Why encouraging greater participation of women in modern food & grocery retail stores is a good idea?

A cursory look at any modern food & grocery retail store across formats and cities reveals a far greater percentage of men in the workforce than women. In most such stores and formats, women don’t seem to comprise more than 10-15% of the workforce when their number should be atleast 3 times higher, if not more!!

While this may have to do with some of the policies that have shaped modern retail in india and with the prevailing environment of perceived security threats to women’s safety and security, to my mind it also has to do equally with historical perceptions carried by decision makers who in most cases happen to be men on what women staff can or can’t do.

I guess elaborating these perceptions or policies is futile. It will suffice to say that for every perceived drawback and perception there is a robust rationale on why participation of women in food and grocery retail must be encouraged for this sector to move forward.

Context

The following 3 points need to be borne in mind to better understand the recommendation

a)        The end user: Most food and grocery formats stock a multitude of brands and skus – sometimes over 5000 to 7000 SKUs – in a single supermarket store and more than 20000 SKUs (food n grocery) in a hyper!! These are brands, products and SKUs that burgeoning India is familiar with and buys on a day to day basis. While most of such products are consumed by the household in general, there is greater connect that the products have with women – than with men. Think fruits and vegetables, daals and spices, attas, rice, sauces, cooking masalas and pastes, cosmetics, household cleaners, detergents, shampoos and skin creams and so on. For most such products the key end user is a woman.

b)        The decision maker: More than 75% of the shoppers in most such stores happen to be women on a consistent and ongoing basis. They come in, browse, engage, make their choices and then take the final call based on their past experience, recommendation from friends or store staff or basis shelf displays, POS material or by advertising that they may have seen.

c)        Intuitive knowledge: Most employees (incl men and women) that work in the front end as contract staff in retail stores come in from relatively weaker socio-economic segments. So their own first-hand experience with many of the products is likely to be low. In such cases, their intuitive knowledge on such products or their usage is always beneficial.

The Rationale

My view is built around 3 pegs – Intuitive Knowledge, Inherent skills and attitude.

1)        Knowledge: In a scenario where most users and most shoppers who engage with food and other fmcg products are women, as retailers, if we are serious about influencing choices, then one of the first questions that we must ask is  whether the predominant male staff – is aiding or actually becoming a hindrance to achieving the said objective.

How can someone with his own limited experience and intuitiveness (shaped by his gender and past experiences) and perfunctory knowledge of these products suddenly become effective in influencing the choice of consumers who in almost all cases are likely to know more about the product than him. In most such cases, experience shows that women staff members are able to bring their superior innate knowledge (shaped by their gender and experiences) to the fore more effectively and help increase store and format productivity.

2)        Skill: Many of the front end roles in retail stores involve merchandising, maintaining cleanliness and hygiene, cashiering, etc. Again from a larger and maybe traditional perspective, these are roles that have been the domain of women for years. The fact that they seem to enjoy these tasks better than men do, makes it easier for them to appreciate the rigour and  importance of the jobs and to excel in them. Ask a guy to spot dust and grime in the store and ask a woman employee to now do the same thing. The difference would be apparent when you notice the half a dozen areas highlighted by women employees that could be maintained better. Ditto for merchandising stuff on shelves. Women, thanks to their inherent skill tend to arrange and organize better as also maintain hygiene and cleanliness better than their male counterparts. They also tend to be more agile, skilled and in general dexterous with their hands. The fastest cashiers in Natures Basket for instance tend to be women. So more women would mean not just better presented stores but operationally more efficient stores as well – something that consumers are likely to notice and talk about as well as make front line Managers happy.

3)        Attitude: The final point that I make is that of attitude and connect. The way women easily make friends, engage, converse or connect with other women is far superior than the way men connect with women or say even with other men. Observe women on trains, flights, salons, in markets or while exercising in the gym. There is a natural conversation almost always on! They are also likely to be part of many more whatsapp groups than men!! It is rare to find them coming out of any public place without having conversed with at-least one complete stranger. This is again something so intuitive, and so innate that it doesn’t seem to require any extra effort; nor does it seem to be limited to any socio economic class. Unfortunately for most men, forming such easy connects is going against their grain. This makes the job of front end male store staff who are mostly faced with women shoppers, that much more difficult and stressful. Conversely, more women as front end store staff is likely to have longer term benefits in terms of improved productivity as well as improved customer loyalty for the business.

None of the above is to suggest that men can’t do some of the things detailed above as good as women staff members can or that women are good only in the roles described above, or that external training inputs can’t change any of the above, it is just to point out that in certain areas, women are naturally more gifted and all things being equal, better equipped to perform and contribute to the business better.

Arguments from front line Managers ranging from perceived instability in the business due to attrition caused by marriage or pregnancy, in the case of female staff must be challenged with hard data. Surprisingly, attrition – which is in general high across retail businesses - tends to be lower for women than men!!

As retailers and marketeers, we need to be cognizant of this reality. The perceptions that our operations staff may be carrying about the alleged capability of women staff must be challenged by making them understand and appreciate the above. To begin with food retailers could experiment in catchments that are perceived to be safer. The argument to have an open mind and a willingness to experiment to make our retail workplaces more gender diverse stems from the understanding that no one gender can completely understand or appreciate the mindset and behavior of every consumer. By giving women an equal opportunity to showcase their natural skills, we as retailers would go a long way in improving consumer connect and make our stores more productive than what they are today.

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Retail theatre can help brick and mortar retailers build repeat footfall

Why retail theatre is here to stay?

With increasing competition at one end and more retail points beginning to look like each other, the consumer has ever increasing choices of where to shop and what to expect in every category from retailers in general. The moot point for brick and mortar retailers is the need to not just bring back customers more frequently but also positively influence their in-store journey, and in general have the ability to influence choices through information, interesting forms of engagement or entertainment. All retailers will tell you that this is easier said than done. What with shrinking attention spans, time constrained lives, traffic overload on roads etc, it is tough to bring customers back to stores in any case. To top this, with increasing penetration and convenience of online retail, the scenario for brick and mortar retailers starts looking even tougher.

It is in the above context, that one needs to examine the significance of retail theatre.

To me, retail theatre is the essence of going beyond the mundane and infusing elements that breathe literally life into a physical store. These elements could be physical, audio-visual or digital or a combination of all of these.

The physical elements could be – product display led, engagement or activity led or even audio-visual led.

Imagine walking into a departmental store – first into the kids section to pick up something for your little star, before venturing into the evening wear section for ladies or for that matter men and then into the home furnishing section. What if, instead of standard uni-tonal music, the audio experience could be different in every section? The chirping of birds and animals in the kids department, followed by mellow music in the ladies wear section and then by a more aggressive sporty music in the men’s section. Would it not enhance the experience for customers and make every section seem real and lively.

Now imagine being in a food store with endless aisles of packaged food products all around you and yet you stand there confused, not sure of what to buy.  Imagine a kiosk in the midst of these aisles, where a cheerful promoter is happily demonstrating a new range of cooking sauces and pastes. Don’t you automatically gravitate towards it? Or a section where the product displays are not on the standard mid floor racks but are displayed loose like in an old style wholesale market? Does it suddenly not cue freshness better than any packaged product ever can. You can not only touch but smell, feel and sample too!

Now think of walking into a furniture store. Rows and rows of endless furniture and furnishings -neatly divided by sections. You start browsing when your eye falls on an oversized screen where you notice one of India’s foremost interior experts sharing practical tips to make your house more beautiful and engaging with customers live!

Or an apparel store with loads of clothes and a line of customers in front of the trial rooms awaiting their turn. Replace this scenario with a Magic Mirror (recently introduced by a leading department store chain in India where customers need not physically try on products. Agreed, It’s a novelty but more than that, its amazingly relevant for the category too.

Digital disruption is another way of grabbing consumer attention. But digital disruption done from the perspective of analytics is likely to be less successful for offline shoppers unless it is specific, in real time and customized for individual shoppers while they shop. For instance, getting personalized offers through the deployment of beacons in stores can be both informative and engaging. Similarly there could be other forms of digital intervention in stores that make the journey more pleasurable and remind a customer what they could be missing if they were shopping online.

All of the above are real life instances where businesses are employing retail theatre to disrupt the journey of a customer inside the store and making it more engaging, more enjoyable and giving the customer a solid reason to return back. One can think of infinite more ways to create and enhance the customers’ journey in stores. But whatever is chosen needs to be scalable and relevant to the business one is so seeking to enhance. These are things that the customer is more likely to remember, talk about and then come back to the store again for.

7 things that retail must keep in mind to forge profitability

Over time, through trial and error, strategic and tactical shifts, many a retailer is now turning the all important corner, on their way to seeing sunshine at the end of the proverbial dark tunnel.

The first step for most retailers lies in achieving breakeven and profitability at the store level, followed by the same at the business level.

