After reading the September newsletter from furniture guru Jerry Epperson I wondered if death were a better option than retail.
Jerry is typically easy on the ears and his market presentations, while interesting, are typically a rewrapped repeat of his previous words of wisdom.
The industry clamors to hear him speak.
His newsletter didn’t talk about the meteoric changes sweeping through the industry. It wasn’t chock full of nuggets of research data to act upon. It didn’t provide a single ray of hope for small business owners. Depressing!?
To me, he suggested only the lucky will survive and the rest will simply be gone.
His diatribe makes me think about something more basic, something that feels to me like eternal, ancient wisdom: the age-old, secret formula for success in customer relationships and communication.
This long lost secret is kept alive by powerfully portraying situations with carefully chosen words. Someone once said, “This price of clarity is the risk of offense.” Words start wars, and end them. Words create love and hate alike, they make us double over in laughter, and crawl deeply under the covers all alone to sob.
Get your “word” act in order. It’s important. Don’t just say or write things for the sake of filling the space or the time; speak to change the world, even if it’s one life at a time.
Face it. As far as the vast majority of customers are concerned, it’s all about the bottom line. Their bottom line – not ours.
There used to be an old media equation of placing advertising in appropriate places, with appropriate budgets, hoping someone will see it, hear it and read it. This just doesn’t cut it any longer. Retailers know this. Retailers want marketers, and customers want stores, who are able to speak their language, understand their issues and fight the good fight right next to them in the trenches to gain sales, share and market dominance.
I wonder, in this day and age of communication, why people of great influence don’t spend a little more time choosing their words.
The pink shaded sky seen through rose colored glasses won’t help stores pay their bills, but as Bill Cosby said, “”Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.”
Want to take on the world? Call me!
