Retail Reciprocity: Bricks to Clicks

At first glance, Home Hardware’s locations, might appear to be unlikely bastions of a brand renowned for highly personable and helpful customer service. Commentators have wondered if their stores are designed by “medieval contortionists”¹ based on the constrictive aisles and chaotic floor plans. Yet, it is precisely this quirkiness and authenticity that has helped this $6 B revenue retailer thrive against the likes of Big Box chains and online behemoths such as Amazon. So far, the story has been that high levels of service and product knowledge beat the competition, but with changing demographics, the diffusion of the winning in-store formula to online is likely imperative for survival.

Symbiosis

Home Hardware has been unusually explicit about the type of relationship they wish to have with their customers in their marketing messages. While the current motto of “Here’s How” is strongly suggestive, the previous tagline was even more definitive about the brand’s intentions (see image right).

If we unpack this tagline, we see a clear message of empathy: you’re a home owner, we’re also home owners. Similarly, “helping” suggests a focus on personal relationships, rather than the interacting with a faceless corporation. The invitation to “ask the experts” is suggestive of a desire to create value for the customer, as opposed to thoughtless revenue extraction.

Before you have even walked into the store for your first visit, the tagline prepares you for a mutually beneficial relationship, which is based on reciprocity and creating value for both the customer and the brand. This leads to willfully engaged customers, who are more likely to transact, purchase more frequently, spend more per visit and are worth 3 or more times to the brand when compared to non-highly engaged customers².

A Tough Act to Follow

Home Hardware’s helpful and expert staff would seem unrecognizable to patrons of London’s shops in the 1880’s as colorfully recollected by a Chicago retailer’s magnate, Harry Gordon Selfridge:

‘Is Sir intending to buy something?’ asked one supercilious man. ’No, I’m just looking,’ replied Selfridge, at which the floorwalker dropped his pseudo-smart voice and snarled, ’Then ’op it mate!’³

At the time, radical ideas such as the “free entrance” pioneered by entrepreneurs like Alexander Turney Stewart in New York had not crossed the ocean to England. Stewart introduced “the shocking concept of not hassling customers the moment they walked through the door”⁴. Prior to these innovations, sales staff were primarily concerned with providing security for goods, and extracting revenue from patrons systematically and swiftly.

In contrast, Home Hardware management prides itself with staffing its stores with experts that remain current with on-going access to seminars and are committed to continuous learning through new product training¹. This often also means stacking the roster with staff members with pedigree and credentials such as running their own wood stove operations, or being members of a competitive BBQ team¹.

Aside from providing deep expertise in product knowledge, the smaller scale and community focused nature of the stores allows staff to recognize customers and to engage with them at a personal level. Staff are uniquely positioned understand what current projects a customer is working on and make helpful recommendations. For example, staff can suggest relevant products to customers that are frequently visiting the store within a weekly period related to a large project underway.

While it is hard to argue against the effectiveness of Home Hardware’s expert staff strategy, it is a challenging model to scale and to adapt to changing customer expectations. Pessimists will argue that attempting to use technology to scale this experience would be alienating for customers and would only debase the brand ethos and mythology through detached and impersonal e-commerce. However, marketing technology has evolved where delivering relevancy and personal attention at scale is now routine.

Project of a Lifetime

Before exploring how to emulate or replicate the in-store expert experience, let’s consider why these personal interactions are so valuable in the first place. For many, a trip inside Home Hardware’s walls is about more than simply acquiring the necessary objects and tools to fulfill some basic utility. Customers are seeking a much deeper form of fulfillment, which anthropologists have explained as how people receive on-going pleasure from acquiring consumer goods and making them their own through personal curation as an expression of self identity⁵.

