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Retail Sustainable Competitive Advantage

As was mentioned in the previous video, part of an effective strategy is creating  “fit” among a company’s activities. When that fit is executed well, the firm usually is able to build a sustainable competitive advantage. But what is a sustainable competitive advantage, especially with respect to retailing? Before we look at the definition os sustainable competitive advantage. I have a little quiz. 

Can a retailer develop a sustainable competitive advantage by 

  • Dropping the price of merchandise?
  • Building a store at the best location?
  • Deciding to sell some hot merchandise?
  • Increasing its level of advertising?
  • Providing better customer service?

Pause this video and see if you can figure out which of these is a proper sustainable competitive advantage.

OK, did you figure it out? Let’s go over each of them. 

Dropping the price of merchandise is not sustainable. As a former professor of mine once said, “competing on price alone is the sign of a weak marketing mind.” So just dropping your price isn’t very sophisticated and your competitors can just do the same thing and then it’s a race to the bottom.

Building a store at the best location? Yes. Like the new Starbucks Reserve location on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, that is a sustainable competitive advantage. Once a location has had a building built on it, that’s it. No other business can use that spot. So that’s a perfectly sustainable competitive advantage.

Deciding to sell some hot merchandise? Well, no. Not only is “hot” merchandise something that can be very fleeting, it’s something any retailer could add to the list of products they sell, often with little advance notice. The exception here is if that “hot” product is one only you can exclusively sell. Then that’s a sustainable competitive advantage.

Increasing its level of advertising? Nope. Again, your competitors are probably already tracking the advertising you’re doing, the channels you’re using, how much you’re probably spending. If they want to keep pace with you, that’s an easy thing to do. But if you manage to get the best, most talented agency to do your advertising, and you execute on a superior strategy, then you might be able to have some sustainable advantage.

Finally, providing better customer service? Absolutely! Hiring the right people, giving them the right training, and establishing the right processes will help create customer service that is difficult for your competitors to replicate.

If you hadn’t guessed, Sustainable Competitive Advantage is an advantage over the competition that is not easily duplicated and can be maintained over a long time. And you really don’t have a useful business strategy if you’re not figuring out a way to maximize sustainable competitive advantages.

Finally, let’s look at some sources of of competitive advantage that are more or less sustainable. First those activities that tend to be more sustainable.

  • Location. We’ve already talked about this being one of the key sustainable advantages a retailer can have
  • Customer service. Again the right people and training can make a huge difference
  • Customer loyalty – You can’t buy this. It comes by treating customers right and providing a lot of value. 
  • Exclusive Merchandise – it’s much more difficult for other retailers to compete when they can’t see the same product.
  • Low-cost supply chain management – wringing efficiencies out of your supply chain and partnering with the right firms can be difficult copy
  • Information systems – yes, you competitors can buy the same computers, but its the management of those systems and customizations that are difficult to replicate
  • Buying power with vendors is a huge advantage if a retailer is big enough to leverage it
  • Committed employees – like customer service to the customer, committed employees provide an immeasurable advantage to a firm

And what about some things that are less sustainable:

  • More advertising, again advertising is easy and your competitors are probably just as good as it as your are
  • More promotions. Sure, drop the price. It’s not like your competitors can do that too. That was sarcasm if you didn’t notice
  • Better computers – Really?
  • More employees – maybe, but it’s quality not quantity that counts
  • More merchandise – Um no. That just makes managing your own store more complicated and your competitors can do the same thing
  • Greater assortments – this one sounds good on the surface, but again it makes managing your own inventory more complex and your competitors can just do the same thing.
  • Lower prices – again this is just a race to the bottom
  • Cleaner stores – um, ya. Any retailer can clean their store–and should. That’s a pretty low bar.

To wrap up, competitive advantage is an edge that you have over your competition and its only sustainable to the degree that your competitors can’t simply recreate it themselves. Your best bet is to leverage the advantages things like site location, customer service, and exclusive merchandise give you.

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Retail Locations

Like the old real estate adage, the three most important things in retailing are Location, Location, Location.

It may be partially tongue-in-cheek, but there is a lot to it. That’s because location offers us a sustainable competitive advantage. Think about it. If I buy a fast food restaurant franchise and put in on a certain street corner. That’s it. No other business can locate their business there. And if you’ve done your homework and figured out the best possible location to reach your target audience, this gives you a tremendous advantage over your competitors.

