The Death Throes of the High Street? – Part 2

The attack on the high street retailer

Since the 1980s local councils and planning departments have allegedly been working to improve shoppers’ experiences in the centres of their towns and cities. To this end they have virtually banned the car from the ‘High Street’ area, by a combination of ‘redevelopment’, shopping malls, pedestrianisation and many with ‘park and ride’ services.

Sounds great on paper, including the ‘artist impressions’ illustrations that we see on public planning information, with happy looking people enjoying a cappuccino at an outdoor café table. However the reality is a little different.

What of the person who wants to ‘pop into’ town for a few things? This is no longer possible, no more parking for half an hour near the deli or butchers that you might have used for years, picking up the dry-cleaning and a newspaper. These regular local customers provided the ‘bread-and-butter’ trade for so many local specialists and traders. Instead, the process of getting into town alone takes half an hour of negotiation of traffic lights and traffic calming measures, then there’s the pay and display, often situated 15 minutes walk from where you want to go and costs an outrageous amount or park and ride (which adds at least an hour in itself).

Ever increasing business rates in town centres together with an often increasingly heavy burden of legislative requirements have made survival, let alone success impossibility for the small, specialist or family business.

City and town centres have become the domain of larger national chains, including café and fast food offerings. Increasingly, fewer of the larger chains remain, and the city centres are becoming populated at best by M&S, Next and Starbucks together with others who can stand the high rates and can still make a profit under pressure of recession due to their strong well established brands, or at worst by charity shops and boarded-up windows.

Many of the national chains have reacted by duplicating or completely moving their stores to out-of-town shopping centres and abandoning the town and city centres that had been the trading centres of these locations for a hundred years.

The new out-of-town enterprise zones were a success from the start. Initially a novelty, each one growing and drawing more and more shoppers with their super-stores, discount centres and designer outlets; huge free car parks and drive through fast-food to the point they are now a ‘destination’ and over-congested by traffic and their own success.

Then along came online shopping. No travelling, no speed cameras, no parking problems, no congestion, no delays, no queues at the checkout (well not very often anyway – Next had to put in an online queuing system for their checkout during the Christmas 2009 sale so high was demand on their website) and no waiting in traffic to get home.

Now that 90% of the UK has access to broadband, (even though only 60% actually do) and with laptop computers readily available for just a few hundred pounds, many of the barriers to home computing, now overcome, open the floodgates for online shopping. It would be nice if the broadband were faster and available all over country, for the consumer to have easier to use software and websites, but it’s still better than negotiating busy towns or shopping centres

Let’s look at the example young mother (or of course father) with two small children who needs to buy their weekly groceries.

We asked lots of people in this type of situation, so that the scenario below is representative of an average or typically common experience of the difficulties that arise.

The eldest child is aged 4 and a baby of 9 months. Their car is parked on the street, and as the parking is quite busy at times, then it is not always possible to park directly outside the house.

They usually go to a large supermarket in the out-of-town shopping centre around 6 miles away. So she has to get the two children ready, load the car and set off to the supermarket. If the car is not immediately outside the house, then what are the difficult logistics of this? It seems unavoidable, yet unacceptable to leave the children alone at some point as it is probably not physically possible to negotiate a toddler, a baby, and all the paraphernalia required to a car in one go, so what is done first? Of course there will soon be the requisite shopping bags to add to the list as supermarkets are under pressure to reduce the number used and those who still give bags will soon be charging.

Practically everyone who I asked who has small children said that getting them dressed and organised, remembering everything, dealing with every detail and difficulty can take an hour, and this can often be a very stressful one!

She sets off in the car after resolving this problem and heads to the supermarket. As it is the weekend, when she gets there the car park is quite full, so finding a mother and child car parking place is not easy, she knows that without the extra space alongside the car to get the baby and child out of their restraining seats and safely into a trolley the likelihood of damaging her or the next car in the car park are highly likely, and insurance is expensive enough already.

Now she needs a suitable trolley to hold the two children. Another logistics problem, does she lock the children in the car while getting a trolley, or get them out and carry them to the trolley bay? And now it’s starting to rain.

Lots of parents we spoke to said that sometimes this is simply not physically possible let alone safe.

