| Birthdays, Nostalgia and Heritage |
Anyone who has watched any TV ads recently won’t have failed to notice the current emphasis on birthday celebrations for retailers. Both M & S and Sainsbury’s celebrate significant milestones this year and are spending lots of money telling everybody. The underlying message is “We have been around for years, been through good times and bad, know what we are doing and you can trust us”. They would love you to feel that you can trust them more than some of the young upstarts that have appeared in the retail world within the last decade or so. They would also like you to feel that the products on their shelves are hand-made in the traditional way using natural ingredients, although this sadly isn’t the case.
What has all this got to teach us? Well, there is certainly history and tradition that we can trade on and possibly make more of. Farm shops and delicatessens actually have people working in them that know about the products, how they are made and who makes them. There is often the opportunity to “try before you buy” and that most vital ingredient of all provenance. As I have said previously, there is a lot to learn from the multiples, but at the end of the day most of their products are mass produced by machine. Ours aren’t! Ensure your customers know the stories behind your products if you make them yourselves, or whether you buy them in. Use the wall space with story boards and posters and also shelf-wobblers to tell the story. Invite suppliers in to sample their products on a regular basis and let them tell their story themselves. We have a lot more nostalgia and heritage than M & S and Sainsbury’s, so let’s shout about it!
Cotswold Fayre, my company, is celebrating our 10th birthday this year – and as part of our celebrations we have invited our top customers to Henley Regatta to celebrate next month. Whilst 10 is still young and, to our competitors, we are still the new kids on the block, I don’t see it this way – we were involved in the explosion of fine food at the end of the nineties and have been one of the leading companies in its growth. Since the turn of the millennium, many fine food wholesalers have started within the specialty food world and some of these are still in business!
It has always been the way, new distributors start every year offering lower prices and better service, but the latter of these key factors is often neglected. One of my sales team was bemoaning today that she had lost two of her largest drinks café customers for this summer to a competitor who was offering lower prices and, in effect, hardly making any margin.
My business has never been the cheapest in the market, but we do place a large premium on service, we pay our staff reasonable wages, we spend money on training staff, we have “Investors in People” standard, we have high ethical standards and we have a team of highly experienced sales consultants. Not all these standards are present in some of our newer competitors – and history shows that they may not be around for too long. 10 years old may still be young, but we have 10 years experience of learning from our mistakes and almost all of our original customers from 1999 are still customers today – and will be coming to celebrate with us at Henley in July.
To read the original article visit Specialty Bites by Paul Hargreaves. http://www.cotswold-fayre.co.uk/specialitybites/2009/06/birthdays-nostalgia-and-heritage/
Article Source: UnArchived Articles
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