Accenture Getting Rid of Annual Performance Review & Ratings

Accenture has recently quitted its habbit to perform annual review and employees ratings.

Indeed, by focusing too much about this quantative approach, the company found out that it was only promoting a type of employees self centered and narcistic, actually the skills necessary in order to have "better ratings than other employees". 

Obviously, when you are in a competition, you may use all kind of means to reach your goals. As the mother of Shaquille O'Neal says in the movie Blue Chips "a foul is not a foul until the referee blow the whistle"... But obviously, this type of profile can't be preeminent in an organization without creating real issues in term of team cohesion & management.

“The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating,” Nanterme said. “It’s all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.”

This process should be also thought through broadly in businesses, also in data management. Data is not everything, and I don't believe that Steve Jobs when he created the Iphone or Carrefour when it invented the hypermart looked at charts to see what a great idea is about.

Obviously, we need some kind of data and simple score cards in order to evaluate a part of the performance. Also, I believe that Annual reviews are good as they create a special moment to discuss about how things are going on in terms of management and processes. But data can't always be the sole way to evaluate a situation.

Category Management et Stratégie: Le danger de l'historique

"Mais on ne repassera jamais sur l'historique!" Quel directeur de catégorie, de magasin, ou commercial n'a jamais eu cette réaction lors de l'abandon d'une opération commerciale, d'un segment de marché, d'une marque, ou bien d'un format spécifique.

L'essence même de l'analyse de catégorie est de voir le développement historique afin de baser des pistes de croissance. Et l'exercice est juste: Nous avons la chance dans le monde du PGC d'avoir des volumes très importants qui permettent de pouvoir valider un certains nombre de théorie, et surtout d'avoir des effets de mouvements assez lents. Par exemple, bien que le marché du rasage baisse systématiquement depuis des années, il reste un marché très intéressant à ne pas négliger.

Néanmoins, la volonté de repasser sur l'historique est l'un des plus grands risque que peut avoir une société. En effet, à vouloir refaire ce qui a été fait le passé, on a toute les chances du monde de manquer les opportunités futures. Et vouloir ne rien changé est également la meilleure manière de se faire dépasser.

C'est la raison pour laquelle, il est important en catégory management comme dans d'autres cas, de toujours partir d'une page blanche, et non sur une évolution de la category, car cette approche permet d'être ambitieux en terme de proposition consommateur. Et c'est également, selon moi, la meilleure façon de prendre un temps d'avance.

Commerce Day: 23rd of December

No blog post today, it is commerce day! Usually, in the FMCG business, December, 23rd is the busiest day of the year, with most of the grocery shopping for the christmas celebration going on. I remember when I was in store at Auchan Velizy what an actic day it was. Today, I will be at Cora Massy to help out the store (one of the largest store in France).

I wish the best to my peers, as they day will be busy, and important. Good luck to all of you guys!

Est ce que Lidl est le "vrai supermarché de demain"? Retail Stratégie

J'ai écrit un article la semaine dernière sur un article paru il y a peu dans le magazine LSA sur Lidl. Magazine événement, car Lidl, pourtant avare d'interview et d'annonces dans la presse, a laissé 3 de ces dirigents ("gérant", directeur des achats, et directeur de l'expansion), le soin d'expliquer la stratégie du groupe. 

Lors de cet article, une phrase a retenue mon attention : selon son patron, Freidrich Fuchs, "Lidl est le vrai supermarché de demain". En effet, Lidl a réalisé un revirement stratégique, décidant sa sortie du hard discount, sans rogner sur ses principes basiques: 

• 1400 m2 vs 800 m2 actuellement
• 1621 références (choix court)
• Peu de marques nationales
• Excellence opérationnelle pour base.

Maintenant, est ce que Lidl est le supermarché de demain? La roue du commerce veut que chaque concept discount rupturiste s'émancipe, vers plus de service et de qualité. Aujourd'hui, Lidl souhaite en faire de même. Aujourd'hui, les supermarchés modernes, tel les nouveaux concepts Intermarché, sont basé sur plus de choix, plus de frais, des services drive etc... Donc il y a clairement une place qui est à récupérer. 

Au moins, Lidl a très certainement un concept très marqué et spécifique, différenciant de sa nouvelle concurrence supermarché. Donc je pense que Lidl a effectivement une opportunité de développer un nouveau segment spécifique, où je ne pense pas qu'un concurrent risque de s'engoufrer (je vois mal un supermarché dégradé son format por concurrencer un Lidl, surtout au vue de l'excellence opérationnelle de l'allemand).

