Found:

I just found this old picture I took of a letter from a customer myself and another girl served when I used to work in MANGO. These kind of comments were received regularly by my boss regarding her staff. Makes me proud to have been part of that team.

It's good not to know everything!

A fascinating and engaging story of how the Dutch ex-Heineken COO with little retail experience, transformed the falling Morrison's brand into a success story, which isn't even letting the Credit Crunch knock it back down. 

Bolland feels his lack of retail knowledge benefitted him when he was appointed to CEO of Morrison's. Coming from an outsiders perspective, he didn't understand what the brand stood for and had to start from scratch in repositioning Morrison's, often acting against the advice of those "in the know". Speaking to real customers, he established that there was a feeling that the brand didn't offer the same service that say, the high street could.  

By weighing up the market competitors such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Asda, Bolland established that he wanted to position Morrison's as a predominantly food retailer (when everyone else was moving into non-food) with competitive yet quality product. He made the decision that every single penny needed to go into making the food valuable and fresh. Today Morrison's is the only supermarket who buy entirely from farmers. 

Bolland also discussed their adverts featuring celebrities but stressed that the likes of Denise Van Outen and Alan Hanson were real Morrison's shoppers who appreciated value and fresh produce. When questioned on pumping lots of money into flash advertising, he responded by stating that there was very little increased budgeting for their ad campaigns and that the real difference was in the advertising approach.

Strengthening your team.

2 different speakers with similar success strategies were Robert Willett - Chief Executive of Best Buy International and Ian Cheshire - CEO of Kingfisher (parent company to B&Q).

Both discussed the importance of the employees and customers being "partners" or "part of the team". 

Training staff on the importance of Customer Service skills is a vital ingredient to success in both cases. Setting goals and having the right people goes a long way in staff motivation, company efficiency and making sure the customer is central to the brand's intentions over e.g. growth. 

Customer Insight

Being an ambassador of Customer Service and keeping the customer at the forefront of retail and design, I was extremely excited to hear a panel discussion on the matter. 

(The discussion featured Alex Gourley - CE of Health & Beauty at Boots; Doug Hargrove - Chief Marketing Officer at Torex and Gerry Johnson - Managing Director at Waterstone's).

To me the most interesting point raised was on how to enhance the customer's experience through loyalty benefits such as the Waterstones' card and Boots Advantage card. It was stressed that it is vital that you have all other aspects of a customer's experience in your store covered and that loyalty cards should not look to replace or make up for lack of service elsewhere.

Further to this, cards give vital information to the likes of Waterstones as to how the individual shops; their preferences and buying patterns. Waterstones give recommendations (Amazon stylee) based on this knowledge. N.B. I found it surprising that Boots doesn't use data from the cards in this manner since the Boots Advantage card is so popular. Perhaps this is where they can learn from Waterstones' experience...??

Tribal

A tribal/safari theme was seen all over the Ready-to-wear SS '09 collections and this has evidently been filtering through to the High Street stores. Here are some of the designer labels which are pushing the look.

Louis Vuitton:

DKNY:

(I began to select a few images from all the designers but it turned out there were just too many so here are a few more shots. Top l-r: Anna Sui, Christian Dior, Christopher Kane, bottom l-r: Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Alexander McQueen.)

High Street retailers need to know their customer well in order to successfully interpret catwalk trends. (It might look good to Marc Jacobs but the truth is the typical UK lady will not wear a short grass skirt.)