Luckily for retailers, this form of self expression is the project of a lifetime, which is infinitely expandable. There is consistently room for further embellishments in every room, and even once every room seems to have reached the apex of comfort, there is always the possibility of bringing “the indoors outside” with endless patio and deck luxuries. Aside from comfort and the pride of ownership, marketers have been acutely aware of the endless pursuit of degrees of cleanliness:

There was always ‘whiter than white’, to use the Persil slogan… A vacuum cleaner and washing machine did save two to nine hours per week… But this gain was virtually wiped out by more frequent hovering and laundry and higher standards of cleanliness. Sheets and clothes were changed and washed more often. Within a generation of its adoption, the washing machine transformed how it felt to be clean or dirty⁶

These personal curation journeys are not limited to the acquisition of objects, but extend to the building of new skills as well⁷. Backyard vegetable gardens are not required for our daily sustenance, instead they are part of a set of renewed hobbies and leisure activity that are time consuming and require the on-going development of new skills. As new skills are developed, they create new expectations, which further feeds the cycle of consumption⁷.

Pretty Planters, or Partnership?

Consumers have an abundance of choices when it comes to which retailer they will shop for their lifetime projects. Promoting sleek patio furniture, pretty planters or new innovative garden hoses only goes so far, as “what pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it” according to Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1795 Part IV, ch.i.). Smith goes on to explain that it isn’t necessary to actually use these objects — the mere access to them affords pleasure:

If we examine, however, why the spectator distinguishes with such admiration the condition of the rich and the great, we shall find that it is not so much upon account of the superior ease or pleasure which they are supposed to enjoy, as of the numberless artificial and elegant contrivances for promoting this ease or pleasure. He does not even imagine that they are really happier than other people: but he imagines that they possess more means of happiness.

What Home Hardware (and other retailers) are really selling is access to the means of happiness. This is one of the strong underlying reasons why an effective strategy is to provide knowledgeable and expert staff, as it helps to elevate the retailer’s offering from mere shelves stocked with products, to a partnership built on reciprocity.

Loyal customers to Home Hardware already (consciously or unconsciously) recognize their relationship with the brand as a partnership, which is why they return again and again for meeting their current and future project needs. The mere access to expert knowledge, advice and help is valued, even if the customer decides to tackle the challenge on their own.

Diffusion

“Online isn’t about personal attention,” says one owner. “It’s about technology and logistics. We made our reputation doing other things well. I’m not sure we should be going there.”~ A Home Hardware Location Owner¹

Providing personal attention and tailored access to expert resources is not only technically possible, but it is transpires routinely today and is woven into the fabric of many leading organizations marketing operations. In addition to the examples in the insurance and entertainment sectors I’ve written about, the maturation and practical application of machine learning and artificial intelligence is a key factor in successfully emulating the in store experience online.

Below are some examples of scenarios where today’s marketing technology can detect, arbitrate and mirror the kind of personal touch, while doing it all at scale:

• Recognizing that a large deck project is underway for Bob and that he is likely mid project, we recommend the next product category he’ll need (sealant) along with helpful guides and information about how to choose the best specific product
• Once we’ve detected that Bob’s deck is complete and he’s exhausted purchases in that category, it’s time to make recommendations about other categories that people like Bob commonly move to next (e.g. BBQs)
• We noticed that Susan’s pergola project seems to have stalled. We were able to redirect her to some educational videos and articles on which circular saw blades would be appropriate and we got the project back on track
• At first, we recommended products that would suit Margaret’s cramped living quarters in her condominium. However, once we observed how she browsed our catalog online, we realized she was shopping for her family cottage and we were able to provide much more relevant suggestions

The above interactions are only examples. In a robust marketing ecosystem, prioritization and individualized recommendations are not explicitly predefined by marketers. Instead, they rely on real-time decisioning and machine learning to automate these decisions at a scale that would be impossible to replicate manually. To get close to approximating personal attention, some retailers support thousands of interaction types, which are further personalized through variations in specific products and messaging.

While individual marketing technology products and solutions are important, convincing mimicry of the personal experience is not something that can happen overnight. Choosing to internally build the necessary foundations to support some of the use cases listed above may be a suitable approach for your organization, but it isn’t the only choice.

¹ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/how-quirky-home-hardware-is-battling-the-big-box-chainsandwinning/article36027934/ ² A global retailer Digital Alchemy client ³ Lindy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge (London: Profile Books, 2007) ⁴ Tim Harford, Fifty Inventions that shaped the modern economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017) ⁵ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and The Self (Cambridge, 1981) ⁶ Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things (2017) ⁷ Elizabeth Shove et al., The Desigjn of Everyday Life (Oxford, 2007)