In last week’s Friday Focus I highlighted the need to make things as easy as possible for your customers to access your products and services. I said that you should make this “stupidly easy”.
Ten years ago I ran a project with Boots to develop a new city-centre store format. We picked an initial store to prototype our solutions and made a lot of changes. We halved the range, focused on brands more likely to appeal to younger working women, increased the sandwich and food offer, added new tills, changed the shift patterns of the store team and developed more focused promotions and deals.
We also changed the store hours, opening one hour earlier and closing one hour later in the week, and also opening on Saturday.
The new store was a huge success and sales grew by over 20%. When we analysed the uplift in revenue, however, we saw that three-quarters of the gains took place in the new opening hours.
We had made the store a bit more “stupidly easy” to shop and customers had responded immediately.
What can you do to make your products and services more “stupidly easy” to buy?
© Stuart Cross 2012. All rights reserved.