It's an excellent idea because there's a good chance a customer will return to a shop they can trust to give them the best service, even if it means a lost sale.
But do you send customers to another shop when their prices are lower? These days many stores check and then match prices. We do it and it's what Marks & Spencer have been doing since they started selling branded groceries. Looking at their price comparisons the other day, I was taken aback to see a sign for Kelloggs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes saying M&S price £2.39, ASDA price £2.20.
It's one thing to send a customer elsewhere when you're out of stock but telling customers your shop has higher prices than your competition? My first reaction was that someone didn't follow through with a price match while someone else did follow through with the shelf ticket. But we are talking about the massive marketing resources of Marks & Spencer, so I think it must be deliberate. If I'd done it, my partner would calling for men in white coats but since this is M&S, it's clearly an incredibly brave and innovative marketing strategy. Anyway, where's the nearest ASDA?

Get Em Off! M&S Know How To Party

Move aside, Ann Summers. Not content with selling 'Frontal Enhancement' underpants that are padded to make one's manhood look bigger, Marks and Spencer now appear to be  pushing the idea of women partying in their underwear (see photo). It seems M&S are rapidly becoming the biggest sex shop on the high street. Perhaps their next move will be a change of name to S&M.

The sexiest thing we can offer at Your Life Your Style is a bathtime duck called Ducks Fizz!

Kettle Apartheid At Tescos?

This newspaper ad for Tesco shows just how careful you need to be when you write copy. Apart from the obvious things like checking spelling, always look for double or unintended meanings. It's a very good idea to get someone else to look at and read out loud your copy. Unless of course these Tesco appliances are aimed at black students.

I'm always amused by the Massive Rug Sales advertised locally. What if you want a small rug? I've missed a few when advertising products in my shop Your Life Your Style. For example, what is a 'woollen picnic' as in 'Woollen Picnic Rug'? Maybe everyone going on the picnic has wear a woolly.

Who Do You Trust on the Web?

It seems pornographers have the same problems as any other businesses once they gain a bad reputation. Pretty much everyone is wary of porn websites because of the bad practices of some. The U.S. industry generally, anxious to hold on to the 40 million Americans who view pages with adult content regularly, have made great efforts to ensure their sites are free from scams and malware. So successful have they been that a Web Of Trust blog  tells us that while 'adult entertainment websites' account for 12% of the total number of web pages (1 in 6) a study has found that there are 99 infected mainstream web pages for every one infected adult web page, making the safety ratio 99:1. It seems those of us who avoid adult websites and think we're safe shouldn't be so complacent.
Web Of Trust or WOT is a great way to use the wisdom of crowds as a guide to websites. You can download it as an app for various browsers and better still join WOT and register your own scores and comments on the websites you visit.

The Big Society: Free Or Fee?

In a world where pay, pensions and bonuses dominate the headlines, it encourages me that people are still prepared to offer so much of their time for free. Even though we expect to get paid by our employers, we don't put a monetary value on time spent on our personal relationships: we don't bill the ironing or the cooking; we do jobs for family and friends for which we would charge strangers; we do charitable work.

Somewhere along the line, we decide that some of our activities must be paid for. In a way this makes of what previously must have been bartering. You might argue that these paid-for activities are the things we don't really want to do but that isn't always true as clearly many people enjoy their paid work (and say they would do it for nothing). Some people even turn their hobbies into paid work. It's not even that simple because the other side of the coin is that some people do things for free for family but really resent it.

All of which leads me to the interesting way in which a whole worldwide web community is happy to share their experiences of products and services with strangers for no monetary gain. Many send reviews to sites like Internet Movie Database or Whatsonstage. I myself am a member of the Web Of Trust which is an add-on for the Firefox browser. Members rate sites as trustworthy or otherwise and I find this very useful when I'm thinking of buying from an unknown supplier. What it shows is that most of us are social beings with an idea that we benefit from a system of indirect mutual support. The formal version of this might be paying taxes for, say, education.

In today's retail world, customer reviews, freely given, are very important. Even critical comments are good because they validate the praise. Customers are much more likely to buy if others have been impressed by the product. The Your Life Your Style website offers the opportunity for our customers to comment. They need to be encouraged with a follow up email and a click link but the investment is worth it.

