What is the role of the high street in the future?

I love high streets. I chose to live in Marylebone because of its particularly lovely high street. I go out of my way to purchase as much as I can from the independent stores there (well from the ones that are left) rather than from chains or on-line, this to show my support, and to ensure their survival.

Marylebone High Street

But lately I’m finding it increasingly hard to buy things from the high street. Which makes me seriously question its future…

Why?

Well; let’s look at it from a basic marketing perspective. Forgive me for using such a simple, and to many outdated model, as the 4 P’s, but hey I’m a 60’s child so for the sake of simplicity I will stick to the 4 P’s rather than debating what should replace them. (The 4 P’s by the way was invented in 1960 by Jerome McCarthy– so I don’t dispute they need a revamp ).

Anyway, back to the high street.

It’s clear that it can’t compete on price. A while ago I went to Selfridges to buy a memory card, and ended up buying one on-line for £50 less. I wanted to buy ink for my printer at Ryman’s, and bought the same ink on-line at a 50% discount.

How about product? I doubt anyone would dispute that when it comes to product range and type, no-one can beat the Internet (especially with the effect of the long-tail and therefore the ability of offering a product even if there are only a few hundred buyers in one place).

Distribution (place) maybe? There is no way a retailer can have a presence everywhere (although some try at a massive cost). So nope the high street does not seem to be able to compete on place either.

As for promotion, I wont even go there as the Internet has most available communication and targeting tools at its disposal, at a relatively small cost.

So what if we extend the 4 P’s and add a service element to it – process (which refers to the systems used to assist the organisation in delivering the service)? A few weeks ago I went to Divertimenti to buy a new filter for my Bialetti espresso maker. They had none in stock and I was told they could order one for me, and call when it arrived. In the spirit of support I chose to accept to wait and said yes. I went back today thinking they must have forgotten to call me. But oh no, the delivery would take 6 weeks. 6 weeks! So I guess it’s a no no to being competitive on process!

So what is the high street retailer doing about this rather serious problem? Well, some offer their own on-line e-commerce facility, or they allow Amazon to power their sales (to overcome the distribution challenge ), they try to put more products in store (range challenge), they slash their prices (price challenge), they pack their windows with sales messages (promotion and advertising challenge)…I could go on… but basically all efforts are ‘me-too’ strategies, and I don’t know about you, but to me trying to compete with the Internet head on seems rather stupid!

One would think that the only way forward is to differentiate. Basically to try to offer something which is not possible to offer on-line. Which brings me to the two remaining P’s of the service marketing mix, (in addition to process) people and physical evidence. These are the two things retailers have today that the Internet does not have. You would think they would use it! And yet finding an original retails space, offering a great experience, populated by people that add value (rather than affect it negatively) is extremely rare now a days.

So who get’s it right outside of the constantly mentioned Apple and Nike stores (with their endless marketing budgets)?!

Screen shot 2010-02-07 at 17.32.46

I suggest a visit to Daunt’s bookstore where the books are categorised by country and not author, and where people serving you actually read books! Make sure you pop by La Fromagerie, a cheese shop that would hold its own next to any French cheese shop, and where the staff can tell you the origin of any cheese. Still hungry? I recommend Mr Biggley’s sausages, made from scratch in his basement – he will tell you all about the art that is sausage making. And just in case you need a button – pop by the Button Queen, there are more buttons there then you know what to do with  – and believe it or not, staff that are enthused about – yes buttons!

Or maybe the future will look differently. My business partner in this fluid world Jonathan MacDonald has a very interesting view on where we may be heading!

“In the future, people will pay for human interaction – perhaps we will have toll roads that harbour these interactions – due to the nature of saying ‘hello’, we can call these ‘hi streets’ and we will congregate in Public Urban Boundary Systems (which will be shortened to the word ‘pubs’)”.

I shall now say good bye to you all, and who knows maybe we will meet, sometime in the future… on the ‘hi-street’ or in the ‘pub’!

