Changing a logo does not constitute transforming a brand and transforming a business is a bigger battle than just addressing the branding issues alone. All too frequently we come across examples of these over simplistic sticking plaster solutions to transforming organisations.

In the last week I was reminded of this when I saw an advert for a seminar offering a full business transformation solution. On closer inspection the event focused on the branding aspects of a business.

Too often we are the people called in after a client has been advised poorly by agencies with their heart in the right place but an inability to see the big picture. In some instances it appears to be naivety or a lack of experience. Sometimes they don’t know the right questions to ask.  For others, you don’t want to be cynical, but it feels like a disregard for the obvious or simply a desire to “make a quick buck’.

Transforming a business is unique in every instance but there are several core and constant approaches. There needs to be clarity around the vision and long term goals of the business. There needs to be an understanding that taking certain decisions will have implications. To take the right decisions you need the right skills and recognise a strategy and timetable needs to be in place.

Emphasis differs in each case but a successful transformation always comes from aligning every aspect of the business towards the customer. Invariably the refocusing of the brand of a business can play a huge part in improving a company but other factors; operational, process, systems, financials, etc,  will also be critically important in transforming that business.

As the CAPGEMINI 2010 survey on ‘Trends in Business Transformation’ highlighted:

“Definitions of business transformation vary, but the term is used to refer to strategic, enterprise-wide change projects that have a profound impact on the organisation’s capabilities, environment, processes and performance. Correctly planned and implemented, business transformation can have far-reaching implications and benefits for the organisation, as well as deliver significant results that are visible on the bottom line”.

If you are an individual tasked with transforming your business, or part of it, recognise there is rarely any quick fix “Harry Potter” solution. Be aware and clear of the implications of changing each part in the puzzle and keep asking the question “how does this benefit the customer?”  If you’re not sure or have never done it before get help from those who have.

Capital Club Dubai presents seminar by retail and commercial expert – Kate Hardcastle

In today’s competitive market it is imperative for companies and organisations to stay focused on their customers, to do everything within their power to enhance their existing clients’ service experience, and to differentiate and make themselves stand out from their competitors.

The great thing to see is that for as many retailers that need help there seems to be fantastic service operations that are passionate about their consumers and the consumers are letting us know about it.

The heart and soul of customer service is passion and creating a smile for EVERYONE who walks through the door.

We have a few CATH nominees where sadly the greeting has let them down. – so remember, each and every time the door opens – it counts,

We’re delighted with the greeting from Anon team in Elland. The lingere specialists are passionate through and through, have great retail theatre and were actually in the process of creating a giant bra for a charity campaign. We loved there retail approach.

Further winners from Yorkshire and beyond have also been announced:

Utility – It’s the dream to be able to buy a present for someone’s birthday and to get the response that they’ve never seen anything like it before. The gift boutique is a must-visit if you have to buy a present. Well known vintage inspired brands like Cath Kidston sit alongside up and coming designers as well as emerging jewellery boutique brands. Service is friendly and relaxed, gift wrapping service helps save valuable time and the range of products changes regularly. www.utilitydesign.co.uk/

The Italian Club in Liverpool is a cafe blending Scottish culture and italian cuisine. Tasty freshly produced food is served with a friendly smile, chatty service. You feel as though you’re a friend being welcomed in from the cold. They’ve also expanded to the Italian Club Fish a few doors away. http://theitalianclubliverpool.co.uk/

Our mystery shopper was left enchanted by the Boudoir Boutique team in Liverpool who gave her a warm welcome and made her shopping experience a magical one. Products are beautifully merchandised into stories throughout the store and the staff are on-hand to offer their expert advice and provide a fantastic personalised service. http://www.boudoir-boutique.com/blog/

Over in Manchester, 3 Eleven Boutique in Hale impressed our mystery shopper with the passion they showed for their premium denim and contemporary fashion clothing. New arrivals were highlighted along with items which had been in the press recently, as well as the gorgeous bag viewed in the window prior to entering. www.3elevenboutique.com/

Teacup and Cakes is a funky teashop based in the eclectic Northern Quarter in Manchester offering a cool layout and atmosphere. Fusing tea, cakes and great music this is a cool place to go to hang out and enjoy a fantastic cuppa and sumptuous cake served by friendly, passionate staff. http://teacupandcakes.com/

The Cornerhouse Bookstore is a creative hub with the use of a cool, understated monochrome throughout the store. Our mystery shopper was duly impressed by the extensive product knowledge of the staff who were well versed in the offer and variety of books for sale and passionate about every single one! The team were a perfect reflection of how staff should encapsulate a brand. They were unassuming but helpful, polite and in tune with the offer. www.cornerhouse.org

Monmouth Coffee, London
http://www.monmouthcoffee.co.uk

Long queues around borough market justified by the experience, taste and sale of coffee. Available in single cup or wholesale, buyers can taste for free, and bags of coffee beans on display with fact sheets and staff very helpful and knowledgeable

Cook & Bakeware company, Huddersfield
http://www.cookandbakeware.co.uk/

Staff on hand to offer advice, and interested in sharing tips & tricks with customers, wide range of products and specialities

Med One, Huddersfield
http://www.med-one.co.uk/

Family atmosphere, great food and staff going the extra mile to make comfort and the ‘feel at home’ atmosphere a priority. No pressurised selling or rushing.