Diesel Ad Campaign Far From Stupid

Congratulations to Diesel on a great advertising campaign culminating with the perfect result- a ban by the Advertising Standards Authority. Ban aside, Diesel's poster/print ad campaign is well worth a look for its humorous concept (who cares about those clever types, it's good to be stupid), perfect targeting (people who think of themselves as young and individualistic) and immaculate execution (beautifully set up and shot tableaux). And it shows off the product.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit At Jeanette Winterson's Small Shop

Previously my only awareness of Jeanette Winterson was as the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Now I know she's a fellow retailer and a passionate defender of the small local shop. Her article in The Observer last Sunday told how her house has a shop below called Verde which she has made into a cafe and greengrocer in keeping with its location in Spitalfields, which was once the home of London's wholesale fruit and veg market. Ms Winterson makes some interesting points about why it is difficult for small local shops to thrive. Here are a a few extracts.
On the economics of small shops: 'In Britain, running a small food shop is really hard work. We do not do as other countries in Europe and implement a sliding business rate, so Verde has to pay the same money as an estate agent or mobile phone agent.'
On the blandness of the big chains: 'I don't like the chilly world of corporate retail... I prefer individuality and eccentricity and self-determination- all the things the free market is supposed to deliver and never does, because markets soon become homogenous and anti-competitive.'
Tellingly she describes the 'new austerity Britain' as 'a country where the Post Office can't be subsidised but banks can, and where we all have to pay more, except the big businesses which are going to be allowed tax breaks to "revitalise the economy".'
Well said.

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.

England's Role Model Manager

England goalkeeper David James talking about the manager Fabio Capello in The Guardian: "He keeps everything clear for the team, you don't have any ambiguous situations. He gives the players the environment to work in, he arms us with the knowledge of the opposition and he trusts that the ability we have is good enough to beat that opposition." It seems to me that's a pretty good definiton of the role of the manager.
I've always found that the best managers have a clear vision and provide their people with the tools, knowledge and support to succeed. That's what I've always tried to do but it's not as easy as it sounds.
Your clear vision can easily get clouded with day-to-day distractions and compromises; tools can be expensive and it's not always easy to be sure which will really work; in order to provide knowledge, you need to have it yourself and to be sure which is relevant; supporting people should be easy but it's even easier to criticise.

Get In Touch With Your Feminine Side

80% of purchasing decisions are made by women (according to research by Iris). That means those of us working in marketing who are not women need to think like them. That could apply to some female marketers as well.

What I do is research what women are saying in magazines, social media and TV to get a handle of what is of interest and way they express themselves. The thing is though, you can't fake it. You have to immerse yourself, be the part, or you just sound like someone speaking a foreign language who doesn't quite understand the idioms.

If in doubt, play it straight. Don't use language which is going to sound false- like the dad in Modern Family trying to ingratiate himself with his kids. Better to use neutral phrases. The main thing is understanding what is important to the people who are your customers.

How To Manage Your Privacy On Facebook

As a retailer, I know there are many legal requirements to protect and not misuse personal data. Not so the social networks like Facebook because people voluntarily give up their information. This article in the New York Times shows how managing your privacy on Facebook involves 50 settings and 170 options and a privacy policy longer than the US constituion.
You can argue that the Facebook guys just want us to have the maximum number of options when it comes to sharing our personal information. Then again, given that the company has come in for a lot of criticism after stalkers, paedophiles and others have used Facebook for nasty purposes, you'd think it might be better advised to assume that everybody wants maximum privacy and to let people opt in to the various levels of sharing.

Did Voters Find 'Posh Boys' Too Lightweight?

I have my own theory as to why neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg did as well as expected. In my experience as a the owner of a shop Your Life Your Style, the recession has caused people to become more cautious in their buying, preferring nostalgia, simplicity and lasting quality.
If you apply this to the party leaders you can see why voters might have been worried that Cameron and Clegg were too young and inexperienced to handle the current grave situation. Brown, despite his many failings, is stolid and experienced. The 'posh boys' might have been the right choice when the living was easy but to take on the worst crisis in most of our lifetimes, the Tories and Lib Dems might have been better with old warhorses like Ken Clarke and Vince Cable.

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.

You'll Either Love Or Hate This Advertising

I myself don't love or hate Marmite- I can take it or leave it. Nevertheless I congratulate DDB, the marketing people, for their Marmite campaign. I can't remember a concept that has so entered the national consciousness. I'm not talking about memorable slogans, of which there have been quite a few. I mean the way the brand name has become shorthand for an idea. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard or read someone say, 'It's like Marmite', often without even the 'love it or hate it' explanation.
It's the Holy Grail for marketeers to create something that so gets into people' brains. 'Gifts As Unique As You' is my best effort so far for our shop Your Life Your Style. Regarding our best selling products, Steiff offer 'For children, only the best is good enough', Ashleigh & Burwood fragrance lamps go for 'Parfum. Inspiration. Emotion' and Dora Designs go for 'Uniquely Different Gifts'.

All Dora Designs Animal Door Stops Are Equal But...

Returning to the theme of my last blog, Dora Designs animal door stops are a case in point. They are definitely among our 20% of products that are responsible for 80% of Your Life Your Style's sales. But once you analyse them, you find that 20% of the animals are responsible for 80% of the door stop sales.

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.