Matter. Julie Williamson
Читать онлайн книгу.
give the shopper a total price. That’s just how it was done. If you asked a grocer in 1916 about how his business worked, he would have talked about the importance of clerks knowing everything about all the inventory and managing the customer experience. If you had asked customers what they needed or wanted in their shopping experience, they likely would have said faster clerks and lower prices.
Saunders didn’t just ask customers what they wanted. And he didn’t try to do what his competition was doing . . . he looked at what was happening . . . synthesized it with what he knew about the economics of his business, had the courage to challenge the assumptions almost everyone was making about shopping for groceries, and single-handedly reinvented the experience.
In the face of deeply held beliefs about how to shop for groceries, a guy named Clarence Saunders was optimistic enough about the industry to launch his own unique brand, and curious enough to challenge many of the deeply held assumptions about how people shopped for groceries. He set his sights on the customer’s shopping experience as his edge of disruption when he opened the first Piggly Wiggly in 1916. It was the first grocery store to use checkout lanes and to price each individual product so that shoppers could browse and select for themselves—using a radical new object Saunders invented called a shopping cart. He was the first to create this self-service format, overcoming deeply held industry and customer beliefs about what the ideal grocery-shopping experience looked and felt like. Saunders didn’t just ask customers what they wanted—the likelihood of them coming up with checkout lanes was incredibly remote. And he didn’t try to do what his competition was doing, only better or cheaper or with nicer people. Instead, he looked at what was happening in retail and in the way shoppers were starting to behave, synthesized it with what he knew about the economics of his business, had the courage to challenge the assumptions almost everyone was making about shopping for groceries, and single-handedly reinvented the experience.1
Fast-forward almost 100 years and Saunders’s self-service format, so radical when he first launched it, is still the norm for the industry. He was truly on the edge of disruption in 1916, and he created an enduring model as a result. In an interesting twist, today grocers are starting to experiment with “concierge service,” where shoppers order online and drive up for curbside pickup, and a clerk loads their bags into the car (sound familiar?). Why take this on? Because grocers are seeing the disruptions that are happening around them and they are defining their new edge of disruption in the shopping experience.
As the grocery industry shifts to accommodate these changing shopping behaviors, one company, Homeplus (owned by Tesco), decided to take a radically new approach. It defined for itself a new edge of disruption to explore—one invested in technology, shifting cultural norms, activity in adjacent sectors, and the reinvigoration of a historic business model while solving for how to create a new shopping experience. While the competition installed self-scanner technology for customers to use in the traditional checkout environment, Homeplus ventured out into the real world of its customers. Let’s take a look at what has become a case study for defining your edge of disruption in the real world.2
In 2015, Homeplus was succeeding as the second-largest Korean grocery retailer, with more than 400 stores serving 6 million customers weekly.3 Flash back to 2011, though, and the company was concerned about losing sales to online retailers (e-tailers). Homeplus did have a conventional website for ordering products, but it felt vulnerable to dedicated e-tailers. South Korea was by most measures the world’s most web-savvy country, with 84 percent of its more than 40 million residents using the internet. Residents especially loved using their smartphones to order all sorts of retail goods on the spot. But in 2011, grocery had eluded the e-tailing boom, and shopping for groceries online represented only 2 to 3 percent of Homeplus’s market.
On the face of it, there was no need to push e-tailing forward. Indeed, it would seem to be in Homeplus’s interest not to—it had plenty to focus on in its traditional business operations to compete with the other traditional grocery stores. The more pessimistic or defensive-minded thinkers in the industry might have been inclined to simply continue to work in the current model, driving out cost and other internal operations in traditional environments—the place where they were comfortable working.
But Homeplus executives were reportedly curious about an unanswered question in the market. They had noticed some developments in other adjacent markets that pointed toward e-tailing being important in Homeplus’s own market. The staggering adoption and use of apps on smartphones was a cultural phenomenon in South Korea. In parallel, in the United States, online sales of staple products like diapers and razors were exploding, with online subscription models claiming upwards of 30 percent of the market. This new fringe behavior was gaining critical mass, and Homeplus saw a chance to answer the question of how consumers would respond to a fresh take on internet grocery shopping.
Homeplus chose to be optimistic about the future of grocery shopping in this new world by framing e-tailing as an opportunity, and to be curious about how to accelerate it even further. This was a stark contrast to most retailers’ desire to halt the progression of online grocery shopping for as long as possible. Standing back from the daily realities of their business, Homeplus executives challenged deeply held industry assumptions by asking a very important question. Instead of considering ways to dissuade shoppers from going online for groceries, they asked, “How can we remove barriers to ordering groceries online and take the lead in online grocery sales?” We suggest that solving this question became Homeplus’s edge of disruption in 2011, and it was the perfect place to bring together its understanding of the market, its enthusiasm for technology, and its interest in the shopping experience.
The company’s executives pulled together a team of partners that included their ad agency in Seoul, which came forward with an idea for making orders much easier for time-pressed consumers. The team hypothesized that consumers were reluctant to take the time to get out their computers, log on to a grocery site, and scroll through static lists of products to find what they liked to buy. It was all too much bother; worse, it didn’t make sense in either the traditional model or the emerging model. To make headway with consumers online, Homeplus had to engineer a new kind of online shopping.
The team looked to cultural norms and technology trends in particular for insight. South Koreans relied heavily on public transportation to get around their highly urbanized country. As they waited for the subway, they liked to pull out their phones— maybe to do something important, or maybe to surf, check social media, or play games—it didn’t matter. For Homeplus, this was a potentially disruptive way to engage.
The company invested in a dedicated app and outfitted train stations with images of grocery products. This allowed commuters to use their smartphones, stroll along the train station with its walls plastered with images of products just as they would a grocery store aisle, and capture the products they recognized and loved on their phones. With the help of their ad agency, Homeplus was able to mimic the visuals of a grocery store’s aisles, with items displaying QR codes shoppers could scan with their phones.4 As items were selected, the app added them to the consumer’s shopping basket. Assuming payment details were filled out in advance on the app, a single click would allow the customer to make a purchase. During the campaign, online sales rose 130 percent.5 Clarence Saunders would be proud!
Imagine for yourself the kinds of questions you need to ask, the assumptions you need to challenge, if you want to completely reconstitute your customer interactions. These market-facing, customer-impacting moments are rich and generative places to look for your edge of disruption. You may want to ask your customers, but remember that they likely will struggle to envision something different as well, so don’t stop there. Ask your employees, talk to people outside your industry, and understand the cultural changes that are affecting your business. Take a good look at your assumptions and test yourself. Are you pushing out of the echo chamber of your own business far enough, or are you stuck on the model as it is known today? It is tough to do on your own—collaboration is great for brainstorming as you define your edge of disruption. Bring in outside voices; industry watchers, customers, board members, employees, vendors, technology experts, consultants, and others will help