Marketing retail TheCustomer

‘Stack it High, Watch it Fly’ … How not to do retail in 2018.

Carrefour CX Fail

A long time ago, when I worked for companies like Unilever and Procter and Gamble, there was a mentality among retailers that if you bought a ton of something and stuck a big red SALE sticker on it, you could move it.

It’s a methodology that is flawed. It doesn’t work for retailers, or suppliers and sometimes it doesn’t even make sense for customers.

In a world of Ecommerce and Big Data and recommendation engines and predicitive analytics, promotions need to be more clever, but not too clever.

I recently needed to buy a cheap laptop. I’ve commented on the customer experience of buying a laptop in Carrefour before, but nothing has changed. My requirements were pretty simple – it needed to be relatively light, it needed a half decent amount of memory, but other than that I was open to anything – even a generic!

The conversation went a bit like this. 

Me – I’d like this computer, but I don’t want the printer. 

Them – You have to take the printer. 

Me – I’ll pay the same price, I don’t want a different deal, but I don’t want the printer. 

Them – You have to take the printer. 

Me – Do you have any other computers in this price range, with this spec?

Them – This one (at AED 1299).

Me – That’s 45% more expensive. 

Them – ‘Shrug’

Me – I want that one, but I don’t want the printer. 

Them – You have to take the printer. 

Me – Ok, I’ll give the printer to you. You can have the printer. 

Them – No. That wouldn’t be right. 

Me – Ok, can you deliver the printer?

Them – No. 

… 

Eventually, after more tediousness where I asked what they would expect me to do if I was a tourist and didn’t feel like carting a printer back to Australia and didn’t get much response, they caved in and let me buy a computer at the advertised price and let me leave the store without the printer.

The experience was laughable. The promotion no doubt cooked up to shift more printer cartridges at a massive margin.

And I don’t really have a problem with the promotion itself – many people, perhaps most people who buy a laptop would love a free printer. I could have taken it with me and left it in a trolley in the car-park. I could have perhaps ordered a cab to take me home and sell it on Dubizzle or give it to a friend, but all of those things were at the time, and still to this day an inconvenience, a hassle, friction in the process.

That the store associates (shop floor staff) were not empowered enough to just say “sure, no problem” points to large, worrying structural and cultural issues, which is why retail is in such a bad place.

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