Retailing - when did it go mad?

9 years ago I started a feedback company. In 2008 I left. In 2009 it went bust. What makes me sad is that it is needed as much today as it was back in 2000 because retailers still have virtually no idea what their customers think from day to day.

Generally retailers seem to have stuck to the same model even now through the economic downturn. The model works like this. Create a bucket with lots of holes. Spend lots of time and money filling it with customers and as long as you can shove customers in the top convince yourself everything will be OK.

Now despite every book on marketing clearly saying the cost of acquiring new customers is always greater than the cost of getting existing ones to spend money, someone somewhere has been ignoring this rule big time. In fact, many, many people have.

So why is this? I've been searching for a simple truth in all this for a while, and it was only after I got married did I hit on some bedrock of truth. The fruit of a relationship doesn't necessarily come easy. Relationships are kind of messy. Most squeaky clean brands seem to try to circumvent this basic truth. Further, people do desire relationships and connections with other things. Not those mechanical, CRM type relationships but what is essentially human.

So perhaps retailers should look at the bucket and plug the holes and try to make their brands more human.

Someone somewhere knows something in Norwich

Have you every had what appears a simple request but to answer it you need to contact some part of a council or local authority set up to service such a request?

I needed a list of local independent retailers, a sector deemed rather important to Norwich. So, I made a call to the city's economic development unit. Then, I was directed to the local Business Link, who never answer their phone, or get back on messages left. Then another phone call, then another, then finally when I thought I came across someone who I thought would have the answer. They promptly told me to call the people who were first in the chain.

So I gave up. Did a Google. 15 minutes later I had the list emailed to be in an Excel table via a company based in Devon.

It does make you wonder. What value are many local authority 'economic development' people actually delivering to the local economy?

Frogs

Aren't frog's amazing? It's March (here in the UK) and standing outside my backdoor, I was listening to two frogs in separate ponds singing their croaky songs trying to attract females.

It made me think. What's going to attract female frogs to one of these males rather than the other?

It's probably going to be what makes one frog different to the other. Female frogs aren't interested (I presume) in what makes them the same, but what makes one different and better than the other.

This made me think about my visit into Norwich today (one of the UK's most attractive retail centres). I am not attracted to retailers that are the same but attracted to those that offer something different. So many of them seem to be singing the song of the frogs. It's the one that sings a different tune that would attract me.

How many businesses are singing the frog song?