Strategy and shopping carts

The devil is in the details

The devil is in the details

A major sportswear retailer’s board of directors approved a new strategy a year ago. I was not their strategic consultant during this project, but I conducted a couple of foresight workshops, so I was familiar with key strategic initiatives that became the basis of the strategy. One of them was “to become customer-obsessed” and “to improve customers’ experience both in brick-and-mortar stores and online”.

One of the ideas devised by the marketing department aiming to improve in-store customers’ experience was to offer consumers two colors of shopping carts and baskets — blue and orange, stored on different racks. If customers chose the blue one, it meant that they preferred (probably because they were as unsociable as I am) to surf through the stores by themselves. If I were their target consumer, I would have always chosen the blue shopping cart because whenever I hear “can I help you?” in a store, my spirit falls. Ordinary, I don’t need assistance, but saying “no” to a broadly smiling, polite shop assistant is quite a challenge. So, for me, a blue shopping card would be equivalent to a billboard “please, leave me alone” on my chest. But if customers voted for the orange one, they thus signalled that they are psychologically stable and would be glad to chat with a shop assistant.

The two racks were marked with large placates. “Do you need assistance? Choose an orange cart!” said one of them, painted orange. “If you don’t need help, take a blue one!” said another, painted blue. And I believe that customers, at least some of them, read these signs, but some store workers don’t. I visited a shopping mall a couple of days ago and spotted their logo, so I decided to drop by. At the entrance, I saw two racks, two painted signs, and two packs of shopping carts. The problem was that all of them were orange. The blue ones were missing for an unknown reason.

You may have a brilliant strategy and a great team, but your consumers don’t care. What they do care about is their experience in touch points, places, including virtual ones, where they interact with your products and service. And very rarely, they are met there by your top managers, but by people who, most frequently, don’t have a clue about your strategy. That store worker who piled blue and orange carts on both racks could be illiterate or color blinded. Maybe he was an immigrant, or perhaps he was simply preoccupied thinking about his personal issues. But the customers were puzzled, and at least one of the strategy’s elements didn’t work.

Strategy is not only a matter of thinking, visioning, and foreseeing, it is also a matter of implementation.