Et vous, qu'en pensez vous? N'hésitez pas à commenter sur Twitter.

Category Management Series: The Limit Of The Category Captain Concept

The category captain concept is part of the historical category management conception. Hence, category management was the relationship between a retailer and a leading supplier that would take over the category strategy. Thanks to data sharing and close collaboration in editing the retailer's strategy, they would grow one category, and hence benefit together of the efforts of the category management strategy.

The assumption is that suppliers know better their customers, as they have more market studies, master the product innovation program, and have also data from other retail channels that one retail could benefit from.

Nevertheless, letting a supplier leading your strategy could be obviously biased. Indeed, it is pretty rare to have a supplier that is actually leading a complete category. And even if that it is true, its advice will be most of the time biaised and probably not aligned with customers' needs.

Let's take a clear example: The Baby section. An interesting section I had the opportunity to work in store. Prior to category management, you would have the different components of the category spreaded around the store:

• Diapers with paper products such as paper towels, pads...
• Baby food in the cans section
• baby care with the pharmaceutical one
• Car seats and furniture in another aisle.

Let's imagine you need to pick one category leader in the baby section, you obviously will take one of the leader of one of the main categories: food or diapers. But how could a diaper producer will know about feeding a baby. Obviously you know I am talking about Procter & Gamble. But they don't own any baby food brands. Neither do Nestlé's know about baby care.

In order to know how to set up the category, and have the most accurate customer response, that requires not to have a captain leader. And I believe more and more retailers are getting back their category strategies, in order to have a comprehensive category strategy, taking care of customers' need prior anything.

Lidl Strategy in France

Amazing article in French magazine LSA. Lidl is one of the largest retailer in the world. Most of time, it is under estimated for several reasons:

• First of all, it is a hard discounter. Therefore it keeps it simple, does not innovate much on products or shopping experience, but maintain consistently excellent execution in store.
• It does not communicate much, as it has a low marketing budget, but also because the company culture is based on not discussing about the company. No public statements, no communication on the sales figures. It is a familly company.
• It does not try to have "avant gardist" store concept. When it takes a decision, for example to have in store baked bread, to spread it fast.

But Lidl has changed its strategy not so long ago, trying to leave hard discount to become "the real supermarket of tomorrow" as its French manager Friedrich Fuchs explains. Here are the great highlights of the article.

• Lidl is giving up the hard discount concept in all its countries, to become a new form of supermarkets.
• The share of sales under "national brands" is 10%, private label 90%
• The strategy is to extend the average store from 880m2 to 1300m2
• It will also implies larger employee staff, from 8-9 people in 1990 to 20-25 people (the double of people of the average Ed at the time I worked there).
• Lidl has a digital strategy based on click & collect deals, especially on premium wines. 
• They have 1 621 products in range. 
• They don't have any plans on extending their national brand range, focusing their effort on their private labels. They even said they don't need national brands! Watch out suppliers.
• They have purchasing agencies in all their European countries, but try as much as possible to buy at a European level. For example major brands like Coke (Coca Cola) are negotiated at Lidl International in Germany. But France have special products bought for the whole Europe, like cheese and wine in France. This is a great idea as France is the main market for those products, and as they are local suppliers, they could benefit from a better sourcing.
• Stores are delivered each day, by 25 warehouses (60 stores per warehourses, which is in my opinion not as much as I believed). 

Real Estate Strategy

• They have a clear real estate strategy: On the 1500 stores in France, they plan on rebuilding 900 of them. 
• They spend 4,5 to 5 million € to reshape each of their store renovation. Let's put it in prospective: Lidl France = 8,5 billion € in 2014. They have 1 500 stores. That means they spend 100% of a year's sales in each store!!!! Crazy investments!

Their strategic goals by 2020:

• Having renovated 100% of their current stores
• Reach 1800 to 1900 stores
• 8% of market shares (from 4.9% today)

This is amazingly detailed, and I hope you like the precision of the explanations and figures given in this article.

Carrefour Releases Top Of The Line Concept Store In Belgium (Video)

LSA is sharing with us some videos of Carrefour's new concept store, which opened in Mons les Grand Prés, Belgium. Carrefour used to hit the headlines of most of the retail news magazines 5 years ago while its innovative new concept Carrefour Planet was released in the Lyon's suburbs. 