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2010
02/07
CATEGORY
Competitive Advantage
Customer Experience
Marketing
Retail
2 comments

  1. je suis très intéressée par cette réflexion sur ce que nous appelons le “commerce de proximité” et sa problématique. Traditionnellement, un des points forts de ce (plus ou moins) petit commerce a souvent été le crédit, du petit crédit, pour de petites sommes, basé sur la confiance et non sur un intérêt à 18% , le taux de crédit qui vous est consenti pour tous les produits de consommation. Un crédit sans papier, unilatéral “je vous le mets sur votre compte?” interroge le commerçant et le remboursement viendra de lui même, fin de semaine ou de mois. Allez acheter un pain a la boulangerie du supermarché et dites que vous avez oublié votre porte monnaie, il est peu probable qu’on fasse crédit.
    Les relations humaines? Oui, dans une société où la nourriture n’est pas le premier poste de travail, la préférence ira à cette valeur ajoutée d’un échange qui n’est pas que commercial, où les réflexions sur la météo, la santé, le travail sont la marque de l’originalité et la personnalisation de l’achat: industriel et anonyme, c’est le produit du supermarché. V”otre” boulanger, vous appelle par votre nom, sait si vous aimez le pain bien cuit, votre boucher vous signale qu’il a reçu des ris de veau ou de l’”araignée (une pièce particulièrement goûteuse mais très petite du boeuf, pour les beafsteaks) et vous confie ses secrets de cuisine pour mettre en valeur le produit choisi, le marchand de vin vous apostrophera, si vous réclamez un vin plus cher que celui qu’il vous a proposé : “c’est du vin cher, ou du bon vin que vous voulez?”.
    Mais cette relation au client , comparable à la haute couture (qui elle aussi a un prix) existe aussi lorsque vous vous retrouvez face aux complexités du quotidien : si le boucher se fait conseiller culinaire, le bon vendeur d’électroménager vous orientera non vers le plus onéreux mais le plus adapté à votre cas: non, n’achetez pas une télécommande “universelle”, elle ne répond pas au qualificatif dont on la pare; quant au marchand de journaux, il gardera votre magazine favori au lieu de le vendre au premier client qui passe.
    Par cette attitude “commerçante” qui reconnaît en vous l’être humain, qui donc vous confère une existence digne d’être reconnue et bienvenue, c’est un peu de bien être quotidien, voire de bonheur, qui vous est offert.
    D’aucun dirait que ce la n’a pas de prix

    • Tim Forrest
    • March 15th, 2010

    It’s funny isn’t it that we all used to love our butchers, bakers and candlestick makers but they too, in the majority, have been submerged under the torrent of people flooding to the supermarkets.

    Having thought about this a bit, and agreeing with J’s comments on ‘experience’, I tried to imagine a world where simply everything to do with shopping was done online. In this way, trying to get back to a perspective whereby physicl shopping is imagined as redundant and then to ask, ‘what would we really miss?’ For all our sense of enthusiasm and wonderment at the virtual world we have an inate need/desire for physical connections.

    I got to thinking about how 90% of communication is non verbal, 90% of WoM is off line and that we are effected by surface geography (topography etc) and our basic desire for community. It’s ironic that you can go into a shop and the human response is, well inhuman and you can go shopping and not socialize.

    We seem to have lost the point of physical shopping and bricks & mortar companies have allowed the human values to wither on the vine as they’ve focused on manipulation of environment/optimized floor space etc.

    If I were a retail business taking capitalism to a logical conclusion through e-commerce then I’d be asking of the business ‘what is the point of a physical estate and what atre those things we can offer that we can’t replicate on-line?’

    By way of closing, a snippit from Seth Godin’s blog that touches on this – that ‘newly archaic businesses turn into lifestyle businesses…’

    http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/03/books-you-dont-need-in-a-place-you-cant-find.html

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