Why She Buys (33 page)

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Address your customers’ biggest fear, and turn it into a competitive advantage
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Lexus has addressed women’s concerns about safety with a 24/7 roadside assistance program that comes with every new or certified preowned car. Sure, the company builds safe cars, but it goes one step further by saying, “Even if the worst-case scenario happens with our cars, we’ll be there.” Take a look at your own industry. What’s the worst-case scenario for your own customers, and how can you address it more effectively? Better yet, how can you turn this into an advantage by dealing with it directly? You probably have a service guarantee or a warranty program, but the marketing value inherent within it may be lying untapped. Look at ways to leverage it instead.

• A great sales experience is only as good as the product behind it
.

Lexus is praised by women for its service, but that wouldn’t mean a thing if its cars weren’t high quality. In any business, no amount of great salesmanship can make up for a lousy product.

Super Store or Super Snore?
Selling Through the Retail Environment

W
HEN
it comes to selling just about anything outside of fishing rods, orienting your retail environment for the female consumer is a must. It’s true that young men are being encouraged to shop more these days and to take a greater interest in things like grooming and fashion. But once they get married, men still tend to abdicate shopping responsibilities to their other half, and soon their shopping muscles go slack. It appears that men take the strongest interest in fashion and grooming when sex is at stake; after the wedding day, they no longer lurk around Abercrombie & Fitch in such large numbers.

The widespread acceptance of online shopping is forcing brick-and-mortar retail to develop in two distinct ways. First, it must provide the human touch and sensory experience that’s impossible to get online; second, it must be efficient enough for people to feel they can get in and out of the stores as quickly as they’d like. The imperative, in essence, is to give people something special in the store that they can’t get in the virtual world. I went looking to find the companies that do it best, and what I found was a nirvana for little girls.

A city inside a store: American Girl

The American Girl store is a paragon of retailing that’s so over the top with wholesome characters and experiences, it makes the average department store seem like a funeral parlor. At the Chicago location, it was hard to tell who was more excited, the moms and grandmothers or the young girls. The store is a blur of happy mayhem and mother/daughter/grandmother bonding. The day of my visit, the song “Come On, Get Happy” by the Partridge Family blared out into the street at top volume, ostensibly to lure in more customers. This was clearly unnecessary, as there’s often a line of people who come from all over the Midwest to shop here. As they say in retail parlance, American Girl is a
destination
shopping experience. It also may be a foreshadowing of things to come.

The more time we spend online or in front of television and video screens, the less time there is to engage with other people in the tactile and ancient ritual of shopping at markets and brick-and-mortar stores. A sensory explosion such as the American Girl store is the antidote to the flatness and solitude of online shopping, and it just may hold the key to survival for the next generation of retail.

At its most fundamental, the American Girl store sells dolls. Yet it has transformed every conceivable aspect of a girl’s relationship with her doll into an experience. There’s a hair salon inside the store where little girls jostle to get their doll’s hair styled just like their own. There’s a doll hospital down the hallway from the salon, where a crackerjack team of “nurses” and “doctors” fix doll injuries, including everything from a general cleaning to “major surgery.” There’s even
a museumlike series of vignettes, with craftsmanship worthy of the Smithsonian Institution, depicting the imaginary lives and historical backgrounds of each doll in the American Girl brand family. These vignettes make visitors feel that the American Girl retail experience is actually educational and not just entertaining.

Each doll has a theme based on a different period in American history. Addy, for example, is an African American girl growing up during the Civil War. Julia is from the 1970s, wearing bell bottoms and struggling with her parents’ divorce. Kit Kittredge is an aspiring young journalist from the Depression era; the character made the transition from American Girl doll to movie star in 2008, when a hit movie—with a real human actress (Abigail Breslin)—was made about her. Each doll comes with its own life story of pluck, courage, and integrity, neatly packaged into an accompanying book. American Girl has sold so many of these books that it’s now one of the top children’s book publishers in the United States.
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To capture the memories of their shopping trip forever, there’s a photography studio where girls can get a photo taken of themselves and their dolls on a mocked-up cover of
American Girl
magazine (which is actually a real magazine), ready to take home in just fifteen minutes. And when they’ve worked up an appetite from the unbridled capitalism of it all, there’s a bistro with real waiters and waitresses, serving children and their mothers real food, like Chicken Paillard and Grilled Pacific King Salmon, with a real bill at the end. The dolls sit at the tables on special booster seats. They have their own menu.

The cost for the dolls? About $100 each. The cost for lunch? About $20 per person. The cost for a photo package?
About $30. The emotional rewards for all this mother-daughter bonding? Priceless.

The American Girl store is clearly designed to connect with both the younger set
and
their mothers, who are the ones paying for all of these products and experiences. It represents a new way of thinking about retail, and gives a powerful example of what it can offer that the online world can’t. When it’s done right, retail can provide a vivid, tactile experience. It can offer personalized service that makes someone feel special. It can offer smells, sounds, and sights that stoke the imagination. It can bring people together. It can leave shoppers with an indelible, emotionally charged memory that makes them want to return again and again. Currently, there are few retailers that fit this bill, but competition from the online world and from game changers such as American Girl may change all that. For the industry to survive, it’s worth examining all the different factors that go into creating a retail environment that women will want to participate in again and again.