Carrefour Planet was soon to be considered as a failure by analyst, as sales kept on plumetting for Carrefour in France and worlwide, before the then-CEO Lars Olofsson resigned. If you want to check some articles I wrote about the topic at the time, you may go here or there. To shortly give you my thoughts about Carrefour Planet: It was surely not the sole response to Carrefour's problems, and could not solve the sales decrease, but it was for sure a good concept in overal (even though a bit pricy to implement maybe), but it was not either the issue with Carrefours' issues at the time.

I wanted to share with you some of the videos, especially to my international audience. The videos show clearly Carrefour emphasizing in its know how in terms of fresh products, the usage of new digital technologies, but also the will to work on the shopping experience. If you have a European store check to plan, you shall have a stop by this store.

Nevertheless, a cutting edge execution, especially compared to the new store I visited at Villeneuve la Garenne which was very deceiving.

CRM: You can't Satisfy Your Customer At All Price (2nd Episode)

A quick come back to yesterday post. I was writting about the reason why you can't satisfy all your customers, and also, how customer satisfaction strategy could impact the ROI of your customer relationship management strategy. 

But I wanted to give you another example: Social Media Marketing. Indeed, it still seems that most of social media strategy goals are to obtain the larger community possible, larger than your competitor if possible. Then, the second goal, once you achieved the first one, is to have the most activities from your community members, showing strong brand equity. 

But as a matter of fact, dealing efficiently with a large community of customers on social media is a hard task needing a lot of resources. you need to have the content created (mostly by advertizing companies), community managers, there to interract with customers once needed, but also a lot of reporting tools allowing to get data to analyse. All this effort requires a lot of money, lowering your return on investment.

Now, does it mean you should avoid social media in your strategy? Not at all! Social media has become a mandatory tool to manage your customer relationship management interactions. But you don't necessarily need to create a community, or to respond to all your customers, or to spend money on advertizing to make sure you have the most likes or the most views on Youtube. 

I always have in mind the "Engie" advertizing I have seen countless times on Youtube. The only purpose? Make sure customers new about the renaming of GDF Suez in Engie. The campaign was using Youtube as a mass market media, but don't think the usage was accurate.

You could maybe have a specific campaign targeting a specific clientele segment to promote a specific service. Which actually would probably be way more efficient.

Once again, CRM could be a key factor of success to raise sales and gain market shares, but it needs to be taken care carefully, in order to be efficient.

CRM: You can't Satisfy Your Customer At All Price

Customer Relationship Management aims to leverage customer satisfaction in order to increase sales. Indeed, there is a clear correlation between customer satisfaction, and one company sales. Nevertheless, customers are weird animals. Therefore it is hard to satisfy them. If I may be more precise, it is hard to satisfy them all.

I read this very interesting blog article of François Jouandet about the topic. There are several case studies showing that the best customer centric companies sometimes are struggling. It is the case of Kmart, having the best KPIs in terms of customer satisfaction, but struggling with sales for years. Why? Because customer satisfaction cost money. A lot of money. 

Here are the most common negative aspects of a customer centric organization:

• Raise in operation costs to coordinate customer relationship management efforts
• More complex reporting
• Sometimes doubling positions which leads to more inefficiency
• Longer decision making processes.

This is the reason why your customer satisfaction efforts should be focused on specific segments of clientele. We have already discussed on this blog on why you should abandonned some customers' segments are they could be toxic (especially non profitable ones, that drains a lot of energy). Some companies are paying customers to leave their loyalty reward programs...

Also, it is important to have a clear ROI idea of your CRM strategy, in order to master the cost and its efficiency. Leaving some expensive programs in order to cost less and be more efficient, and moreover to have a clear segmentation of your clientele, in order to master your expenses upon your ROI.

9 Ways To Motivate A Team When Not Setting A Goal

Management is a key factor of success in retailing and in customer relationship management. I have written countless time about how important human interactions are key in CRM.
Moreover, we see more and more we see companies abandonning traditionnal goals to focus more on qualitative aspect. This is the reason why Accenture abandonned its annual evaluations, or Unilever don't provide anymore quaterly results, to focus more on the long term. 

I read a long time ago this blog post about the 9 ways to motivate employees when you have not set a specific goal. I believe it is important because actually, motivation comes from simple thing you could implement on a daily basis, that could have tremendous success.