Once into the shop the 4 year old is refusing to stay in the trolley seat, he wants to get out and walk. Worn down by the fuss and tantrum that is building up, she lifts him out of the trolley to be immediately faced with a new problem, keeping up with him and making sure he does not disappear and get lost or worse. She wishes that she had remembered to bring the child reins or wrist link, but he hates it and it just makes life even harder so she only uses it when walking in traffic.

After negotiating the aisles, trying to remember everything – goodness knows where the list went in all the chaos of trying to get everyone into and out of the car - she finally gets to the checkout to pay for her weekly shop, and joins a long queue. The baby is bored and hungry now, and fed up of sitting in the trolley, she is reaching for the goods piled up on the belt (someone else’s shopping) and has succeeded in grabbing a multipack of crisps which she proceeds to shake and squeeze into dust. Now embarrassed, she has a dilemma where she cannot offer to go and get a replacement for the shopper in front, even though it is her fault and she knows it, eventually she manages to get a harassed shop-floor supervisor whom after some confusion about whether she wants the crisps or why the replacement is needed, gets a replacement for the shopper in front of her.

Finally, her shopping is paid for, the checkout operator thankfully helped her with the packing, but still the little boy will not get back into the trolley seat and now it is really raining as they head for the car, negotiating the hazards of the car park where drivers now have a combination of increased motivation to park near the door with reduced visibility.

Again there is the dilemma of getting the children and into the car and now laden with shopping in the now pouring rain, and someone’s parked a van really close to the passenger side of the car where the baby’s seat is located, now she has to struggle to get her in across the width of the car, hurting her back in the process. What’s more, she can’t let her little boy climb into his seat first or she wouldn’t have the room to be able to strap in the baby (which she normally does from the passenger side. He is not happy and has started screaming and shouting, passers-by are looking and her stress levels are reaching maximum levels for today. At last everything is in and they can head for home.

Its all taken much longer than expected so now they are in the traffic at the busiest time of day, the children are hungry and complaining, the car is misted up and she is trying not to think about whether any significant damage was done to the car door that bumped the car next to her as her little boy climbed in. Her headache is mounting and exhaustion is mounting, and she has to make an overdue lunch as soon as she gets home.

When they get back, there is nowhere to park near the house, so the whole palaver has to be carried out in reverse, the children taken into the house, then the shopping in numerous trips, and between visits to the car, her little boy manages to pull one of the bags of shopping off the table, smashing a glass jar of mayonnaise in the process.

As many of the people we talked to, the whole experience is time consuming and can be stressful and exhausting, often taking 3 or 4 hours (and feeling much longer) from start to finish.

What is the alternative for our young (or not so young) mother (or father)?
Use those 4 precious weekend hours to have quality time with the children. One evening in the week, after they have been put to bed at night, make a cup of tea, or even better, pour a nice glass of wine and go online. Order the groceries and other requirements, pay online on one of the many supermarket websites and a few days later a nice person from the supermarket will come along and put the groceries inside the front door. All that is now left to do is put them into the cupboards while the children are playing, happy and safe where they can be kept under a watchful eye.

The next article will look at what the business case for get on a level playing field and start building business online – reaching a wider audience that could only be dreamt of before.

Samples: how much is too much?

There is no doubt that the knowledge industries represent the future of the economy. The sector has seen phenomenal growth in the last decade that shows no sign of slowing up.

If you’re in the business of knowledge of some kind, particularly of information provision, or specific expertise that might be delivered as consultancy or some other kind of knowledge exchange, then you may find yourself constantly up against a paradox: like in some other types of business, in order to sell what you make or do, you need to give some away. However, the problem with giving away knowledge is just that, once you’ve given it away there is no taking it back, it can’t be cancelled or repossessed, it’s out there.

We recently visited the Royal Welsh Show, the one of the largest shows in the UK, which in 2010 attracted almost a quarter of a million visitors from over forty countries. Along with many other attractions and trade offerings, there is a dedicated food hall where producers and manufacturers of traditional or innovative food and drink were plying their wares to the general public and potentially professional buyers alike.

