Curiosity – Leaders need to be curious. Looking for new thing or trying new things should be the way of life for a leader. If you do not try new things you bill be stagnate and your company or organization will not thrive.
Confidence – Confidence. This is a no-brainer for leaders. You HAVE to have it. Without you simply are not a leader. You need to believe and yourself. If you do not believe in yourself your followers will not believe in you either. IF this happens your organization will utterly fail.
Courage – Stand up for yourself. If you feel like there is something that could be done better have the courage to say something. This goes hand in hand with confidence.
Constancy- Good leaders are dependable leaders. A follower must know that they can rely on you just as a leader should know that they can rely on their followers. Its a relationship that is built around constancy.
Pet food companies know how to market to consumers. They manipulate the consumer’s behavior by using pictures of gourmet food and adjectives such as fresh and gourmet.
Pet companies are not marketing to pets, they are marketing to the owners. Companies will create canned meals that a consumer in their mind would like.
Say you as a consumer really like beef stew. In fact beef stew is your favorite soup. It makes you feel warm inside and reminds you of homemade beef stew at your grandma’s house. When shopping the pet food aisle you come along this….
Not only is it actually called Beef Stew but it also has pictures of vegetables and beef that look fresh and appealing. The container its self is a genius piece of marketing. It looks like a Rubbermaid leftover container and also has a clear space where you can see the food. The dog food just happens to look like real beef stew.
As soon as you see this, your mind says well if it looks like that then it has to be good! Your thinking of what it would taste like for you instead of your dog!
While Saturday Night Live makes fun of this, it is a real world marketing strategy used by almost every pet food company. Like organic foods? Buy organic pet food! Like seafood? Get Friskies Ocean Whitefish & Tuna Dinner!
List of Purina Beneful Wet Dog Food Flavors (Pay Attention To Bold Words)
Beef and Chicken Medley
Beef Stew
Chicken Stew
Hearty RoastersSavory Beef Recipe
Hearty Roasters Savory Pork Recipe
Hearty Roasters Savory Turkey Recipe
Roasted Turkey Medley
Savory Rice & Lamb Stew
Simmered Beef Entrée
Simmered Chicken Medley
Think abut this the next time you go shopping for pet food!
More and more consumers are looking for personalized service. They want products and service tailored specifically to them. Model T’s would not sell in today’s world.
Disney is excellent at creating a personalized service for their guests. The Bibbity Bobbity Boutique is located in Downtown Disney and is a boutique where young girls can get a one-on-one appointment with a fairy to turn the girl into a princess. If you don’t want to be a princess you can become a pirate at the Magic Kingdom.
Consumers will seek out a place that offers them something that is exclusive to them. It makes them feel important and special. There is a fee that is usually associated with personalization and the majority of consumers are willing to pay it.
I came across this video on YouTube. It talks about the current state of the fashion industry and the possible future.
The video brings up great points and opinions. Phillips believes that the consumer still needs a brick and mortar store for fashion. I very rarely will purchase clothes online. Overall, I do not do a lot of online shopping. With clothes I want to be able to try them on before I buy them.
With online shopping if the clothes do not fit you either have to ship them back or take them to the nearest store, which is more of a pain, then juts trying them on in the first place and receiving them immediately.
Consumers also look for an experience. Like the video states websites cannot give the consumer the same experience that store does and that many shoppers see fashion shopping as not just shopping but as a social event as well.
Consumers are looking for more technology in the stores. Stores must find a balance of the right amount of technology.
Overall I agree with the video. Companies need to find a good balance between online and brick and mortar.
(Watch Hulu Video Above)(Ads May Play Before Video)
The Menards that I work at in West Lafayette had a bad Black Friday. There were not as many customers as expected.
I go Black Friday shopping every year. Even if you aren’t getting any “big ticket” items, it is fun to watch the crowds. Everyone should experience a Black Friday at least once in his or her lifetime.