1. Remember that you don’t actually motivate anyone
2. Take Responsibility – Don’t Pass the Buck
3. Be Transparent
4. Believe
5. Help
6. Own the Problem
7. Advocate9. Celebrate

Category Management & Shopping Experience: How Sephora Is Promoting The Trend Of Contouring

I have been working in the health & beauty business for several years, and I find it very interesting. The wide range of brand, and the opportunities to grow new categories is very challenging.

One of the hypest trend of the make up business right now is what we call "contouring". What is it?

"Contouring is giving shape to an area of the face and enhancing the facial structure through makeup," says Beau Nelson, Kristen Stewart's longtime makeup artist.

Contouring used to be a professional techniques needing a lot of expertise in order to use. But a lot of the mass market make up brands decided to propose products to contour. Nevertheless, due to the technicity of these products, they are hard to sell.

This is the reason why Sephora has worked on a new store concept in order to help customers try these new techniques.

“That’s where Sephora comes into play,” said McDonald. “When you demystify, people feel empowered to buy. This translates into her being more engaged in beauty, and that translates into her buying more items.”

Also featured alongside the workshop is Sephora’s digital Beauty Board, a shoppable screen that plays user-generated content coinciding with current trends. Visitors who sit down at the station can watch the looks go by for inspiration, and then pick up the exact products used. Customers can also share their beauty routines and accompanying products to stream on the board. A “People Like Me” search function filters the content stream to show specific skin tones, hair textures and more.

“It’s not digital for the sake of digital,” said McDonald. “It’s a combination of products, services and teachable moments that support our customers’ missions.”

More features in the new San Francisco store include fragrance identifier InstaScent (previously called Poof) that spritzes raw notes of a perfume to help customers decide which defining scent they’re most attracted to (McDonald noted that fragrance is one of Sephora’s under-performing categories). Digital Trend Tables show which online products are most popular and best-selling in real time.

This is a good example on how category management could be leveraged in store to develop new product categories. 

Robots To Be Used To Manage Out Of Stocks In Store

There are a lot of discussions about the phenomenal progress robotic made those past few years. Some consider it could become vital for certain tasks, for certain usage, whereas some are scared of their power and how it could evolve in the future.

Carrefour has lately undertaken some tests in store of robots dedicated to help shoppers out. But as I have already previously said, even though I agree that testing fast is a great habit, I did not see robots blossoming in a near future for that purpose. Nevertheless, LSA has recently published an article about Tally, another robot in the retail world.

This robot aims to control store execution, especially two turn off items: Price errors, and out of stock items. We all know (and we have discussed about the topic) how much out of stock could mean in terms of lost sales.

It can identify 15 000 to 20 000 items per hour, and send its results in the cloud.

Hence tally could empower your big data efforts with premium information that could help you apprehend key factors of success.

I believe that in a near future, we'll see those kind of robots flourishing in store.

TokyWoky: The future Mandatory Social Media Plug In For Ecommerce

Today I wanted to talk about a French Start Up I recently met, TokyWoky. TokyWoky is setting some brand communities on the webpage of E merchants or companies. The idea? Having a community of customers who could help new comers to make purchase decisions.

Obviously, you may trust more someone who is not a seller but rather an advocate of the brand. TokyWoky is therefore working on this new trend. It has already prestigious partners like Kiabi (when I visited the page, 700 people were online), or Lancome (60 people while visiting).

I like the concept, and I think it is actually cool to be able to interract with people while visiting an E commerce shop. Now I wonder if it could work for every companies. I believe you need either a strong brand equity, or be in a specific industry which allows you to have real fans (or both) in order for Tokywoky to be interesting.

Actually Tokywoky don't recommend to incentive coaches in order to get response. They do it because they like to help, and because they like the website.

My experience with Tokywoky

The interface is great, it is easy to use, easy to chat with users, and quite fast. I had to wait couple of minutes to get a good answer. 

The people I chatted with on the website seems to have been "coaches" for months, and quite happy. They also told me it was a bit addictive, but that actually shows that people like it.

One of the downsize is that if you are a visitor and not a coach, you can't read the answers to other questions, which is a pitty, especially as some questions seems to be interesting.

Good luck to this young French Start Up. I actually believe that in the future, it will be clear that E merchants will have this feature.