Driving around Sydney this week is as close to manageable as you will get – kids, plus teachers plus another few hundred thousand on holiday means you can actually get from A to B in less than half a day, which gives you time to see what kitchen companies are offering in this – the sale season!
And this year it seems their has been many ways to attract a potential customer in Sydney:
- $3000 off stone bench tops
- 50% off cabinets
- Free glass splash back valued at $1500 plus free consultation
- New Year Sale……
- Free kitchen installation plus free check measure
- $4510 off plus free wall tiles, water purifier or air filter valued at $499
Or is that what happened last year – I’m unsure. I write this because last week I read an excellent article by Paul Crow, MD of British Bathroom Renovator, Ripples which appeared in KBB Review. In it he describes the decisions they had to make as a franchised company about their next promotion, something that the marketing departments of the above companies obviously sat long and hard and thought about before releasing their campaigns.
“We had our company franchisee conference this week and used the sanctuary of yet another luxury five-star hotel to discuss some naughty words banished from the showrooms, like discounts and promotions. We don’t discount is what we tell our customers and we don’t like giving anything away. But, we don’t like customers not giving us their money either, and getting it can sometimes be a bigger problem than our sales team would like.
We had predicted a year of challenges and regular customer negotiations, but it was clear that things had gotten a lot better. Margins were up, sales also, but we still needed more customers. Last year, we placed giant red chillies in the windows of every showroom to headline our ‘red hot’ October Winter Warmers offer. They looked fantastic, created a real talking point, and they certainly boosted purchases of the under-floor heating we were giving away with every order. But it didn’t really make the dent in the sales figure expected. Had we been too artistic in our promotion?
So we decided to walk the high street to see what everyone else was doing. We shouldn’t have been surprised to see that many known ‘names’ were still heavily dependent on promotions, sales or other fancy campaigns to draw their customers in. And, based on the number of people that were doing it, they were clearly working. Sure, there were more Primark bags walking down the street than Jigsaw, but both had unique campaigns that seemed to suit their offering.
But how do you drive business today and not damage your brand tomorrow? If you always have a sale, customers will always want sale prices, and if you always have 25% off, you will always have someone cheaper down the road. But if you do nothing, nothing happens.
From the straw poll of our franchisees, the general consensus was that customers are still looking for deals, but not as much as they were in 2013. We therefore needed a method of forcing them to make a decision – an idea that could increase sales (during and after the promotion) and a campaign that supported the core values of the brand.
So, in conjunction with our main radiator supplier, we hatched a plan. We would give products away for free. We would use the opportunity to update all the radiators in the showrooms, and we would retrain and refocus all the sales teams, putting in place various incentives to reward them for their efforts along the way. To make sure our customers didn’t miss it, we shouted about the promotion – very loudly. We declared Winter Warmers in big Day-Glo letters and decorated them with even bigger bright orange smiley pumpkins that dominated our windows, our web page adverts and the flyers we posted through thousands of letterboxes.
What on earth had we done? Would Harrods have done it? No. Jigsaw? I suspect not. But we did and in the process produced record figures for our radiator supplier, a motivated and better trained sales team, a record number of web visitors from the promotional campaign and fortunately our best ever group sales figure for the month.
Is there a downside? I’ll let you know, but the evidence is that most orders placed were actually at the high end of the budget range and that, for now, leads me to conclude you can run successful promotions for the customer and keep yourself, your sales team and your suppliers happy.”
I like what Paul has to say – a lot. Too often there’s a tendency take an easy option (but then again, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it) but these are major promotions that obviously effect the future of businesses.
Anyone care to tell us what the best offer in our industry has been by way of a marketing campaign??