It did not take a genius to notice a phenomenon that was clear: all the stands that were offering free samples had crowds around them, where in contrast, those who were not offering samples of any kind were largely and in some cases entirely, bereft of both visitors and customers.

As they stood there with their glum faces, I felt like saying (or even shouting) if you don’t get anyone into your shop – or in this case to stop at the counter instead of moving on the next stand where there were free sausages or cider on offer - then you can’t sell anything! The online equivalent of this of course is effective website traffic generating activities such as SEO, PPC, link-building and so on.

It has to be noted that this is a place to shop, and there was no shortage of shopping opportunities, over 1000 trade stands were at the show and no shortfall in money being spent, the organisers reported that cash machines on the showground dispensed over £1.2 million, bearing in mind that is money that is extra to that which exhibitors and visitors had brought with them, and credit and debit card sales.

Of course there is little doubt that many of those taking advantage of the free samples were simply trying, and succeeding in, getting their hands on a free lunch. Although if every tenth or even hundredth person bought something on the spot or at some point in the future then it is worth it; and if that one pro-buyer walking around was tempted to stop at a particular stand they might be in the market for a tonne of sausages a week and secure the future of that business.

The next step of course is that once they are at the counter then they must have a good experience, be welcomed with smiling faces and the irresistible prospect of a freshly cooked sample of local produce whether a steaming sausage, a chilled (albeit small) sample of cider or similar. Those who were giving samples in this way were the ones making the sales. Others had samples on offer, but were not so keen or needed to be asked and were in turn not so successful, the smallest barrier – where there was so much competition on offer – was enough to make the browsing customer move on to the next stand or shop. The same thing happens online, each time the user encounters a barrier it contributes to the detriment of the user‘s experience, and while each individual thing might be very small, the accumulative effect can be enough to bring the point of frustration beyond the level of motivation to continue. What happens then? Then back button, and your competitors are only a click or two away.

Back to giving away your knowledge, it’s a really difficult thing, lots of people find themselves in an impossible situation where in order to prove that they know something, or are capable of providing the serviced they are trying to sell, they feel that they have to reveal their possibly ‘secret’ knowledge. Others, perhaps through their passion and enthusiasm for their subject, inadvertently give it away. The principle may be to give a little away, holding back the crucial content for the order or contract,

A sample is clearly what is needed. It is important to realise that it must be properly representative if what is on offer. Not a low quality version, or something that is common knowledge or available to everyone, in order to demonstrate expertise then you must do just that, give a sample of your real expertise and not be afraid of doing so.

A key point lies in specifics: be prepared with samples that are specific to your offering, and reveal a choice morsel or offer a useful tip – and I mean useful to the person to whom you are offering it – but that does not go into specifics about that persons’ company or problem (that you are hoping or proposing to help or solve).

This brings the question of how much is too much? There needs to be enough to get a proper taste, one of the stands at the Royal Welsh show was giving samples of soft cheese that were practically too small to see let alone taste, it might have been expensive, but gave the impression of meanness, and no-one wants to deal with someone who is mean. Of course you need to ensure that it is not enough to satisfy the appetite, enough to get the saliva flowing and taste buds awake, but definitely not a free meal!

Your website is your customer’s window on your business. What do they see?

Good user experience is about enabling your visitors to complete the task they set out to achieve when they typed their search term into Google. It is the most important element in satisfying the needs of your visitors. If a visitor achieves their task on your website they are unlikely to go to your competitors.

You have invested in the development and the promotion of your website and you are getting a level of visitors but how many are being converted into customers. Are they presented with barriers on your site? How can you find out?

Book an independent user experience evaluation of your website so you can identify what your customers perceive from the site. During the two hour evaluation you will resolve the following:

• Are you answering your customer’s questions? (Task analysis)
• Is your information architecture customer focused? (Paths to task completion)
• Has your web developer committing design convention violations?
• Can your customers read and understand your content? (Language of the customer)
• Is the site optimised for the customers?(User Groups)

Contact Nigel T Packer on 01639 820984 for further information on Website Usability reviews and to book yours. or email nigel@businessforbusiness.co.uk

(A user experience evaluation review costs £250 plus VAT, please allow up to 2 hours for the feedback session.)

