Hobnob with Your Neighborhood Retailers

How often are you visiting with neighboring retailers to learn from them? What opportunities do you take to answer their questions and offer them advice so you can mutually build shopper traffic in your area? Do you regularly carve time from your nonstop schedule to visit the competition to see what you sell that they don’t? When you spot those products and services, do you tell the floor staff how pleased you’d be to get referrals? How many of the neighborhood stores you’ve seen as competitors can also be seen as teammates?
     Your participation in business improvement districts, merchant associations, a local chamber of commerce, and informal hobnobbing can all help you discover more about your retailing neighborhood.
     One of your objectives should be to identify what shopper psychologists call “market mavens.” Positive word-of-mouth helps convince people to shop at your store, and market mavens are particularly effective at broadcasting positive word-of mouth. Market mavens are a special type of opinion leader. Rather than considering themselves expert advisors on only certain retail products and services, market mavens counsel others about the whole shopping experience and recommend specific stores.
     Team up with other local retailers to exchange information on market mavens. Research at University of Mannheim and University of Texas-Austin finds that market mavens aim to keep current about many retailers in the same geographical area. A study based at Providence College and University of Connecticut indicates that a main reason for the value to you of market mavens is the stable self-confidence with which they make recommendations to all the people they know.
     Currently, some experts are saying this sort of neighborhood cooperation is essential for retailers’ full profitability. Here’s why: Manufacturers and Payment Card Industry companies are finalizing plans to use the GPS capabilities on shoppers’ mobile devices to gather information about each shopper’s physical location, combine this with information already gathered about the person’s purchasing patterns, and then entice the shopper to go next to a nearby store that pays for the referral.
     The retailing experts are recommending you preserve your profitability by getting to know the shopping patterns people use in the stores near to you and then work out cross-referral and cross-promotion arrangements. At least one expert is highly confident groups of stores can prevail in doing this. But this assumes you start taking action now. Join in. Get to know your neighbors, retailer.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more:
Visit Other Retailers
Build Buzz with Market Mavens
Team Up in Making Your Purchases