Bob Neville has worked with some of the world’s leading brands, including Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour and Clarks. Acknowledged globally as a strategic retail expert, he helps brands all over the world to build trust through authenticity. But he recently received an unexpected lesson in how it’s done – from his Mum.
Neville’s parents’ beloved dog died recently, just as their monthly pet food subscription was delivered. As his parents no longer had need of the food, they first tried to donate it to a local pound, which couldn’t accept it. So they contacted the pet food maker, a provider of premium frozen ready-meals for canines, to cancel their subscription, and to see if the company would simply like to take its food back.
Instead, the company refunded their last month’s subscription, entirely unasked, and went on to send the couple flowers, a card and an offer of grief counselling.
That’s how it’s done, says Neville, who, along with his parents, has told as many people as possible about this great company.
“If any of us were to get another dog, that is where we will get our pet food from,” he tells Inside Marketing podcast host Dave Winterlich. “It’s just a great example of trust, authenticity, and consumer-centricity.”
It was a very human response from a business to its customers, something that is hard to measure and never features in profit and loss accounts. Yet it adds so much value to a brand, he says.
While numbers are the life blood of any business, it’s important to look beyond them, he adds, because great retail is about so much more than figures. Metrics, by their nature, can lead to short-term thinking and a focus on immediate return on investment, which can ultimately undermine the brand.
For Neville, good retail brands are about process and operational efficiency combined with emotional engagement, because that is what results in long-term growth “both for the brand, and commercially,” he explains.
‘You have to make sure you remain true to your legacy, to the core that made you who you are as a brand’
Indeed a healthy profit and loss account can obscure the fact that, from a retail and a brand perspective, “You can actually be doing a hell of a lot of damage, because P & esn’t capture emotional connectivity. It doesn’t capture the ‘why’, as in, ‘Why are people emotionally engaged with your brand? Why is it that they should purchase from your brand?’ And that is really important,” he points out.
Throughout Neville’s career, what has driven him is the appeal of working on “brands with legacy”, he says.
That is, brands that are grounded in something, have a reason for being, and can leverage that history as it looks to the future.
“What I really enjoy is rediscovering what made that brand in the first place, what its unique point of view is – it’s story,” he says.
It can be easier for a brand strategist to come in from the outside with fresh eyes. “Sometimes, when you are inside an organisation, inside one of these brands, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees,” he says.
Harking back to a brand’s legacy is useful too because evolution is more cost efficient than revolution, he points out.
But an outsider can also help existing teams to break out of a pattern of simply repeating the same old behaviours and getting the same old results, the definition of madness.
“It’s why I encourage all my teams to look at why are we doing something, to ask ourselves: ‘Are we putting the consumer at the centre? Do we understand their expectations? How can we meet those expectations? And how can we amplify the core of who we are and what we are about?’” he explains.
Don’t be a dedicated follower
Never chase fashion, he cautions. “If you do, first you are in fashion but then you are out,” he says. “So you have to make sure you remain true to your legacy, to the core that made you who you are as a brand, with a view to evolving and, when needed, revolutionising, what you are doing.”
The biggest risk for brands, especially successful ones, is complacency. “They lose sight of what they were known for. In such cases it’s about reconnecting the wiring and spinning that wheel again,” he says.
The other risk of fashion, “is that the unintended consequence of fame is loss of specialness,” agrees Winterlich. For Neville, part of the challenge is bringing senior management on the evolutionary journey with him, particularly when a brand is successful.
“The time to innovate is when you’re doing well,” says Winterlich, “because the opportunity cost of innovation and of trying new stuff is mitigated by the fact that you are growing already. It’s really scary to change things when your sales are flat or declining.”
The very fact that a brand “is flying” can mask underlying issues that otherwise are only revealed “when you come off the boil”, says Neville.
Worse still, when that happens, the knee jerk response of too many brands is to start discounting, educating their customers in the process to hold off purchasing until a sale. That’s a slippery slope for any margin to get back up.
‘If you lead with transaction, you are never going to succeed as a retailer’
Much better to act while things are going well. Start by simply talking to your front-line store staff, advises Neville. These guys see issues as they arise, such as the impact that lack product in a particular size is having on sales, for example.
It’s why Neville’s first move in any new project is to anonymously survey retail staff. “After all, it’s the front-line staff that make the money, not the CEO,” he says. “They are the people experiencing first-hand the impact of decisions made at board and senior leadership level.”
Too often c-suite executives avoid the shop floor altogether. They simply don’t visit. The complaint he hears most frequently from retail staff is: “We never see anyone from HQ”. That reflects poorly on senior leadership and, for Neville, is a red flag in relation to future brand performance.
Of course, today’s retailers depend on a mix of both on and offline stores, as well as both company owned and franchised out. But whatever the customer journey, the same brand values must hold true and the customer experience must reflect that.
That’s because, as Neville points out, customers walking along a street don’t care who owns the store, they just see the brand.
On top of that, while in the run up to Covid the narrative surrounding bricks and mortar retail was one of doom and gloom, the post Covid drive to go out, meet up and just chat in person has changed the sector’s outlook significantly.
That makes sense given that retail was never simply transactional, it was always, and will always, be experiential. In other words, the customer should come out with their tail wagging, whatever the touch points.
“If you lead with transaction, you are never going to succeed as a retailer,” says Neville.
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