Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

114 Fashion Marketing
traditional consumer goods groceries, clothes, shoes, furniture and white electrical
goods. Even in the innovative electrical leisure sector, falling prices have
offset increased sales volumes. Partly, this is the result of saturated markets.
An ageing population consumes less calories per head and has acquired a
stock of durable items, leaving only a replacement market. Most households
have so much ‘stuff’ that they no longer know what to use or where to store
it. Hence the growth in charity shops and car boot sales. In the United States,
a growth industry is personal ‘lockups’ where surplus items can be stored and
brought out on a rotating basis. Partly it is because of the improved quality
and life expectancy of many products, especially motor vehicles and clothing,
which need replacing less frequently, and partly it is because of changing
personal attitudes to possessions which are no longer deemed by many to be
an indicator of personal success and status. As the American retail commentator
Carol Farmer (1995) wrote 10 years ago, ‘we have entered the Less
Decade’.
However, retailers, and retail marketers in particular, must also accept much
of the blame for the performance of their sector. They have been guilty of the
very mistake often attributed to Henry Ford offering customers any colour
they want as long as it is black. In the drive for centralized control, economies
of scale and low operating costs, they have, with a few notable exceptions:
Reduced the choice available to shoppers, both in terms of available products
(too often identical in different stores) and shopping locations, leading
to accusations of identikit shopping experiences.
Confused the customer with proliferation of similar products or products
inappropriate to her needs.
Irritated customers by de-listing favoured products on the basis of new systemized
management techniques like DPP (Direct Product Profitability).
Wasted the customer’s time by locating key product categories in remote
parts of the store, continuously changing the layout and product presentation,
and slow payment processes.
Explained away ‘no-service’ as ‘self-service’, and failed to invest in the calibre
and training of store level staff who are in direct contact with customers.
Created cloned stores and bland shopping centres which are virtually indistinguishable
from each other.
Offered products for sale that are consistently priced more highly
than in other national markets (local cost structures and tax regimes
notwithstanding).
As Burns et al. (1997) pointed out in a telling article, ‘retail renewal’ has
become the critical issue of the decade. It is an indictment of the past performance
of retail marketers, supposedly the customer’s champion, that it is only
now that some enlightened top managements have decided to truly focus
on their customers that these issues have begun to be addressed. What these
companies are doing will form the subject of the next section of this chapter.