Marketing Week/Insight Show and Mary Portas, Queen of Shops

by Parsley on Sat, 2010/07/10 - 8:11am Post to Twitter

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK

Show Review : Marketing Week/Insight Show, Olympia 29-30/06/10
Popped into this ‘four shows in one’ marketing event to see what was new. First I went into one of the many presentations happening as part of the event. A guy from Visuality was explaining about shopper behaviour. His firm had been dismayed by their retail ideas for big manufacturers being great in focus groups, but completely failing when they hit the shops.

It turns out that most of us are shopping on auto-pilot. We’re buying the things we always buy, and if that goes well we’ll be buying ourselves a treat at the end of the process. So even if a new brand that we would like more is sitting on the shelf next to the one we usually buy, we ain’t buying. He even showed some videos where people didn’t notice that the person they were talking to had got swapped with someone else, because people haven’t got enough concentration power to notice.

Our principle aim is the ‘mission’ - to buy what we need, and after that it’s about loyalty to what we always buy/do. Beyond that it’s about the mood we’re in, the time we’ve got, and finally our experience and culture. Internet shopping is even less flexible. We’ll be buying whatever’s on our regular ‘to buy’ list. Turns out the way we behave depends on what we’re buying. In the pet shop we want to talk. In the household section we just want to get out. It also turns out we pay more attention to things with loads of writing on, like Pret’s messages about all their good works on the side of their packaging. Actually I think this is just because it takes more time to get that information into our heads, and not actually because products with lots of writing on are a great idea. Still, it was an interesting presentation.

Next was the shop display zone, where there were some eye-catching wacky ideas. A ‘projected’ floor with a camera sensor let you kick away leaves or make waves in water. Illuminated 3D displays could make you look like you were in front of a skyline. Other firms were displaying their made-to-order promo items. I wondered if they used their own analysis of shoppers to model the behaviour of people at the show. Most seemed to be wandering fairly aimlessly, but enjoying themselves nonetheless.

TV Review : Mary Queen of Shops - Series 3 - 2. Clealls, 30/06/10
In the search for late night Family Guy episodes, one occasionally bumps into ‘the sign zone’ repeats of other shows. Perhaps it’ll be some not-very-well-off family having their house re-decorated in an exciting way. Perhaps, like here, it’ll be Mary Portas giving a local shop in Devon the benefit of her opinions.

For me it was car crash TV that I could not turn off. The couple involved in the local shop had moved out of London and found themselves in an insular village where everyone popped in and told them they would never make a success of it, then left and never came back. The wife struggled hard, buying more and more lines of stock in the hope that something would entice the locals to buy. The husband called himself the ‘dog’s body’, ready to work and work, but not understanding why things were going so badly.

Mary Portas knew why. It was, apparently, their complete lack of taste. Their freezer full of cheesy fries was uninviting. No one ever wanted the things they chose to stock. The husband used to work in a market in London. He thought he could talk to anyone. He didn’t get the chance because they didn’t come in. Mary Portas was the Jeremy Kyle figure, prepared to tell them how stupid and wrong they were about everything.

Having completely demoralised them, she set about forcing them out to meet their neighbours. Despite knowing everything important, Mary didn’t seem to realise that her relentless criticism of them was possibly not the best preparation for having positive conversations with large numbers of relative strangers. The wife was told to ask everyone at an outdoor social event what they wanted. There’s nothing like putting everyone at their ease in a relaxed setting of a TV show with an audience of several million. The guy was made to learn about local history, then to host a pub quiz.

I wouldn’t have blamed the woman for going and having a good cry. Indeed she said she wanted to go and hide in a hole. Her plucky hubby came out fighting, trying local food, and talking with interest. He confessed to being scared, but it didn’t stop him doing what was necessary. God I felt sorry for them. Yes, they’d got themselves into the wrong place, but they weren’t bad people. Mercifully the locals rallied round the re-vamped shop full of local produce. I wondered if this wasn’t the perfect way to channel their closed village attitude - to sell it back to them.

I wondered how the couple would survive their transformation from insular shop owners, to highly ‘available’ local characters. I really felt like I wanted to contact them and tell them not to worry and to wish them luck&hope it went all right.

Mary Portas, on the other hand, I would give a wide berth. She may have extensive knowledge of the retail industry, and she may have, in the space of one TV show, transformed a failing business, but her loud self-satisfied arrogance is not a brand I’ll want to return to the TV shop to purchase. More to the point, how did we get to where we had to re-invent characterful shops because the convenience stores got killed off by the big stores of this world? Is that the couples’ fault?

Congratulations Mary. With the success of your shows you have apparently successfully sold the most tasteless brand of all – brash superiority. Your words are the cheesy fries filling our TV shops till there’s nothing else to buy. Your loving website’s forums (at www.maryportas.com) can gush appreciatively of your talents, but I’m afraid I will find myself shopping in the old TV show DVD box set speciality shop because my closed-mind village is happier to live in its gentle old ways.

parsley.L at virgin.net [http://freespace.virgin.net/alpha.moonbase/garden.records]