Inspire Store Staff by Persuading Shoppers

Effective advertising directed at a store’s potential customers also positively influences the store’s current employees. Researchers at Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics find that the organizational identification of the employees increases because the effectiveness of the advertising empowers them. Empowerment of staff with strong organizational identification builds store sales and lowers turnover of talented staff. Together, these improve profitability.
     When employees see their employers advertise, this builds pride. However, the research finds that a more important consideration is how effective the employees think the ads are. Therefore, regularly ask your employees for suggestions about your store advertising, incorporate those suggestions into your ad campaigns, and share with staff evidence of ad effectiveness.
     You also could invite employees to be featured in your ads. That builds organizational identification directly plus gives participants the opportunity to build it further by striving to be effective spokespersons.

• What opportunities do you provide your sales staff to thoroughly learn about each of the products and services they're selling? 
• Aside from sales personnel, what are the roles played by others in your store operations, and what interesting tales might they have to share with shoppers? 
• To what degree do you take the recommendations of your staff—those who purchase the merchandise, those who sell to individual consumers, those responsible for business-to-business accounts, those who handle returns, and the rest—as to what items should be pruned out of your merchandise mix because the staff feel uncomfortable endorsing them? 

     Use advertising and social media to inspire not only current, but also prospective, store staff.

• Include material on your social media sites to reflect the history and the culture of your store. Job applicants can assess the personality of your business from what you, the owner or operator, choose to show and tell. 
• Encourage your current employees to contribute material to the pages, and then comment as the owner/operator on what’s been contributed. 
• Invite job seekers to ask questions via the site, and then answer the questions in ways appealing to the types of people you’d like to have working for you. 

     All this underlines the challenges in recognizing the full return on advertising investment. Beyond empowering employees, ads effective with consumers can increase interest among investors. And even if your advertising isn’t increasing sales right now, it still might be serving you well by bringing your store into the shopper’s consideration for the future.

For your success: Retailer’s Edge: Boost Profits Using Shopper Psychology

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