This year the first store, Wal-Mart, opened at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Then on every hour after that, more and more stores opened. After the midnight openings, the next stores did not open until 5 a.m. including Menards.
There was a five-hour gap between the waves of stores. Shoppers were out until midnight and then went home. They probably then fell asleep and even if they had alarms for 5 a.m., ignored them. I was one of these shoppers but I also had to work at noon.
All the stores need to open in the same time frame with no long breaks in between them. This would increase sales and shopper traffic.
It will be interesting what will happen next year. Wal-Mart did get a lot of bad publicity for opening at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving but what does that mean for the future?
In todays high competitive saturated market there are few ways a store can stand out from another. One of the ways to stand out is to provide the best customer service that you can.
Customers are becoming more and more needy and demand customer service. If you do not give them customer service they will leave and go to the competition. Consumers expect that if they have a problem with a product or an employee that a manager will have a magical Band Aid that will make it all better.
While interning at Walt Disney World, I was able to learn guest service from the best. I was taught different techniques and ways to handle guest dissatisfaction. There are seminars and classes that Disney offers companies. These classes go over guest service and I think every retail company should enroll in these. The proof is in the pudding as they say.
Consumers expect guest service from the time they enter the parking lot until the time they leave the parking lot. Cashiers are usually the last employee a customer sees and that is why all cashiers must be quick and efficent while providing the best customer service possible. Customers expect the cart collectors to be friendly and courteous.
Whenever customer service is brought up, I think of this classic story…
“A man came into Home Depot one day with a tire and asked to return it. The cashier explained to the man, “I’m sorry sir, but we can’t return a tire.”
The man said, “I bought my tires here but they wore out very quickly and I’m very unhappy with their short life span. I want to return them.”
Again, the cashier calmly explained that we can’t return tires here. He said, “Sir, The Home Depot has never sold tires and we can’t return it.”
The man asked to speak to a manager. The manager, who was all for customer service, asked the man how much he had paid for the tires. When the man told him the exact amount, the manager opened a till and gave the man his money back.
The cashier, baffled, asked the manager why he had given the man money back, when obviously The Home Depot doesn’t, and never has, sold tires. The manager explained to the cashier that the customer is always right, and we want to do everything we can to keep our customers happy.
A week later, after some research, the manager found out that before that specific Home Depot store was there, a tire store had been in it’s place.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way that customers who like your company could seek your company out, enroll to your advertisements, and get updated each time you advertise something about your company? Well there is something just like that! Facebook!
Consumers will search Facebook for their favorite brands and stores and “like” them. This lets the brand and store tap into the consumer directly instead of wasting money on their forms of advertising that may or may not reach their target market.
Why do consumers “like” brands and stores? Need of association is one reason. People want to feel like they belong to groups. By liking a company or brand they are associating themselves with a group of people that like that brand or company as well. Also, friends can see what you “like” so that is another form association. You can associate with your current friends by liking the things that they like.
Another reason that a consumer likes Facebook is to get those updates sent out by the company. A lot of great deals and coupons are given out on Facebook. Facebook is also used as a stage to release new products and services offered by brands and stores.
Consumers like choices. They like to decide for themselves which product or brand will suit their needs better. There is however a point where the consumer can be overwhelmed by options and this will cause them to be come frustrated and may not even make a purchase.
One new innovation that is all about choices is Coke Freestyle. Featured in the local restaurant Firehouse Subs, Coke Freestyle is a fountain machine that gives consumers over 100 beverage choices. Included in these choices are diet and low calorie options. In this case users love the ability to personalize and choose what kind of beverage they want. The YouTube video interviews customers who had a positive experience with the machine.
Another example of consumers want options is when purchasing computers. There are a lot of different components and options that a computer can have but different consumers are looking for different things. Some may only be using to surf the web while others need a high performance gaming machine. Options allow both of these consumers find something they want.
As a retailer you must have options for the consumer. Having options will keep the consumer customer coming back, which helps your bottom line.
John Moffett's Consumer Behavior Blog 