Business for Business Internet Marketing Ltd is an internet marketing Knowledge company, not a web design company. We provide independent e-Business advice and knowledge in the development of effective business websites that meet user experience guidelines, engaging the visitor and converting them into customers. The choice of web designer or web developer is yours.

Business for Business Internet Marketing: The Death Throes of the ‘High Street’? – Part 1

Business for Business Internet Marketing: The Death Throes of the ‘High Street’? – Part 1: "I have never been inclined to be the harbinger of doom. However, from where I’m standing, the facts, and what they might mean for the futur..."

The Death Throes of the ‘High Street’? – Part 1

I have never been inclined to be the harbinger of doom. However, from where I’m standing, the facts, and what they might mean for the future of ‘High Street’ shopping, seem irrefutable.

We are already seeing businesses in ‘High Streets’ up and down the country suffer. More and more are closing. This might partly be attributed to the recession; and of course there has been a decline over a number of years that could be due to other means. The increase in out-of-town shopping centres certainly has not helped, the retail giants massed together with enormous car parks, fast food outlets, cinemas and more. But now a new threat has emerged: much larger and more virulent than ever before. The traditional customers are now staying at home and doing their shopping on the internet.

Month by month we see a continued increase in the number of people buying online. These people used to shop in the ‘High Street’ of the villages, towns and cities all over the UK. If you’ve watched the news on TV or in other media at all over the last few months, you can’t fail to be aware of the problems local (and often national) retail traders are experiencing.

Online however, it is quite a different story. In July 2010, online retail sales in the UK reached £5 billion. This is approximately 20% of UK retail sales, and represents an increase of 18% compared with the same month in the previous year, with sales volumes up by 1.1% on June 2010.

Online sales are increasing year-on-year at an exponential rate. Back in 2001, the average (mean) spend was just under £150 million per month (total online sales for the year 2001 were £1.8 billion), and there are no signs of this growth rate slowing.

To put this into perspective, the top three shopping streets in the UK (in terms of sales volumes): London’s Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street, together, took just over £5 billion in sales for the whole of the year 2009. This is by no means a small sum, but the whole of the annual income is comparable to just one month of sales for the shops along the ‘online high street’!

Interestingly, almost all non-food sectors are reported as showing strong growth online, with the biggest increase of 68% being seen in clothing and accessories. This is certainly not the same kind of performance that is being seen elsewhere.

What’s more, the online shops are open 24/7 and accessible from every home, office or even café that has an internet connection, Wi-Fi hotspots have sprung up everywhere and many people are now shopping (and comparing prices on the spot) from their smartphones.

A series of reports from research company IMRG/CapGemini adds some weight to this. IMRG/CapGemini predicts that if current trends continue, within 10 years 50% of the UK’s retail sales will be carried out on the internet.

Of course, a prediction is only that, a prediction, but even the most sceptical can not ignore the enormous increase in online sales, and actual performance has surpassed all predictions made in recent times.

While this is likely to have a devastating affect on those who have their livelihoods in the high street, the broader impact is potentially far bigger.

I wonder if councils – not known for being fast moving when it comes to policy – are ready and equipped to rethink their development strategies and seek innovative ways of attracting people to town and city centres. Or to find ways of their communities engaging with the local area through the internet (beyond finding out when the next refuse collection is from a bloated, confusing website).

Governments might also experience falling tax revenues, where companies that are set up to trade and sell online only, can base their headquarters in offshore locations more easily that traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ companies thus benefiting from lower taxes as well as labour costs.

Speaking of Governments, most major countries are pushing for the roll out of faster broadband and service providers are also developing faster and better ways of providing internet access. In South Korea, and perhaps more surprisingly Latvia, broadband download speeds are in excess of 20Mbps, with 10Mbps broadband being considered slow. Yet in the UK we can’t even get it together for 50% of the population to have 2Mbps download speed, with many in rural UK areas restricted by no-go zones or not-spots. Finland has declared broadband to be legal right for every citizen (from July 2010)! So when will the UK catch up with this, if we are to compete in a global marketplace, we at least need to be competing on a level playing field. This is even more important post-recession.

The larger national chains are already preparing for this transition of customers’ activity, with Tesco being current leaders in the race to gain market share with online grocery, home products and everything else they can manage to provide while providing home delivery for the weekly shop.

