Quality, not sizzle, keeps customers coming back
By Jay McIntosh, News editor -- Furniture Today, December 9, 2001
One of the more disturbing trends of the last few years has shown up on local television news. It's not the latest lurid story about a traffic accident or another pathos-laden feature about a mistreated animal — not exactly. It's the news itself. And I think the problem with the news illustrates a conflict that is faced by everyone who serves the public, including home furnishings retailers and manufacturers.
More and more, local TV news relies on stories that are cheaply gathered and easily presented. It leans heavily on crime, since it's easy to monitor police scanners and send camera crews to accidents or murder scenes. There is little enterprise and investigation — the kind of stories that take time, hard work, familiarity with the subject matter and a real empathy with the audience.
A public TV documentary called "Local News," done by Lumiere Productions and WNET in New York, showed the conflicts that can arise from this approach. The news staff gets frustrated, but the owners go even further into "aggressive" crime coverage to try to boost ratings.
How does this relate to furniture? In a way, the cheapening of newsgathering is comparable to the notion that price alone is king. It's the idea that all the public looks for in a product is how much it costs, and you'd better be cheaper than the next guy.
With all the furniture ads about deep discounts and emergency, overstock, going-out-of-business sales, it sometimes seems like most stores are taking that approach.
I think this is a false impression. Retailers that have been around a while know that price is important, but they have to back it up with something more substantial. Good retailers — even the good price-oriented retailers — put in time and hard work, know their products inside out, and know their consumers. Their customers don't mind paying a fair price, maybe not the lowest price, for the value of the retailer's product knowledge, service and dependability.
An example of a retailer that adds something extra is Goods Furniture in Kewanee, Ill. Owners Phil and Mary Good, who just won the 2001 Retailer of the Year Award from the Manufacturers Agents Club of Chicago, do $25 million a year by offering everyday low prices, excellent service and a great mix of retailing and entertainment that includes nine historic gallery buildings, a restaurant, a bed and breakfast, a wine cellar and a gift emporium.
This isn't the cheapest way to sell furniture. But customers drive two or three hours from Chicago to shop and buy.
It's good to hear about the success of people like the Goods. On the TV news front, there's also a glimmer of hope. A group called The Project for Excellence in Journalism recently investigated the TV scene and concluded, "Many of the conventional ideas about what works in TV news — high story count, flashy production, emotion over substance, targeting — are demonstrably wrong." Quality, not cheap sizzle, is what keeps viewers coming back, this group says.
In the long run, you've got to believe that quality retailing is what keeps customers coming back.
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