Wear hunger on your sleeve

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic started to rage, retail and lifestyle as an industry has been on a stretcher.

In the last three months of the lockdown, the industry has been largely dead.

As the economy opens up, cautiously at best, the retail & lifestyle business is just about looking for a revival of interest in its offerings. I do believe this needs to be seen as an opportunity to really re-invent, and an opportunity to disrupt retail altogether.

It’s business as Un-usual!

As every retailer follows every little thing in the SOP (Standard Operating Practice) prescribed by the government, it is time to sit up and do the different. Time to even disrupt your retail model altogether.

As business starts reviving, and as consumers start wanting to visit retail outlets once again, the biggest worry in their minds is the aspect of hygiene. Hygiene is the new paranoia. As retail businesses start following every step in the hygiene-game, it is time for retail to go a step forward, beyond the call of SOP.

Delight your customer with more and more. Mollycoddle your customer, disrupt your store and stop thinking of your store as a 60X40 space even. Your store is much bigger than all that. Your store lives in the mind of the consumer. Get in there. Create that very needed noise in that mind. The right kind of noise. Treat your store as a portal. A portal that
excites interest. The store is a box. Jump out of the box!

Jump into formats that are all about personalized tele-calling. Call in and chat with your customer. If you have their number, call them. But dear storeowner, don’t outsource that call. If you are a small store, please behave like one. The boss must call in. Not a tele-calling executive outsourced to do the job. That’s so yesterday!

Call and offer a service of trial at home, if you are a dress-store. Dear storeowner, get off the pedestal of your making. I know you drive that BMW, but get out of your store on the high street and stand on the street if necessary, welcoming in customers. Gone are the days of thinking this to be infra dig a task. Put on your best shoes and put your feet on the street. Get the whole street talking that you, the big name of that big retail outlet are on the street, hungry to get business back. Show hunger. It’s a good way to re-start. Imagine if nothing else, what a big noise you would make, if every shop-owner and every big designer stood outside their store (in mask for sure) on the MG Road, the Commercial Street, the Brigade Road, Kempegowda Road, Chikpet and Indiranagar 100ft Road welcoming customers back! Do it for a week. Do it for a month. But do it for sure.

Dear retail and lifestyle brand, and most certainly every restaurant brand, do wear hunger on your sleeves. It’s good for business.

(The writer is a Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults)