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.
He didn’t have the patience to sit around and see what might come from Congress. On May 6, 1903, he declared the Grand Canyon unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. Then in 1908, without even a hint of authority, he spoke our national parks system into existence using the power granted a President under the Antiquities Act. Interestingly enough, the park didn’t become official until 1919, when Woodrow Wilson finally signed the bill officially establishing Grand Canyon National Park.
I think Teddy would well understand the small business owner in America today.
In 1906, Roosevelt made his now famous Muckraker speech. Muckrakers were people who worked to reveal corruption in business and in government. The first stories about the “muckrakers” appeared In McClure’s Magazine in January, 1901.
As I read these words today, I feel like he is talking directly to the many family business owners I have the pleasure of working with:
“It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”
Times are rough. All of the credit belongs with those of us in the arena. Speak your future into existence. Let’s agree to not be timid.
TS Eliot said, “Business today consists in persuading crowds.”
Do you believe your marketing and training message is persuasive?
Does your organization show understanding, trust, threat, tension, surprise, substitution, specificity, social proof, similarity, repetition, push, pull, perception, passion, obligation, objectivity, logic, involvement, investment, interest, hurt and rescue, harmony, framing, fragmentation, experience, exchange, evidence, distraction, dependence, deception, daring, contrast, consistency, confusion, confidence, closure, bonding, authority, attention, assumption, association, arousal, appeal, amplification, or alignment?
Each are positions in persuasion that, used correctly and with timeliness, will raise the impact of your story.
How it works
When a person receives a communication from you, they decide if they can trust you and your message. Mixed messages result when beliefs, values, attitudes and prior words and actions do not tell the same story.
You know, like when will claim to have the biggest or best of something, only to eat humble pie when someone proves your claim aren’t true. Saying one thing and doing another causes a loss of trust, and a falling of confidence, and makes you appear shallow.
Remember the prayer? Your will, NOT mine… Alignment.
Hugh MacLeod said, “The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you’re already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.” How To Be Creative
The Lively Merchant’s David Lively talked about e-commerce at a special online marketing summit at Las Vegas Market — not how to build an e-commerce business, but how consumers shop.
“The industry is currently doing 9 percent of its business online (for a total of $12.3 Billion per year),” Lively said. “Forrester Research predicts that figure will rise to 11 percent in 2009, and that it will double by 2012.”
So if you’re a furniture store who believes you can’t afford to have an aggressive e-commerce strategy, Lively suggests you might want to reconsider.
Lively spoke about The Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 2001, which had a Luther-like 95 theses, which included…Read more.
Want to know more about developing a web strategy for your furniture store? Here’s more press coverage from our trip to Vegas:
Live from Las Vegas Market: How to have a successful e-mail campaign
On the eve of the Las Vegas Market, home furnishings retailers joined together to try to figure out how to tackle the problem of marketing in a new digital age. Organized by the Retail Marketing Alliance and The Lively Merchant, the Industry-Wide Web Summit was held in the Las Vegas Room at Harrah’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino and featured seminars from various experts on everything from social networks to sending messages to people’s cell phones.
One of speakers was David McMahon of Profit Consulting, who offered 10 Tips to Step into the Modern World of Customer Relations. McMahon said the first step to developing a good e-mail relationship with your customers is to make sure that you are keeping track of your customers through a Customer Relations Management system, which can be as simple as an Excel file. Next, make sure you have online publishing software that interacts with your customer database. “How those two interact determines how well you can do e-mail marketing,” McMahon says.
Here are McMahon’s 10 tips for successful e-mail marketing:
1. Deliver Value: Everyone wants to deliver e-mail blasts, but if your e-mails aren’t relevant to the specific customer who receives it, it’s borderline spam. “You need to send messages that seem as if they’ve been written specifically for the person who receives it,” McMahon says.
2. Get e-mail addresses: Keep it simple and easy, but very prominently on your site should be a place to sign up for a VIP list. Use contests and special offers.
3. Segment your database: Who bought a bedroom set but not a mattress? There’s a good marketing segment. It’s all about following up with specific e-mail campaigns based on purchasing patterns.
4. Show style and substance: It’s not about pasting names into Microsoft Outlook. Think of the e-mail as the stationary you’re going to use. Use images, but understand that they also have to work as just text — a lot of people open their e-mails on Blackberries, so if you’re relying on a .jpg, a lot of viewers are never going to see it.
5. Speak to your customers, not yourself: Make sure your e-mails speak to the recipient’s interests, not your own (at least not obviously). They’ll opt out quickly, and McMahon notes that you only have, by law, 10 days to honor someone’s opt-out, and then you’re considered spam.
6. Write engaging subject lines: You really need to consider the “subject” and “from” lines when drafting e-mails. If they are not well thought-out, no one will open the e-mails in the first place. Here are some examples of good e-mail subject lines:
– Order confirmation: #35274864637
– Special event for San Diego Customers
– Preferred Customer Card for David
– Happy Birthday on Dec. 10!
An audience member at the seminar — Devin Kinsella, CEO of Etailer Solutions — said he knew of one retailer who sent out an e-mail to customers inviting them to an after-hours wine and cheese party to see new products.
7. Teach your customers something: Content should be a learning experience for readers. If your e-mail isn’t of value to them, they won’t open them (and will eventually opt-out).
8. Tailor your message: Transactional e-mails (emails that reference a specific interaction between the recipient and the store) have high open rates.
9. Track results: What are the open ratesfor your e-mails? Which e-mails bounced (i.e., didn’t deliver)? Were any e-mails forwarded to a friend? Did customers opt-out? Opt-out rates are just as important as click-through rates, and if they’re much over 1 percent, the quality of your list might not be very good.
10. Start now: Waiting a couple of years to start e-mailing your customers is not an option. You need to get this up and running before your competitor does.
Many in the home furnishings industry are still trying to figure out how to best use the internet to boost the bottom line. To simplify the complex world of online marketing, home furnishings retailers, manufacturers, representatives and suppliers will gather at an Industry-Wide Web Summit on February 8, 2009, in Las Vegas.
The most pressing issues in the home furnishings industry are increasing expenses and decreasing revenues. Being online is the solution to both. We’ve broken online marketing down to its basic fundamentals. After four hours of teaching and an hour of interactive discussion, you will better understand the whole because you’ll understand the parts.
1245 Intro://Las Vegas Room@Harrah’s
1.oo Recipe for Online Content://Rick Doran/ President.CEO@RAMarketing.com
2.oo Simplifying PPC and SEO Marketing://Mark Phelps/President.CEO@PartnerMarketing.biz
3.oo The Power of e-Marketing://David McMahon/Director.E-Commerce@PROFITconsulting.com
4.oo What You Had Better Know About e-Commerce://David Lively/President.CEO@TheLivelyMerchant.com
All segments of the home furnishings industry are invited to learn how to improve their business through online marketing. The agenda is filled with valuable content that guarantees you will not be disappointed in what you hear. Seating is limited. Registration is required for this free event.
I never gave any thought to the worldview of Willie Nelson. In fact, his pot-smoking, Jack-Daniels-drinking, hell-raising stories just doesn’t line up real well with my life plan. So when friend suggested a couple of years ago I read “The Tao of Willie,” I thought it would be a waste of time. I was wrong. Remembering a chapter this morning I think y’all may relate to his message.
“Since life is a journey, let’s think of it as a road trip. Ahead of you are untold opportunities for joy, learning, sharing, and a lot of fantastic sunsets and sunrises. And every one of these opportunities will be at the intersection of your trip and a road called Now.
“Unlike a real highway, it’s not a problem if you doze off and coast right through the corner of Now and Happiness avenues, because life is an infinite progression of these intersections, and each of them holds opportunity, surprise, and the promise of a smile.
“But if you’re asleep at the wheel your whole life, you’re gonna miss a lot of places called Now.
“Thousands of pages and millions of words have been written about living in the moment, but it is not a complicated idea. All you have to do is open your eyes — and all your senses – to the world around you.
“The easiest mistake on earth is to forget to appreciate what you have right now.
“Take last year, for instance, when my hand started knotting up on me and I found it almost impossible to play guitar. I went to see a bunch of doctors and they got worried looks on their faces, and that put a worried look on my face, and that got my band and crew looking really worried. When I don’t work, they don’t work. And we all like to work.
“So I had to take a few months off for surgery. And while my hand was healing more slowly than I wanted it to, I had a of time to appreciate all those gigs that I’d sometimes let myself think were just the okay gigs.
“Away from the road, I realized that every show is a blessing.
“I’m not trying to say that nothing goes wrong in my life. Or in yours. Your love life may not be perfect — okay, chances are your love life is definitely NOT perfect. Work may have something lacking, and you may be a few coins shy of that Jamaican vacation you’ve been dreaming about. But those are not causes of unhappiness. Those are distractions, obstacles, and challenges to overcome.
“You may carry a big chip on your shoulder about things that happened to you in the past, but that chip is nothing but a weight that’s anchoring you to intersections you’ve already passed.
“Quit looking in the rear view mirror and set your sights on the road ahead.”
Theodore Roosevelt made stuff happen.
Many of you have asked for information about the Industry-Wide Web Summit we conducted at the market in Vegas.
For those of you who couldn’t make it to the Industry-Wide Web Summit in Vegas, you can 
Many in the home furnishings industry are still trying to figure out how to best use the internet to boost the bottom line. To simplify the complex world of online marketing, home furnishings retailers, manufacturers, representatives and suppliers will gather at an Industry-Wide Web Summit on February 8, 2009, in Las Vegas.
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