The only question is: What type of retail location does my business need? 

When retailers decide to locate a business, they can choose one of two types of retail locations: Unplanned or planned.

Unplanned Locations

Unplanned locations do not have centralized management. The retailer is in charge and must handle all of the business requirements and legal restrictions that operating a business entails. Just because an unplanned location doesn’t have centralized management doesn’t mean the retailer won’t necessarily have a landlord though. Unplanned locations usually come in one of two forms: freestanding and urban locations. 

Freestanding locations are purpose built building meant only for that retailer. Much like a standalone Olive Garden or Container Store. 

Urban locations are usually ground floor spaces in densely populated downtown areas or high-rise buildings.

Planned Locations (Shopping Centers)

Planned Locations are far more varied and we have another name for planned locations, it’s shopping centers. A shopping center is a group of retail and other commercial establishments that is planned, developed, owned, and managed as a single property. The shopping center management controls most all aspects of what goes on in the shopping center including parking, security, external lighting, outdoor signage, advertising, and special events of customers. And there are many different types. Let’s take a look.

Neighborhood and Community Centers

Neighborhood and community centers was one of the most common forms of shopping center. Also known as “strip malls” these locations are usually in convenient locations, have easy parking, and relatively low occupancy costs (rent). The downside of these locations are the relatively limited trade areas (meaning the geographic area that they service), the lack of entertainment aspects, and very little protection from the weather.

Power Centers

Power centers consist primarily of collections of big-box retail stores such as discount stores (Target), off-price stores (Marshall’s), warehouse clubs (Costco), and category specialists (Lowe’s, Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dick’s Sporting Goods). They have an open air setup, free-standing anchor tenants, limited small specialty stores, low occupancy costs, and tend to be located where land is more available. They also typically have large trade areas. The retail center in Grafton that houses the Costco would be a good example.

Enclosed Shopping Malls

When we think of shopping malls, enclosed shopping malls tend to be the type that spring to mind. These are climate-controlled environments with retail shops on one or both sides of an enclosed walkway. Shoppers of enclosed malls don’t have to worry about the weather (except perhaps when walking to and from their car), they will see a lot of other shoppers given how enclosed shopping malls attract a large and diverse groups of shoppers, and they are usually surrounded by comfortable, well-manicured environments. Enclosed shopping malls typically are “anchored” by large department stores referred to as anchor tenants and all store operating in the malls have standardized hours of operation. Unfortunately, these locations tend to be more expensive for retail tenants, the level of control exerted by shopping center management can sometimes be overbearing, and retail competition within the centers can sometimes be intense. These malls have faced a lot of challenges in the last few years and the COVID pandemic only exacerbated an already brutal situation. Many malls, like the Grand Ave Shops in downtown Milwaukee are experimenting with a conversion to a mix of retail and residential tenants.

Mixed Use Developments

Mixed use developments combine several different uses into one complex including shopping centers, offices, hotels, residential complexes, civic centers, and convention centers. They are often designed to be all-inclusive environments os that consumers can work, live, and play in one place.

Lifestyle Centers

Lifestyle centers a form of mixed use development incorporate an open-air configuration and tend to be located in affluent residential neighborhoods. They often feature restaurants, theaters, and other entertainment options. They also tend to feature upscale chain specialty stores and their department stores tend to be smaller in size. Many also incorporate residential properties with apartment or condominium units above the ground-level retail like Atlantic Station in Atlanta, Georgia.

Here we see a typical example with the Bayshore Town Center in Glendale, Wisconsin.

Outlet Centers

Outlet centers feature manufacturer retail locations and retail outlet stores. In the early days of these types of centers, shoppers could be seconds (or products with small manufacturing errors) or clearance items. Now, outlet stores often have their own dedicated product lines made to less stringent quality standards.

Nearby, we have the Pleasant Prairie Outlet Mall which is a great example.

Other Location Opportunities

Finally, many other types of managed properties see the benefits of incorporating retail stores into their facilities. For a while now, airport terminals have looked a lot more like malls than the sterile transportation hubs they were in the past. For example, the Milwaukee General Mitchel Airport recently opened a Summerfest Store replaced a Harley-Davidson store. 

We’re also seeing more temporary pop-up retail locations that offer seasonal products or one-off exciting retail experiences. These are used to create buzz around a brand, test new retailing concepts, or to evaluate a new neighborhood or city.

The store-with-a-store concept, pioneered by Ralph Lauren at Bloomingdales, is an agreement in which a retailer rents a part of the retail space in a store operated by another independent retailer.

Merchandise kiosks have also become a popular retailing alternative. These can be small, manned booths or high-tech vending machines. By taking advantage of portability and the latest technologies, retailers can connect with their customers in a more diverse range of environments.

To wrap up, retail locations come in two forms: unplanned—where retailers are essentially responsible for everything—and planned locations, otherwise known as shopping centers, where shopping center management is responsible for most elements of running the overall facility. The most common forms of planned locations are: Neighborhood and Community Centers, power centers, enclosed shopping malls, lifestyle centers, mixed use developments, and outlet centers. 

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Merchandise Retailer Types

03. Merchandise Retailer Types

Retailers sell products. That’s what they do. But we have to make a distinction of what type of product a retailer sells. You see, while you you might envision a retailer selling physical products that a customer carry out of the store in a bag, that’s not what all retailers do. So there are two types of products: physical goods products and service products. We’re going to be talking about goods products, what we also call merchandise. We’ll be talking about service products or services later on.

When we speak about merchandise retailers, we typically put them into two broad categories: Food retailers and general merchandise retailers.

First Food retailers.

Supermarket

The typical supermarket carries perishable items (meaning meat, dairy, product, and baked goods) and those account for 30% of sales. They also tend to carry anywhere from 15 to 60 thousand different SKUs (or stock keeping units)—these are discreet inventory items with unique barcodes, so a 6-pack and a 12-pack of the exact same soda would be two different SKUs. 

There is also a subset of supermarkets call Limited Assortment Supermarkets. These typically carry less that 2000 SKUs and are designed to maximize efficiency and reduce costs. Stores such as Aldi, Lidl, and Trader Joes fit this category.

Supercenters

Supercenters come about in one of two ways. Either a full-line discount retailer adds supermarket (grocery) products. Or a supermarket adds discount store products. When Target, a full-line discount retailer, added grocery products, it because SuperTarget. But when Kroger, a supermarket, added full-line discount products, it became a Kroger Marketplace. The stores are designed to capture more of the customer’s wallet by providing the convenience of selling a wide range of products under one roof. The is especially appealing to young families where traveling from store to store is not as feasible given the time constraint young children impose.

Warehouse Clubs

Warehouse clubs are no-frills environments where the retailer can offer products at a steeper discount by removing the more refined environment of a typical retail location and offer products in larger quantities or in bulk.  Many require a yearly membership and oftentimes the memberships are the primary source of the retailer’s profits. Costco and Sam’s Club are great examples.

Convenience Stores

Convenience stores are small, neighborhood stores with limited SKUs (usually less than 1000). Many often sell gasoline as the primary mechanism for attracting customers. Other can be located in densely populated areas to attract foot traffic from passing shoppers. Most tend to focus on beverage products. These stores are always looking for new convenience capabilities to add to attract customers. Recent additions include EV charging and delivery self-service  lockers

Now let’s take a look at the retailers that sell general or (non-food) merchandise. 

Department Stores

Ever since one of the earliest department stores open in Paris in 1852, Le Bon Marché if you’re wondering, this has been a successful retail format. These stores feature a broad variety of products (many product categories) and a deep assortment (many options to choose from in each category). They separate the products by department (ladies’ wear, home goods, etc.) and most carry a variety of soft goods (clothing, linens, etc.) as well as hard goods (appliances, tools, etc.). These retailers also put an emphasis on customer service. Department stores like Macy’s have seen a lot of pressures on many fronts the past decades, most of which were intensified by the eCommernce revolution.

Full-line Discount Stores

Full-line discount stores offer a broad variety of merchandise, low prices, and somewhat limited service. Walmart, Target, and Kmart are good examples of these retailers. These stores have seen increased competition from stores specializing in specific product categories (category specialists) and they have a difficult time competing on price since category specialists tend to leverage their buying quantities into prices that full-line discount stores have a difficult time matching.

Category Specialist (Category Killers)

Category specialists pick a specific product category and try to meet the customer’s needs in every which way for that type of product. This means that category specialist retailers are excellent resources for shoppers to use for comparison shopping as the product selection is usually very good. We also call these types of retailers category killers, as once they move into a particular category they’ve effectively killed it off for the competition. For example, Dick’s Sporting Goods offers a huge selection in sports equipment and sports related products. Their buying power means that other non-specialist stores would have a difficult time competing. Other examples of category specialists include Staples in office products, Best Buy in electronics, Guitar Center for musical instruments, and Petsmart for pet-related goods.

Specialty Stores

Specialty stores are among the most profitable, fastest growing, and a great mechanism for product manufacturers to interface directly with customers. Apple is one great example. Before they open the retail stores, Apple had to rely on the selling skills of retail partners, which were often lacking. Apple now boasts the highest sales per square foot of any retailer at over $5500.

Drugstores

Drugstores are one of the most common forms of specialty retailers. So common we consider them a separate category. There has been a lot of consolidation among the drugstore retailers. The top 4 drugstore retailers earned over two-thirds of all drug revenue. Walgreens purchased RiteAid. CVS purchased Target’s pharmacy business. Kroger merged with Roundy’s and its pharmacy locations.

Extreme-Value Retailers

Extreme-value retailers also go by the name dollar stores as every prominent extreme-value retailer uses the word dollar in its name (Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree and so on. These stores target low-income customers and locate their stores in low-income areas.

Off-Price Retailers

Finally, off-price retailers do not have a consistent inventory of products, but instead sell brand-name products as closeouts and irregulars. This randomness and inconsistency helps create a unique experience for shoppers every trip and drives bargain hunting behavior. Marshalls and TJ Maxx are good examples.

To wrap up, there are two overall types of merchandise retailers: food and general merchandise. Food retailers which consist of supermarkets, supercenters, warehouse clubs, and convenience stores. General merchandise retailers consist of department stores, full-line discount retailers, category specialists, speciality stores including drugstores, extreme value retailers, and off-price retailers.

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The Long Tail is a Power Law

So I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. His name is George. George Zipf. Besides having an exceedingly cool last name, George here was a pretty smart guy. George studied at Harvard and became a world renown linguist. He became an expert in what is known as quantitative linguistics, meaning the study of how we learn language, how language changes, and the structure of language, including the frequency of word usage. Now that last one is important as that’s what made George famous. He studied the frequency of word usage in language. He discovered something interesting. When mapping the frequency of word usage in any language, only a few words are used very often, and most are only rarely used. And how does one determine the frequency of words in a language? Well, you count a lot of words in a lot of books.

To put that in scientific language: given a corpus of natural language word usage, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table.

Well, what does that mean exactly? Let’s take a look at the most commonly used words in the English language.

You can find this on Wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, “the” in the most common word, follow by be, to, of, and, and a and so on.  Let’s go to the virtual whiteboard and write this out. Alright, let’s write out our words. We have, the, be, to, of, and, and a. If “the” is the most popular word that would be 1 or fractionally-speaking 1/1. The second most popular occurs half as often, so it is half or 1/2. The third happens 1/3 of the. The forth 1/4 and so on.

If we graph this out it looks like this: a line that quickly falls and flattens out, but never actually hits zero. An asymptote. This is what’s called a power law.

The interesting things is that George Zipf and others started to notice that a lot of other data sets from the physical and social sciences seemed to follow the exact same “Zipfian” pattern. 

And thus was born Zipf’s Law.

Let’s look at an example completely unrelated to to word frequency: City populations in the United States.

Here’s our list of the major cities in the US and here are their populations. If Zipf’s Law is actually reflected in city size than we would expect the second most populous city to be right around half as big as the most populous. So Los Angeles should be around half the size of New York City, or 4 million people. 

And that’s what we see. The predicted population using Zipf’s law (or multiplying New York City’s population by one half) gives us 4 million, which ends up only being off by 7%. 

Looking at Chicago, which would be one third the size of New York City, the results are darn close. For the rest of the top cities, you can see the results are also pretty close.

So what does this have to do with digital marketing?

