Innovation is the Key to Winning in Price Competition
In Japan, various economic policies have been put in place to resolve the lengthy deflation our economy is seeing, but in the retail world there has only been a fierce price competition taking place. There is a limit to how price competition can solve your problems - in order to survive, you need to innovate in fields such as store design and layout as well as shopping experience.
To see this need for innovation, one only needs to look at the policies or guidelines for supermarkets, home centers and electronic goods mass marketers - you will always see the words "innovation" "conversion" or "transformation" in them. In order to secure sales and profits, these companies are actively looking for new methods that have not been used before, even in the lingo they use.
The Reality of Your Store's Floor Layout
But what about the products displayed on the store's floor? In some major retailers, they are very, very busy constantly changing the products they offer, their product displays and replenishing products in order to differentiate themselves from competing stores. What is more, in their back area, new products are being delivered one after another. Since this results in having tens of thousands of inventory items, even store employees don't know where everything is, and when they go to the back area, they find themselves lost.
Everyday, these employees work as hard as they can to complete their tasks within working hours. But when just completing your daily schedule becomes the objective, the original goal of creating a customer-focused store, that is easy to shop in, is lost.
The firm looks for new ideas to increase sales. Since the employees who are in contact with customers are in touch with the daily demands and desires of customers, it is easy to assume that they can come up with many ideas for new operations and improving the store. But since the problem listed above still exists, you can truly say that no valuable new ideas appear.
Making a Place for Joint Creativity to Give Birth to Resourceful Ideas
It is unreasonable to expect employees to come up with ideas once-a-month in official meetings, since daily tasks are so demanding. So, I often give the following types of advice:
- Look for a bit of idle time where a number of people can get together in the store, thus creating a regular place to bring up ideas for improvement.
- At first, the number of ideas that come out may be low, but through sharing ideas with others and thinking about possible combinations of the ideas that come out of this process, this will lead to various, different ideas.
- Further, looking at videos of revitalized workplaces or active sales floors, or talking about the kind of workplace where one would like to work, will cause more ideas to come out.
Working diligently to have these kinds of workplace meetings will lead to improvements in the workplace, which will produce independence on the work floor and lead to the thorough establishment of policies, thus becoming the means for your store to become the primary store chosen by customers in the region.
Innovations that improve your store come from taking your employees’ small realizations and ideas that stem from coming into contact with customers and tying these ideas together into something that leads to improvements or innovations that will not be forgotten in daily business. This is what one calls “a place for joint creativity that gives birth to resourceful ideas (workplace meetings)."
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