Here are a few pointers for those who may still be struggling :

a)      Remain consistent with your proposition – Do your home work right before you select and then execute the chosen proposition. Nothing confuses customers more than rapidly changing propositions and promises. Consistency in execution of your chosen proposition through stores, through the assortment mix, through communication and through staff is key. Frequent changes can hurt sales growth rates and set you back by a few months, if not years.

b)      Push like to like sales growth – (1) Look at a retail business granularly as a sum of individual parts and not always from the top through the prism of the brand name. Understand and review issues plaguing individual stores, unlock their potential by co-relating what issues may be preventing growth basis an understanding of their sales trends, their customer complaints, their category level sales, inventories, their manpower and attrition levels etc; work with downstream teams and form your own hypothesis of what ails the store or a specific catchment. Unlock growth potential by working on solutions that impact customers. (2) create positive network effects through multiple initiatives and engagement with diverse sections of the target audience who value the brand for completely different set of reasons and ongoing engagement with whom can unlock both positive buzz for the brand as well as enhanced sales. (3) Add new or missing links to the portfolio. These in most cases tend to be either obvious gaps that for reasons of brand fit / cultural fit / competitive differentiation are often left out of the portfolio or are completely new additions which add to true variety in the store and can have a dramatic effect in the way customers perceive the brand and buy from it.

c)       Enhance sales throughput across the business – this is essentially about enhancing productivity at each point of sale. Given the large proportion of rentals in the overall cost structure, it is important to ensure that space in the store is utilized well and turned around optimally. This means (1) that every store must carry the most optimal mix where each range serves a designated and predefined purpose (as say the mass mover / image enhancer / for the connoisseur etc) and achieves its desired velocity. (2) For ranges that are underperforming evaluate a change in visibility or position.  While every store does carry some additional range over and above what sells, it is critical to refine the mix being carried to better reflect the taste of the catchment where the store is located. (3) Add categories if required or give double facings to potentially large categories. (4) Ensure that random and thoughtless layout changes are minimized and changes that are made must be monitored for effectiveness. (5) And if everything seems fine while the sales throughput is still low, evaluate whether giving up a part of the store space could help save valuable rental outflow. Almost all successful retailers have optimized their store sizes over time. (6) Additionally evaluate multiple times a week deliveries into the stores for faster moving goods

d)      Nudge retained gross margins higher – (1) the first part is to push earned gross margins higher through fundamental programs like a planned change in the merchandising mix in favour of higher margin categories or change suppliers or negotiate better returns with existing suppliers (through higher margins, better supply fill rates, higher samplings and promotions, lower inventory holding  etc). (2) Enhance the proportion of private label in the portfolio has been a favourite for many of the retailers as have been (3) avenues to earn more through in-store advertising, events, promotions and even listing of new products. (4) Moving from an owned stock to a concessionaire model in key categories could also greatly help shore up margins. (5) Identifying stores where margin mix is relatively lower will help you understand and develop specific initiatives to push margins there and help the overall business.

e)      Monitor and plug leakages, wastages, et all. Just as it is important to nudge earned margins upwards, it is also critical to establish all potential sources of margin leakages. There could be potentially several areas to look at. These include – pilferage by customers and employees, cash points where cashiers get away by not punching a few bills or not punching all items in every bill but collecting the money from customers; deliberate in-warding of stock in excess of what is physically received on the shop floor to the benefit of the supplier;  outward movement of material for home delivery in excess of what is ordered by customers or even outward movement of good stock in the guise of garbage disposal are just some of the potential leakage sources of revenue and margins. In-accurate counting and collating of stock remains one of the big bugbears of the retail industry in general and identifying sub categories that contribute to greater Wastages and inaccuracy can help plug some of the gaps through more frequent and continuous counts and checks. Dump especially of fresh produce can add up to potentially huge numbers and optimizing that loss by reviewing order and sales patterns and having specific programs to enhance daily sales to reduce wastages could work wonders.

 f)       Be frugal in your expenses – retail businesses in general have struggled to make money and in this context it is pertinent to understand that controlling expenses of all kinds and being frugal in the way the business is conducted helps send the right signals to the rank and file across the organisation. Simple structures is the need of the hour where employees must be encouraged to multi-task. This means controlled or no hiring at the store and at the business level unless absolutely necessary in the interest of generating higher revenue; negotiating hard for every rupee to be spent including for repair and maintenance; evaluating models from the perspective of reducing long term expense outflow where you pick up the entire fixed cost vs only the variable cost and evaluating whether feel-good programs pushed by different individuals or functions need to be acted upon at all. Marketing expenses unless absolutely necessary from the perspective of adding value to the business fall in this category.

g)      Speed of decision making – For day to day decisions, - efficient retail businesses are somewhat partial to faster decision making not just because the response can be almost immediate but also because decision points are several and speed in thinking and in execution really sets the pace for everyone down the chain and more often than not results in visible and discernible differences for regular consumers, something that they appreciate and keeps bringing them back.