Let’s look at an important example, search marketing. Let’s say you’re a logistics management software development firm looking to advertising yourself on Google Search. Because you know that Google’s Search Ads system is based on a real-time bidding auction, you know that bidding so your ad comes up for the popular keyword searches is going to give you the most number of individuals seeing your ad.

If you bid on the keyword “logistics” you are guaranteed to get exposure to the most number of eyeballs. The problem is, you’re selling logistics management software. The keyword “logistics” is overly broad. Let’s narrow our keyword bidding a bit. Now we bid on the keyword “logistics management software”. Because the keyword is narrower, fewer people will see it, but chances are those people are going to be more relevant to us because they typed in “logistics management software” or something similar into the search engine.

Now, you’ve done your marketing research and your know that the vast majority of logistic management software purchases are preceded by purchasing managers reading up on successful deployment case studies. Wouldn’t it be great if we could target those people? Well, we can. Again, just narrow the keyword we bid on to “logistics management software case studies” and now our ad will show up to fewer people, but those people are far more likely to convert to a sale.

The great thing about this is, as you increase the complexity of your keywords and more narrowly target your audience—looking for only those people typing in the search terms that will match your keywords—your competition goes down. And when your competition goes down, so does your bid cost. Thus those lowest-common denominator keywords in the so-called “fat head”, which are expensive and a fairly blunt instrument, are far less appealing than the keywords that sit here in the long tail.

How is Google addressing the Long Tail? 

Obviously, the more narrow people are with the search terms they use to find things the better result that gives the user. But does Google benefit from pushing people towards more common, “fat head” searches instead? Turns out, they do.

Only 15% of Google’s daily search engine queries are unique. Just a few years ago, that number was 20%. When unique queries are run by a search engine, it is more processor-intensive and thus more expensive. So convincing users to utilize search results that have already been indexed is more cost effective. Here are a few ways they do that.

When you start typing into the google search field you are offered suggestions. This is Google subtlety steering you toward those pre-indexed pages. In some cases, as in this Disneyland example, you don’t even have to finish typing a question before the Google dropdown provides an answer. Finally, if you’ve already made a query, you’ve established a context. And future searches operate within the search context. For example, if I do a search for the original opening date of Disneyland, but then start a new query with “Who is the…” Google will fill in the rest using artificial intelligence trying to figure out what you might want. Again, subtlety steering you toward pre-indexed, less expensive results.

To sum up, George Zipf observed a pattern in nature that’s reflected in many physical and social science phenomena. This pattern creates the same long tail distributions that we can use to our advantage as digital marketers. Oh and by the way, the long tail doesn’t just apply to search engine keywords, it’s can be used to understand a number of phenomena that are relevant to digital marketers.

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Retail Research

Retail research is something that all retailers should engage in, no matter how big or small. In this presentation, I’ll share why it’s important to do retail research, what the typical retail research subjects are, and we’ll look at some insights generated through research along the way.

Why do we do retail research? The insights provided by retail research  can help us anticipate shoppers’ needs and desires. You’d be amazed at how the small task of actually talking with customers can provide you big results. 

You can discover the points engagement and friction in the shopping process. If you sit and watch customers in your retail stores, you can quickly see where shopper become frustrated, the areas of the store they avoid, where they are most likely to congregate and other useful insights. 

You can also improve the retail experience for the customer and measure how shoppers respond. In essence, you retail stores can become a place of experimentation to help you improve your operations and increase customer engagement.

As retail researchers, the three big areas you are likely to study are shopper behavior (what your shoppers do while they’re in the store), atmospherics (how the physical environment impacts the shopper), and purchase patterns (what shoppers tend to buy together, what is purchased certain times of day, or the seasonality of products). 

Let’s take a break to look at a research insight from Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. Endcaps are a great merchandising tool for retailers to use and there are a number of benefits to their use. One is that shoppers must pass them as the enter an aisle. Chances are it’ll be the only merchandise that is perpendicular to their vision as they enter the aisle so it automatically stands out. This means that merchandise on an end-cap nearly always sees a sales boost. But the only problem is, there are only two per aisle, so use them wisely.

Shopper Behavior

Ok, let’s look in-depth at shopper behavior. What we do as shoppers is chock full of useful information for retailers. The shopping lists with carry (or don’t carry), how long we stay in the store and the type of shop we do, how many products we buy, or basket size, the decisions we make while in the store, how we move around the store, and so on. All of our behaviors and decisions say a lot about us, but also provide valuable data to retailers, who, if they’re smart, will try to turn that into actionable insights. 

