There’s an old rule of business that if you treat your customers well, they will reciprocate.
What you are not supposed to do is to pummel your customers into the dust. Yet that’s exactly the impact that the big retailing giants like David Jones and Myers seem intent on doing.
Their recent strategy of having a perpetual sale is achieving little. Gone are the heady days of crowds lining up to save 50% or more in the boxing day sales. The discounts are there, but the crowds are not.
In fact, they are probably making things worse for themselves. Using discounts as a strategy is about engendering excitement and impact. After a while it is replaced with a realisation that these new prices are now the norm. So it will be difficult to increase prices without causing another slump in demand which must feel like a real headache in the making to the bean counters.
Business management 101 says if you find yourself carrying too much stock then formulate a clearly defined plan to put things right without devaluing your brand or suffering long term pain.
Price slashing and cost cutting should be last on the list, not first. They are too destructive to form part of a serious business strategy. It’s a strategy that lacks the sophistication one might expect from the brains trust of the huge conglomerates that seem to be taking to an operational problem with a fix-it solution that will cause huge strategic problems in the not too distant future.
By reducing prices larger businesses are making life very difficult for smaller businesses to survive. And Australian small businesses employ around four million people - many of them existing or potential customers of the larger firms.
The result is somewhat ironic - The strategies being employed by larger firms are a
cause of the very lack of consumer confidence that, as sellers of discretionary items,
they need in order to flourish.
They may have tested out some easier strategies to manage a reduction in stock in such a manner than their brand would remain intact.
Suggested (and less damaging) alternatives to correcting overstocking:
