Over the decades, we have seen many large names disappear from our high street and roads and Little Chef is just one, see this recent article on the BBC. British Home Stores, Woolworths are two others that are no longer with us and sadly there is one common theme, none of them have understood the consumer market and read how the needs are changing and adapted accordingly.

Over the past thirty years, I have been quite opinionated about how retailers have evolved and, in several cases, critical of the fact that they have not taken time to truly understand their customers and adapt, in most recent years, focusing on the need to become an experience and to move away from traditional models of sales per square foot.

Customers now still want to visit the high street and shopping centres, but are looking to visit shops to get an experience of the brand and what it can do to help them, the customer, achieve their social goals, be that in the clothes they wear, the tech they buy or the food they eat. Either way, they want to understand what the brand is about and how it matches them.

To walk into a store and see old fashioned layouts, cramped and jumbled will more likely put people off and confuse them. The alternative is you walk into a store and are taken on a journey through the brand and how it can benefit you. This will create more buy in, leading to a purchase or order there and then and longer-term loyalty.

Unfortunately, too many businesses do not take the time to understand their market place and customers and what their challenges are and the solutions they need to meet these. Businesses are guilty of continuing to push a message onto the market rather than listen and engage.

Modern social media and digital channels give us a huge amount of insight, but the really valuable skill is to interpret this information and translate it into the products the business delivers and the environment in which they promote both the brand and the products.

If we look at Little Chef, for decades the menu and the restaurants fundamentally stayed the same despite the fact that peoples’ tastes were changing and their journey planning was also altering significantly. Had Little Chef understood the changing needs as well as the changing competition, they would have been able to adapt and with the network of restaurants and their size, would have been able to take the lead in the market.

If your business is struggling to understand how to evolve to meet its customer demands and how to communicate these changes, get in touch and we can give you an objective view that will help not just maintain your existing customers but increase your sales and loyalty.

Call 07900 580407 or email owen@ewo.uk.com