Retailers Localize For Success

The best independent retailers know how to become integrated into the local lifestyle of their customers. From the merchandise they select, to the way they display it, from their store design to the way they advertise, they use every bit of local knowledge and intuition to weave themselves into the everyday local life of their community and customers.

Now the big boys want some of this local flavor along with the  customer loyalty and customer insight it engenders.

A raft of consultants are making a living advising major retailers on such esoteric subjects as supply chain integration of local inventories.  Regional managers are reliquishing some control over how each location responds to local expectations of customer service, visual merchandising and event implementation.  Store designs prototypes are being modified at every level from the merchandise assortment, to visual display, to window, storefront and signage configurations.

Starbucks has begun to rebrand and redesigns some stores as local “coffee houses”.  Best Buy adjusts store hours by location while featuring local and regionally related items front and center. Macy’s is implementing a localization strategy that includes “incubating” and “launching” local products discovered and developed by regional planners and merchants.  Even some Internet retailers are combining online ordering with local pickup.

Does making it local, make it better? Can chain retail and mega-brands ever really capture the magic of your favorite local shoe store, kitchen shop, used book store or coffee bar? Big retail is recognizing that people in a community care about what happens to local merchants. They don’t want standardized everything and they just don’t trust big companies (Say Toyota, Tysons, Mattle etc…) they way the do the local food producer, neighborhood craftsman or downtown vendor.  Does anyone on Yelp wax poetic about the Sam Goody store at AnyTown Mall?  Despite the preditions of the collapse of independent retail in the face of WalMarts and Amazons, local vendors hold on and in many cases thrive, at the expense of their chain store brethern.

In the end, there are real benefits to both standardization and to local knowledge.  The best and most successful retailers, both independents and chains, will find ways to make good use of both.