June 2023 - 42

POHMER ON...
TREATING
CUSTOMERS
AS GUESTS
Your most effective brand messengers are
your front-line employees; focus on your
guests and your team members to build a
strong culture.
By Stan Pohmer
A
few fundamental questions for you to ponder:
Are you selling plants or providing solutions and
fulfilling the needs and expectations of your
customers? Are you in a transactional mindset, selling
one plant at a time, or providing compelling reasons
for your customer to come back frequently to enjoy
the benefits of plants and flowers? Is your approach to
your business product focused or consumer focused?
Do you spend more resources (time, money, energy and
effort) on honing your operational capabilities or on
creating opportunities for your customers to have great
experiences with you and your business? Is the term
" customer lifetime value " in your vocabulary?
The obvious response most of us would give to these
questions is that we both sell plants and provide great
experiences. But which approach provides the best path
for the customer to see a differentiation between you and
your direct competitors (or any other retailer - brick and
mortar or online) to get them through your front doors
for the first time and then return again and again? Your
brand and brand message must be clear, specific and not
confusing in any way. Everything you do in your store -
from marketing to merchandising, from assortment to
staffing, from product maintenance to store ambiance -
must be in sync and be consistent. I've voiced my support
for a consumer-focused approach in past articles and
continue to believe that that's the right way to go in
today's marketplace. And who and why you hire staff is
a major element in communicating and executing what
your brand stands for and what the customer sees.
The Disney (and Target) Effect
Many, many moons ago, I had the opportunity of a lifetime -
to build a national presence for lawn and garden for Target
42 | LAWN & GARDEN RETAILER | JUNE 2023
(Target once had year-round garden centers in Florida,
California, Arizona and Nevada, as well as seasonal, freestanding
garden centers in the Midwest, and they still have
decorative lawn and garden in all stores today).
Back in the early '90s, Target execs identified the
opportunity and need to change their focus from sales
and operations to a laser focus on their customer. Rather
than try to affect this change internally, they went to the
best-in-class company that wrote the book on consumer
focus and creating unparalleled experiences: Disney (think
Walt Disney World and how they use their team members
to help deliver the Disney experience). Disney shared all
their secrets and training techniques to ensure that their
customers were truly treated as " guests, " and Target used
this knowledge and these practices to change their own
culture, also referring to their shoppers as guests and
everything that this word implies.
To this day, Target doesn't have customers; it has
guests. And everything it does, from remodeling stores
to tailoring their assortments to the local community, to
their marketing and merchandising, to implementing new
policies and programs (like introducing a process where the
guest can make a product return from their car, without
going into the store) is focused on enhancing the guest
experience. On a few of my recent shopping trips to my
local Target store, I couldn't find what I wanted, so I asked
a part-timer stocking shelves where I might find it. He or
she reached for a device on their belt (all employees have
these devices), typed the product name in, and the device
displayed the specific aisle, fixture and shelf location. And
rather than just pointing me in the right direction, every
one of these team members physically took me to the
product, sometimes completely at the other side of the
store. I sure felt like a guest in their store!
Oh, and as Target changed to a consumer-forward
culture, it also understood that it was the people who faced
the guest every day, those who helped create the guest
experience, who were the ones who needed to embrace
and execute to achieve their desired culture goals. The
relationship between the boss and the employee needed
to change to one of cooperation to achieve a common goal.
June 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of June 2023