Blue Rinse, Leeds
http://www.bluerinseleeds.co.uk/

A vintage clothing store with a difference, everything you could want or need and helpful, friendly  staff who really endorse the brand. Have avoided the trend for pricing up vintage.

Magma Books, Manchester
http://www.magmabooks.com/

Making the use of a smallish space on oldham street, the shop entices you in with a variety of products, all backed up with staff that can recommend, and instruct on anything in the shop. Nice touches with customer picks and allowing us to try out some products before buying.

Our awards have been receiving national attention with coverage this week on the Retail Times site. The full piece can be found here.

They sign their own death warrants if they do.

Clinton Cards is the perfect example of a high street retailer failing to understand the needs of its customers, and by doing so making itself obsolete. Within hours of the news that one of its suppliers was due to force the company into administration, not only was Clinton Cards trending on Twitter, but so was Moon Pig. The usurper.

How does Moon Pig understand its customer better than Clinton Cards?

Anyone who’s received the same birthday cards from two friends might be able to tell you. Anyone who knows they have to buy a Mother’s Day card, or their niece and 18^th birthday card, but simply can’t get out of the office can tell you. We don’t always have the freedom to pop into a card shop on our lunch. Nor do we want to pick from an ever-dwindling range; soppy, funny, generic. You’re much more likely to jump online when you make a cup of tea, design and order a card to be sent to your mum on time, or pop into an independent retailer with a wider selection of unusual and eye-catching cards that are more individual and stand out.

A failure to understand what customers want, and need, is a vital element of offering customer service. It is one that is all too frequently ignored as retailers assume they understand how they should stay in touch with consumers, assume they don’t need to adopt the latest technology and suddenly see their name and position in the market become obsolete.

One of the most frightening headlines for many retailers should not be interest rates or lack of lending, it should be that both Amazon and Asos plan to open high street stores in the next few years. Both brands have not made names for themselves not simply by being at the forefront of the online digital revolution but by embracing “traditional” attitudes to customer service despite their “modern” setup.

They connect with customers directly; regularly to remind them of the brand and what products they sell; remember buyer behaviour to help tailor products and searches to tastes; send “unique” offers and codes to emphasise how important your custom is to them – how are any of these things activities that high street retailers should not be doing?

Digital doesn’t mean turning your back on the tried and tested way of doing things. Instead it means understanding an ethos of putting the Customer at the Heart and having the approach change and adapt with consumer behaviour and activity. Twitter, QR codes, mobile browsing, e-communications, an online profile to match an offline one; these aren’t add-ons to customer service, if you’re customers are there already then it’s part of how you should be engaging with them.

Until customer service is at the heart of every practice on the high street then increasingly retailers will find themselves falling behind their online counterparts.

There was a time when clever individuals could sustain themselves by exploiting people’s ignorance and anxiety. Augursstudied the flight of birds to explain the will of the gods; haruspicespracticed divination by inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals. For fear of bursting into uncontrollable laughter, so the joke goes, the fortune tellers studiously avoided making eye contact with one another in chance street encounters.

Not much has changed.

Our modern-day haruspices, the Wall Street analyists, must struggle mightily to keep a straight face (although perhaps not so mightily – they’ve had a lot of practice).

Before Apple‘s April 24th earnings release, Wall Street observer Karl Denninger put on his poker face in a Seeking Alpha post:

Profit margins on hardware are very difficult to sustain over 10% for long periods of time. Someone always comes after you and this is not going to be an exception to that rule. But that in turn means that you either must cut your own prices (and margins) to compete or watch your market share get diced up into little tiny pieces by a bunch of guys wielding machetes.

Colourful. And with a disclosure of his own AAPL posture:

Lightly short and more likely to add to that position over time than cover it, eyeing major support in the $400 area.

The entire longish post is enlightening, in a “special” way, as is hisSeptember 2010 Seeking Alpha post where he predicted serious trouble for Apple’s new tablet (for which he uses a nickname that, we’ll assume, elicited schoolyard snickers from his cohort in the Tea Party, a group hehelped found. New age male sensitivity be damned.) And what was the trouble he saw when he fondled the sheep’s liver? RIM was “coming after” Apple; it had just announced the QNX-based BlackBerry PlayBook. Don’t laugh.

The idea, here, is that everything becomes a commodity. It’s a common fallacy among the Street watchers, a meme, “a unit for carrying cultural ideas”, in Wikipedia’s words. It’s built on the idea that market forces—competition—will erase all advantages at a “molecular” level. Yesterday, customers were paying more for product A because of some unique feature or service. Tomorrow, a competitor will provide the same (more or less) at a lower price. Commoditization always wins, say the sages. QNX is better than iOS so the PlayBook will, clearly, murder the iPad.

Fun aside, Denninger is but a member, if that’s the right word, of a class of ideologists who seem to be curiously unaware of their surroundings. Where is the ineluctable commoditisation they predict?