Principles of Female-Friendly Retail

R
ESEARCH
shows that creating positive emotional experiences for shoppers increases consumer spending and involvement. No surprise there. But in most categories, people aren’t given a positive emotional experience, and when that happens, it affects the entire industry, because at that point people tend to default to the retailer that offers the lowest price.

Women have always viewed shopping as a social experience. Perhaps it’s a hangover from stone-age times, when
women spent their days gathering food alongside female clan members as well as their own kids. Whatever the reason, a day spent shopping with girlfriends is still the definition of a great day out for many women the world over. In our time-starved society, those days are now typically relegated to weekends or special occasions, and when women are not with their friends, shopping often becomes an exercise in efficiency: get in, get out, get home, and check a few more things off the list. “Retail is a reflection of life,” says Stephen Hoch, professor of marketing and director of the Baker Retailing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “Whatever changes are happening in society are going to be reflected in retail.”

How to get women to linger, enjoy the experience, and buy more products comes down to the following principles.

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Friendly, available help matters
.

In the online world, if someone can’t find something they’re looking for, they immediately go to another website or click on a different link. Either way, they usually get immediate gratification. This has changed our frame of reference, and it means that when women have to wander around a store looking for help, five minutes can feel like five hours. One of the smartest guys I know, Chris Gray of the shopper marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi X, puts it this way: “When it comes to women shoppers, a lack of humans can put a retailer in a dangerous position.”

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Women have a kill-several-birds-with-one-stone shopping approach
.

With their multitasking mindset (as opposed to men’s
linear style of thinking), women have a tendency to group errands together to maximize productivity. This makes them open to picking up products that weren’t on their list, because buying something now will save them a trip back later (or so they will tell themselves), and besides, they always have their antennae out for things that members of their “Broadway cast” might like.

A more academic way to say it is that women shop in a
holistic
fashion. Niketown and IKEA are two major retailers that provide great examples of how to place products together in vignettes. Women love seeing how outfits and rooms come together, and these companies do a stellar job of packaging individual components into bigger packages. These vignettes not only spark customers’ fantasies about how a particular look might work for them but are viewed as a great time saver, because someone has done the coordination work for them.

• Women’s shopping experiences are transformed when children are involved
.

More than ever, kids, strollers, child carriers, and other accoutrements come with women on their shopping trips. How easy is your retail environment to navigate, given this reality? From family bathrooms at the store entrance (to take care of the inevitable before families start shopping) to dressing rooms that accommodate children (doors that go all the way down to the floor so that they can’t run out) and aisles wide enough for strollers, kids are an important reality for almost anyone with a predominantly female shopping base. This makes it just plain silly that we still have a six-items-or-less policy for so many dressing rooms. It limits sales because
people are so time-crunched they don’t want to make multiple trips to a dressing room—especially when there is no one there to help them get different sizes anyway.

• Women will abandon a personal shopping experience if it inconveniences their companions
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Few retailers invest in the simplest of products: chairs for weary shoppers and the people accompanying them. More clothes have been abandoned in more dressing rooms because a woman can hear the audible sighs and distress calls of her (often male) companion, propped up against a pillar in the ladies’ department. Simple furnishings, such as chairs and magazines, can make all the difference between whether a shopping trip is cut off after an hour or lasts the whole day. My local Nordstrom has an entertainment “pit” outside the ladies’ dressing room where people (mainly men, from my experience) can relax on a giant couch and watch movies while their female companions try on clothes.

There are an infinite number of ways to unearth female-friendly insights within a retail environment. More mirrors are needed everywhere, especially in purse and shoe departments. Those little ones on the stools will not do, and yes, women need a mirror to “try on” a purse. All that’s needed is a genuine desire to understand, and the answers will be there for the taking.

lululemon athletica: The “Un-retailer”

LULULEMON
athletica is one of my favorite stores. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you will: it is one of the fastest-growing athletic apparel companies in the world, with about a hundred locations in Canada, the United States, and Australia. In 2008,
BusinessWeek
named this yoga-focused retailer number two on its list of the top fifty hot-growth companies. Based in Vancouver, Canada, and founded by a surfer turned yoga practitioner, the company’s vision is bolder than you’d expect from an athletic retailer: “Elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness.” The lululemon vision translates not only to the company’s beautiful and technically brilliant athletic apparel, but also to its retailing practices. “It’s the best growth story in retail today,” said Paul Lejuez, a senior analyst at Credit Suisse.
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You don’t have to love yoga to love lululemon. I don’t know a downward dog from an upward cat, and I can’t resist the place. It’s a bit like Williams-Sonoma in that way—you don’t have to cook to lust after the products sold there. What makes lululemon different is that each store feels like a small, locally owned boutique, so much that customers are often shocked to find out there’s more than one location. (They’re even more devastated to find out it’s a chain.) The company’s commitment to the local communities surrounding its stores is palpable and present in every store. And who is lululemon trying to target with its community focus? You guessed it.

“Women aren’t just the future, they’re the now,” says the company’s founder and chairman, Chip Wilson, an entrepreneur who founded a surf, skate, and snowboard company prior to starting lululemon. He explains his vision of
lululemon stores this way: “I see a lot of U.S. retail as schlocky and fake and not real, and catering to the lowest common denominator. I didn’t have any experience in retail when I started out, so I had to invent it myself. I thought,
What would I want if I were the customer?
How do I take a chain store and not make it a chain store?”