Ah, the good old days! Fact is, the furniture industry was successful in the 1950’s and the 1970’s and 1990’s. But “nothing fails like success,” says Gerald Nachman, cultural historian and founder of www.thecolumnist.com. Financial success turned our industry into a left-brain culture. Left-brain cultures are good at preserving old paradigms and programs, what Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen calls “sustaining technology.”

This works well when an industry is hitting on all cylinders. But when they slump, as is happening in furniture right now, left-brain cultures fail. In this industry’s case, we have tried to innovate by building lines that look exactly the same only cheaper because we believe the customer is only interested in price. Marketing departments scream louder and louder about unsustainable credit offers, and now we are trying to make cheap computers and bad bicycle give-a-ways the reason Ms. Jones should visit our stores. Leaders won’t implement technology, claiming the customer will not be interested in fully using it, and the result is bland brands and slow growth or dying retailers.

In his 2005 bestseller, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink says, “The future belongs to designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers—creative and empathetic right-brain thinkers” who exhibit “the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative.” In every industry there must be right-brain thinkers. They’ll need promoted and will play a part in upending existing paradigms.

The cold reality is that left-brain cultures are a liability when it comes to innovation. These cultures are not bad—they’re simply not equipped to move forward. Left-brain cultures rearrange existing programs; they rarely allow systemic change. They claim today’s situations is really the same as it ever was.

3+2-5 is not an innovative way of saying 5-3-2. The sum remains the same: zero.

The last time paid newspaper circulation in the United States was at its current level, a new house was selling for $4,600, a gallon of gas was 15 cents and the average annual wage was $2,400.  Oppenheimer’s Little Boy and Fat Man were about to bring World War II to an end. Clearly a lot has changed in the past sixty-four years.

Unfortunately, furniture marketing is stuck in this mid-20^th century fantasy land. Print media is still the dominant media choice for family-owned and family-run furniture companies. According to the 2009 ABTV industry watch report, the Top 25 sources experienced an average drop in sales of 10.4% last year.

According to this same report, “Marketing holds the hope for revival.” This is a scary proposition, because as the report points out, “In furniture companies, of course, marketing has traditionally been weak.” It goes on to say, “Even dire circumstances have not induced furniture companies to try to learn from other consumer goods sectors” (page 15).

Marketing in today’s environment is confusing and difficult. Retailers and suppliers alike are trying to find enough consumer money to keep the lights on. Marketing professionals are paddling beyond control to learn and implement emerging media in a way that benefits their clients.  At the same time, even the studies are confusing and conflicting. An example is a recent NAA (Newspaper Association of America) report stating these glowing claims:

1. First quarter traffic to newspaper Web sites was reported as 73.3 million unique visitors (average per month) by Nielsen.
2. That’s 43.6 percent of all U. S. internet users, up 10.5 percent versus the same time last year.
3. Page views grew from 3.1 billion per month in last year’s first quarter, to 3.5 billion in 2009.
4. NAA CEO John Sturm suggests these point to “digital success.”

But if we look at each of these “glowing” results in some context clearly the picture is not so rosy! Consider this information about the other side of the statistics:

1. The top three news destinations on the Web (MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo!News) each drew more than half the unique visitors of the entire newspaper industry in March. Year-over-year, MSNBC grew 9 percent, CNN 4 percent, and Yahoo!News 16 percent.
2. Yahoo! News alone gained 5.2 million unique visitors in March, or nearly 70 percent of the gain of the entire newspaper industry.
3. Newspaper page views at 3.5 billion per month are less than one percent of total U.S. page views (386 billion in February).
4. Time spent on newspaper sites in February, 43 minutes, 9 seconds per month per NAA/Nielsen, compares with total time online of 61 hours, 11 minutes and 56 seconds per U.S. person.  This means newspaper sites get the attention of the U.S. online audience just 1.2 percent of the time.
5. The total U.S. online audience (what Nielsen calls the “active digital media universe”) in February was 167 million individuals.  As NAA does note, 43.6 percent of that audience visited a newspaper web site, but given that newspaper site traffic works out to only about 1.6 page views per reader per day, many of the newspaper site unique viewers are clearly represent one-time-only traffic.

This information is easily found with only a small amount of time and research. As the leader of your privately owned and mostly family run businesses, why there is NOT audible dull noise leading to an ear drum busting roar of insistence on getting best advice for every area of your media strategy?

The conclusion of the ABTV report and my point are exactly the same: “The furniture industry needs to reject the old formulas that no longer get results, to replace the old dogmas that have lost their meaning, to refuse to settle for mediocrity, and to insist on world-class performance. It’s the only way to survive.”

The single most important number that directly impact your profitability doesn’t even appear on your financial statements: Customer Satisfaction. Our Ask Ms. Jones™ process provides you with prompt, actionable information so you’ll know exactly what your customers are saying about you, which positions you as a problem solving expert armed with answers that can laser guide your store to the top of the heap.

Our furniture-exclusive process, based on the Net Promoter Score (or NPS®), is a straightforward metric that holds you accountable for how you treat customers. The concept was first popularized through the book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth. Employees at all levels of the organization understand it, opening the door to customer- centric change and improved performance.

How to Calculate Your Score
NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one simple question — How likely is it that you would you recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague? — you can track these groups and get a clear measure of your company’s performance through its customers’ eyes. Customers respond on a 0-to-10 point rating scale and are categorized as follows:

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

To calculate your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors.

This is not a traditional customer satisfaction program, and simply measuring your NPS will not lead to success. You’ll need to follow an associated discipline to actually drive improvements in customer loyalty and enable profitable growth. You must have leadership commitment, and the right business processes and systems in place to deliver real-time information to employees, so you can act on customer feedback and achieve results.