Speaking of shopper behavior, let’s actually take a look at what American shoppers do in mass market retail stores. The following data are from the Point of Purchase Advertising International Mass Merchant Shopper Engagement Study. This organization periodically runs this study, the most recent one was 2014, and they have uncovered some interesting insights. Mass market retailers, by the way, are large retailers that sell a large variety of products. For this study, it was retailers that sold groceries as well as other products. Think Walmart, Super Target, Kroger Marketplace, etc.

First, is shoppers’ use of shopping lists and so-called pre-store media. As you can see by the data in red, mass merchant shoppers rely far less on written shopping lists and are much more likely to have no list at all compared to the data for grocery store shoppers in blue. We can also see that mass merchant retail customers are a lot less likely to use pre-store planning media, in other words, store circulars and newspaper inserts. Imagine how useful knowing this information would be if you were a store manager. You’d know that mass merchant shoppers were probably going to make more impulse buys and you could probably stop wasting money on in-store circulars.

The report also sheds some light on typical based basket for shopper trips. Interestingly, the break down the different types of trips that shoppers take, fill-in trips, quick trips, and stock-up trips.

Finally, and I think this is one of, if not the most, interesting insights from their report: in-store decisions. You can imagine that if shoppers don’t use shopping lists, then they are more likely to make their purchase decisions while they are in the store. And you’d be right. From this report, we can see that only 18% of purchases that shoppers made were specifically planned, meaning that 82% of purchases were made with an in-store decision. The in-store decision can vary from knowing you want to buy spaghetti sauce, but you’re not sure what brand to buying something purely on impulse that you had no idea you were going to buy when you entered the store.

Atmospherics

Atmospherics are another important area where we can uncover valuable insights in the retail environment. What lighting will keep your shoppers in the store longer?What colors coordinate with your products most effectively? What sounds and music put shoppers in a more comfortable and receptive mood? What smells can make your shoppers hungry? What fixture, carpeting, and furniture textures will make your shoppers feel more welcome? Heck, even taste! What tastes will make your shoppers want to come back? Think free mints at checkout or even food samples throughout the store. Atmospherics are hugely important to retailers, but the retail space is a blank canvas just ready for a retail design artist to make the right decisions that will lead to longer shops, largest basket sizes, and happier shoppers.

Here’s a video that shows how shopping malls think about attracting customers and keeping them in the shopping environment.

Purchase Patterns

Finally, purchase patterns are an important insight for retailers because they can tell us a lot about what products are bought together. This can help when merchandising products and creating purchase synergies through adjacencies. Retailers can also see how often products are purchased by individuals, when products are typically bought, and by whom. These are great insights to help a retailer provide targeted promotion for the individual shopper such as coupons.Product purchases can also help retailers predict the life stages on specific shoppers. 

There’s a famous article written in the New York Times titled, How Companies Learn Your Secrets, about how Target used product purchase patterns to predict a teenage girl’s pregnancy, much to the dismay of her father. It’s an interesting read.

One more shopping insight from Why We Buy. At grocery retailers, the use of shopping carts is common. But oftentimes, shoppers don’t want to travel all the way down an aisle for a product with their cart. They often leave the cart at one end, walk to the middle of the aisle, and the return to their cart. Paco Underhill noticed this common shopping practice and named it the “boomerang effect.” One of the ways that retailers can encourage shoppers to traverse the entire aisle is by putting the most popular items towards the center of the aisle. That way the see more products on the way to what they want, increasing the likelihood that they’ll make another unplanned purchase.

By the way, we shouldn’t forget about online retail. 51% of Americans prefer to shop online, but online purchases only make up 16% of retail purchases. That means there’s a lot of retail research left to be done to figure out what it will take to push those shoppers over the edge and get them to buy more online.

To recap, we do retail research to understand consumer needs and desires, discover points of engagement and friction, and improve the customer’s experience. The subjects of most research in the retail realm are shopper behavior, atmospherics, and purchase patterns. And finally, while 51% of Americans prefer online shopping, only 16% of retail purchases are made online, meaning there’s much more retail research to be done!