Page 13 - CSA Speaker Bulletin June 2019 | CSA Celebrity Speakers
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CSA SPEAKER BULLETIN INNOVATION
INNOVATION
The Chicken Dance that Revived
a Supermarket Chain’s Soul
Afew years ago, the owner of competitors. We asked every senior done it this way’ mentality had taken
Lowes Foods, a mid-sized employee - and all of their thousands control of the company. As a result,
supermarket chain in the of store managers too - to come to it had lost sight of the consumer’s
U.S., approached me with a serious understand their customers’ lives by dreams and hopes.
problem. Walmart, Whole Foods, cooking with them, dining with them,
and Publix were attacking his chain shopping with them, entertaining with Perhaps to no-one’s surprise, Lowes
from every direction. There’d been an them. In short, they experienced daily stood for nothing, perhaps with the
average of five new store openings life through the lens of the consumers. exception of their chicken, which
in the neighborhood of every Lowes seemed slightly tastier than the
store over an 18-month period. Sales Why did we make this request? To competition’s.
had dropped 40%. When I looked into infuse empathy into the minds of the
his eyes, I could see the panic. organisation, enabling them to see the But then, following Kamprand’s
world from the customer’s point-of- philosophy of truly getting to know
They’d exhausted every obvious view. your customer, we conducted in-
strategy. Cheaper prices, because home visits and made two unusual
that’s what his customers said It was a technique I learned from observations. Most supermarket
they wanted. More product the founder of Ikea, the late Ingvar executives would have glanced right
offerings, because his consumers Kamprand. Ingvar had invited me to over them.
were requesting it. Faster check IKEA’s headquarters in Sweden, but
outs, because his customers were when I arrived, he was nowhere to We all have two ages, not one.
increasingly strapped for time. But be found. “Where is he?” I asked. His There’s our physical age. I’m 49 years
none of the approaches seemed to be people informed me that he was at his of age. But then there’s our twin-
the key. ‘usual’ place, down at the checkout age, our inner age. On the inside, I
stands. And sure enough, that’s where feel like I’m just 16 years old. Every
Instead of diving into the billions of Big I found him. Already in his 70s, he supermarket was designed for our
Data points stored on Lowes’s main was at a register, ringing out every outer age, but as a result of our in-
frames, inviting trend researchers to customer. “Why do you do this?” I home visits, we wondered: Should
explain tomorrow’s consumer needs, asked. He answered, “Because I want we be celebrating our inner age,
or visiting competitors’ stores for to look into every customer’s eyes, feel appealing to our inner child?
‘inspiration,’ we did something entirely their dreams, know their hopes. This is
different. In a search for the subtle the secret of my company. This is why However, we also made another, more
insights that reveal the heart of the IKEA is what it is today.” horrifying observation. Communities
problem - what I call ‘small data’ - we are dying. Social media has killed
moved in with Lowes’s customers. Like every other supermarket chain every aspect of social interaction,
out there, Lowes had lost contact with except the one taking place on a
This was something Lowes had never its customers. Routines, compliance, screen. Read more.
done before. Neither had any of their rigorous rules, and a ‘we’ve always
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