It isn’t a new idea. When I landed in Cupertino in 1985, the Pepsi and Playtex marketeers that tagged along with the new CEO insisted that the tech game was over, personal computers are now commodities, marketing would have to do for Apple what the Leo Burnett ad agency had done for Philip Morris with its Marlboro Man campaign.

True, the Marlboro Man was an exemplary marketing success that made a huge monetary difference for an otherwise commodity product. Marlboro didn’t make a “superior” product–blonde non-mentholated 100mm filtered cigarettes are all the same. The only pieces tobacco companies could move across the chess board were imaginary and romanticised.

But high tech isn’t a commodity market. In very French words I told the young commoditising Turks how wrong they were: Moore’s Law and good software would create the opportunities that make a difference. Commoditization isn’t ineluctable.

Are clothes all the same? Tube socks at Costco, perhaps. But for the rest of our wardrobe, material and cut (and brand) matters.

Food? Do we buy commoditized calories, or do we care for the difference that the quality of ingredients and preparation make? Fresh string beans and asparagus, lightly fried in butter and properly salted—you can’t get that from canned vegetables packed in a margarine sludge, ready to pop into the microwave.

Do we buy cars because they go fast and the wheels are (most of the time) round? I can hear the young Turks claiming that people don’t buy cars, they buy transportation (all while jumping into their BMWs). But when Detroit began putting accountants at the head of car companies, they rode the steep downhill slope of commoditisation. That Audi is now one of the most profitable car companies on the planet tells us something about the importance of technology, design, manufacturing, and quality.

I used to refer to BMW as a good example for Apple: Don’t worry too much about market share. A well-made, well-marketed product will see its difference rewarded by the marketplace. And, indeed, BMW became larger than Mercedes Benz. And now we have Audi.

Quality shows, and Apple continues to show quality. Last quarter it enjoyed an incredible 47.4% gross margin. Higher than expected and very unusual for a hardware company.

As an ex-entrepreneur and a venture investor, I’m a fan of gross margin – it’s what you can spend. Revenue is nice, but it doesn’t tell you when and how much you can eat. Because Apple’s operating expenses have become such a small percentage (8.1%) of revenue, Apple’s operating margin approaches 40%. As Horace Dediu notes in his Which is best: hardware, software or services? comparison of Apple to Microsoft and Google, this is unusual for a hardware company:

Can this growth continue unabated? Probably not, both Microsoft and Google have shown that there’s a plateau, a margin level that can’t be exceeded. But their examples also show sustainability.

Of course, Apple execs are cautious forecasters. Their much second-guessed guidance for the next quarter calls for “only” 41% gross margin, significantly less than last quarter’s. But the commoditisation predicted 27 years ago isn’t about to happen.

I’ll quote Horace Dediu’s 1 May post once again:
Apple is the most valuable company in technology (and indeed in the world) because it integrates hardware, software and services. It’s the first, and only, company to do all these three well in service of jobs that the vast majority of consumers want done.
A mere matter of execution…

—
The Guardian, Monday 7th May

Insight with Passion’s Customer at the Heart awards recognise excellence in customer service. Nominate your choice here.

This week, IWP founding partner Kate Hardcastle presented our now renowned Retail Theatre Seminar at the AIS conference, Birmingham.

‘Retail Theatre is about using a whole range of tools and techniques to stimulate the senses’

‘It’s about tapping into the physical, intellectual and emotional needs of customers to ‘capture them’ to shop longer and spend more’

Initial feedback received through LinkedIn is strong:

Saw your presentation at the AIS conference, Brilliant !

To request a copy of the presentation, or to get in touch about anything you’ve seen or heard, please contact us. Attendees also qualify for our special offer detailed below. Contact Sue Ellis to follow up on this.

What is it?

RSPCA Week is to raise income and awareness of the work the RSPCA does, it’s been running every year since 1995. Over £4,000 was raised for our Branch last year by our loyal supporters.

The next RSPCA Week is Monday, April 30th – Sunday, 6th May 2012.

So why are we asking you to support RSPCA Week 2012?

1. Because all animals deserve a life free from hunger and thirst.
2. To protect animals from cruelty and pain
3. So we can act to rescue any animal enduring fear and distress
4. To give animals a new beginning
5. Because supporting RSPCA Week will help us to be here for animals every single day

How can you get involved in RSPCA Week 2012?

You can either:

• Fundraise for our Branch
• Volunteer at our Tesco Bucket Collections
• Make a Donation for RSPCA Week
• Distribute information about our Branch around your local area
• Become our friend on Facebook and Twitter
• Sign up for our newsletter
• Name an Animal in our care
• Donate blankets, toys and treats for our Animals

If you would like to get involved or request a fundraising pack, please contact Lauren on 07432 896283 or

laurenmoore@rspca-halifaxandhuddersfield.org.uk

Does your community business need help? Contact Jenny Tomlinson and ask about our Access for All Programme.

Our Access for All programme is open to start-ups under 1 year old and charities that need direction and support to help them achieve the results they desire. Using our wide range of expertise and unique approach, we work with you to understand what your future looks like and what to do to get there.