Young, fast-moving and well-funded start-up businesses are looking at the marketplace and seeing that there is a raft of opportunities to be had online as internet usage becomes mainstream – not just for the geeks or the young - and continues to permeate the population.

The future is exciting for those who are determined to take part, be engaged and make the investment. However, those who are determined to stick their heads in the sand, or make smug remarks about not really being ‘into’ technology, or even worse all those people out there who say: “Oh yes, our website is under construction,” or more often: “… redevelopment at the moment.” But when we look at the sites, there is so often evidence that they have been ‘under-construction’ or ‘redevelopment’ for years (or even in some cases – a decade). I can only assume they are hoping ‘it’ (the internet) will stop soon or maybe they think it just won’t ‘catch-on’, as someone said to me back in the 90s. What are they waiting for and what are they going to do when they can no longer rely on the dwindling numbers who take the journey through a high street that has only a few shops in it?

The reality is, in a mere 15 years, the internet has become the most dominant feature of daily life, creating unimagined opportunity for many and changing the very fabric of our society. We have no way of really telling what effect it will have in the next 5 or 15 years, or whom it will affect the most.

In part 2 we will be discussing how the high street has been under attack since the 1980s and how business owners need to act to stay afloat.

Business for Business Internet Marketing: Lost In the Translation

Business for Business Internet Marketing: Lost In the Translation: "You have gone to the expense of translating you website into a second and third language. Are you are getting enquiries from the destinati..."

Lost In the Translation

You have gone to the expense of translating you website into a second and third language.  Are you are getting enquiries from the destination counties to make it worth the investment?  Is your website being found for the products and services you provide in those counter search engine?

Probably not!

Translating your website content to get listed on foreign search engines is the first step to increasing your international exposure.  You are considering the customers in those destination countries who use English as a second language but are you sending the right message to them?  Is the translation at a level of language that is suitable for the foreign visitor to your website?

It is not often the case and all depends on the Translation Agency you used or the translation technology you found on the internet that translated for free.  The literal translation of content can change the nuances of meaning and context of your copy when changed from one language to another.  There are many cases of this happening to dire consequences and often lost orders.  Literally ‘Lost in Translation!’

Lazy workers
An engineering company that wanted to open up the Chinese market had a long report translated into Mandarin by a native speaker – cheaper than getting a translation agency to do the work – the report was translated literally and it was published on their website.  In the first 9 months they did not get a single enquiry even though they could see from the website logs that there were many visitors to the translated page.  It was at this time that a Good Samaritan contacted the Engineering Company to ask why they were telling everyone that the engineering company had lazy workers and did not care about the customers.

Lost orders
Another case was reported of a company that had provided an enquiry form in German for their customers in Germany.  After a period of intensive marketing they were receiving over twenty enquiries a day.  The sales team were dutifully deleting these enquiries because they thought the emails were spam.  They had not been informed by the marketing department there was a German version of the email enquiry from the site and to pass it to another office.

Inflatable toys!
A seller of rubber dinghies had translated their website into French using his rusty schoolboy learnt skills.  The effect was good and they got a large number of visitors to the French pages in their website.  Unfortunately they did not get the corresponding orders from the site that should have expected.  On closer examination they had translated the content and used the term inflatable which thought was a French word. 

What he did not know was the word inflatable is a keyword for a blow up doll.  What he should have used was the term 'bateau pneumatique'.  I can imagine the look on the faces of the users when they were presented with a Zodic (another term the French use for inflatable boats) not the subject of an episode of ‘Only fools and Horses’

When it comes to business, trying to shave the budget to get the job done cheaper can result in a waste if money and brand damage.  Use a Translation agency and get localised translation of your website. 

Search engine optimisation
Keyword research should also be carried out in the destination languages with experienced linguists who understand the importance of the keywords and phrases used by their countrymen.  Many of the sites that we see that have been translated have not catered for this and do not appear in the search engines of the destination country.

Be and expert use an expert.
In summing up you are experts at your business.  Make sure you use an expert in the translation industry and search engine marketing industry to get the best for your business.  It could save you some embarrassment and a lot of money

Have a good week!