Mind The...

In November of last year, I had a meeting with TFL to discuss the downturn in trading at Broadway Shopping Mall, and more pertinently whether Mishmash Bookshop would survive into the New Year. And we all know what happened…

I cited what I considered to be the most malignant problems; poor signage, unclean and unwelcoming environment, departure of substantial customer demographic, competition from higher profile sites nearby. Not so, I was told; despite my experience as a retailer I was, apparently, reading the signals wrongly. It was the fault of the customers themselves; “Everyone wants branding nowadays, Andrew, and that includes us [TFL]”.

This stuck in my mind; and now that I am [technically] unemployed and at home, with time to trawl the Sunday business pages, I can see how ill-formed TFL's strategy is. Big branding is over – or at least it would be if they hadn’t bought up all the big, expensive, commercial sites. Gap is up for sale, down 8%. WH Smith is down 6% in the last quarter, and raids its workers’ pension fund. HMV is ‘going to the dogs’. Bloomsbury – who own Harry Potter, the strongest brand in books – delivers a profit warning. Radio phone-ins and blogs recount the public’s concern about Tesco’s fearsome buying power and acquisition strategies.

What the customer – the really important person in all of this – wants nowadays is quality of service. Reliable, high grade products delivered as and when required. Ten years ago the big brands fulfilled this, the independents largely failed. But those surviving smaller retailers have, by necessity, developed excellent marketing strategies; while the majors have got lazy and arrogant about their like-for-like and their segmentation. And consequently, the lazy, arrogant commercial property agents have got their strategy wrong too.

None, they say, is blinder than him who will not see.

Andrew Mishmash