Read more at netpromoter.com… or if you are ready to Ask Ms Jones for the nitty gritty truth of how you are doing, sign up now.

In this morning’s New York Times I was struck by recent purchase of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field by the Ricketts family from TD Ameritrade fame.

This reminded me of furniture store stories for several reasons. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series for 101 years, Wrigley Field is the second oldest ball park in MLB and the Ricketts family made all of their wealth changing the rules of the stock trading industry. This same juxtaposition is taking place right in front of us in our industry daily.

Opportunity abounds. Our 100 year plus casegoods and textile businesses are dying painfully. New ideas for design, distribution, pricing, etc. are presenting themselves daily. At the same time, the hanger-on-ers continue to hang-on. Old thinking is sucking the life from many.

The Cubs and Wrigley were both owned by the same company, The Tribune Co., which is operating under bankruptcy protection. So is the Los Angeles Times and several other recognizable newspapers. Furniture stores continue to typically spend over one-third of their marketing budgets using this failing delivery vehicle.

Paid content news providers are growing by more than 25% annually. Aggregation websites such as Fark, Boing-Boing, ebaumsworld, CollegeHumor and Digg, and the sheer filtering efficiency of social networks do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Online search is now part of nearly every furniture purchase cycle, reportedly reaching 95% during the last twelve months.

So, who will be the Ricketts family who changes the furniture landscape in the coming years? It will be the folks who laugh out loud when they read quotes like this one by Elbert Hubbard, “Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that the cow will back up to them.”

Bob Garfield, Robert Picard, and Greg Stielstra are all making the case that we have entered the post-advertising age. How are you allowing your customer to engage with your company? How are you answering her concerns on her terms? What have you provided as a communications platform to allow her to tell you how you are doing?

At The Lively Merchant we are focused on the future. We won’t waste you money on pie-in-the-sky wild ideas. More importantly we won’t waste you money on nearly worthless newspapers just because it is the way it’s always been done.

I haven’t passed a horse and buggy on the highway recently. Have you?

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with several retailers in a round table setting. We talk at ease about television and radio and newspaper, but I often get blank stares when I bring up the subject of online strategy, ecommerce, SEO, PPC, email marketing and other non-traditional media.

Many store owners tell me they still spend the majority of their advertising dollars on newspaper and other print media. In a recent industry-wide report, stores categorized as LOW PROFIT businesses continue to spend 34.3% of their marketing in print. These same companies are spending under .05% on all things web!?

Retooling is coming to a newspaper near you in the near future. The newspaper industry is in a free fall in every measurable category: 24 of the top 25 papers in North America declined in circulation in the last 15 months. The average decline in circulation is 20%. Advertising spending has dropped 7.5% overall, but the first quarter of 2009 saw a decline of 28.3% in advertising spending. There is a plunging reduction of $2.6 billion from just a year earlier. Scripps, Gannet, McClatchy, and the New York Times have all watched their stock price go to zero in 2009.They are bankrupt!

In the new book, The Chaos Scenario, Bob Garfield writes in Chapter 1, page 33; “Both print and broadcast — burdened with unwieldy, archaic and crushingly expensive means of distribution — are experiencing the disintegration of the audience critical mass they require to operate profitably. Moreover, they are losing that audience to the infinitely fragmented digital media, which have near-zero distribution costs and are overwhelmingly free of charge to the user. Free is a tough price to compete with. As documented by Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Throat’s advice to unraveling Watergate was to ‘Follow the money.’ To understand the current predicament, you must follow the no-money.”

Safeguarded opinion established in days gone by can cause you real problems in the days ahead. Ask yourself these questions from Garfield’s Chaos group:

1. Consider your own habits.  Do you read newspapers as frequently as you once did, or do you get your news online?
2. Discuss the impact of Craigslist, Monster.com, and eHarmony on newspaper classified advertising.
3. If newspaper and magazine display advertising disappear, what alternatives will connect that audience to your brand?
4. If media institutions as large as the Tribune Company (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times) are in bankruptcy, is any mass media outlet safe?
5. How has the Internet changed the availability of content?
6. How did you get your news ten years ago? How do you get it today?
7. How much time do you spend connecting with your friends vs. consuming media?  How has that ratio changed in the last ten years?
8. If you could no longer buy advertising on mass media, how would you connect with your customers?
9. Can you name any businesses that succeeded in stopping cultural shifts?
10. Can you name any businesses that successfully adapted to cultural shifts?
11. Is your company organized/equipped to effectively listen to its customers?  What should you change or implement in order to hear them?
12. What are your customers trying to tell you?  What are you doing about it?

Empowered business owners get to decide what they believe. Documented changes in business should not be avoided. Entrenched thinking might be more comfortable than the alternative, but without a planned strategy your future is bleak. When the newspapers themselves fail in your marketplace, how will you deliver you story?

Your customer is most anxious on your website when she’s reviewing her cart. The cart page shows the cart total for the items added and the basic price – but often doesn’t show the tax or shipping charges – thus begins the fear of the unknown.

Aside from price, the customer wants assurance that she’s getting what she wanted. For furniture, this is usually size and color, material, or wood finish at the very least.

Bad cart summary pages don’t provide enough detail:

The customer is interested in a lot more information about the product.

Do not be vague. Without a thumbnail image it’s near impossible to figure out what type of bed and which finish she is going to receive if she makes the purchase.

Excellent cart pages show the sku, color, large thumbnail images, availability, tax and include a shipping calculator pre-checkout.

Reduce her anxiety on the cart page, and you’ll reduce cart abandoment.