#shopping experience
We all saw it coming sooner or later amidst a changing panorama of retail market conditions. Sears will close 59 stores across Canada after seeking court protection from its creditors in a move to restructure itself, but will this be enough?
For over a decade Sears has been suffering the test of time in the retail sector, having entered the 21st century without a solid plan to fight the competition, and the new online platform for retail distribution.
I remember the shopping experience even before Sears acquired Eaton in Canada in 1999, back when the Toronto flagship store downtown at Yonge and Dundas represented an important landmark for the pre-eCommerce era.
Today Sears is folding after a series of bad decisions made in their American HQ by the top management team, which failed to understand the modern market model of the new century. They blame it on Amazon but the mistakes started to happen twenty years ago, before the online shopping giant became a sensation.
How does such big brand name miss the target?- some may ask in a bit of confusion. One part of the answer can be found in the lack of vision of the company in understanding the market, the absence of storytelling, but most importantly the customer and its needs.
Here’s a list of mistakes Sears collected through the years:
- lack of multimedia strategy and innovation
- no significant digital platform to sell their products online
- old design store which provided a look and feel of early 90s
- same old brands and lack of new ones (aka stale style)
- weak new logo and branding strategy
- worn out management
All in all we cannot only blame business disruptors like Amazon for Sears’ failure to understand the market, but surely the archaic methodology of interfacing towards customers has contributed to its demise. Blame the old school marketing department that prefers relying on numbers rather than listening the true needs of the shoppers out there.
That’s the very same marketing department that constantly believed paper and flier ads were still a thing. Boy, they were wrong. Mailboxes constantly stuffed with pamphlets and seasonal catalogs failed to engage the Millennial generation (and became a nuisance for homeowners), but rather appealed to the same old crowd of customers for the past decades.
However shopping habits evolved with the competition selling different products to different crowds. Sears failed to understand their marketing strategy had a foot stuck in the 20th century. They dismissed storytelling to engage buyers and kept selling the very same products the competition had at cheaper prices.
It’s sad to see such iconic brand slowly fading to black, but new commerce platforms are emerging willing to listen customer first and most importantly willing to adapt to changing times.
