reveries.com - mike shinall

MARCH 1998

"It's about me!" Mike Shinall's eyes are wide with Ali-esque panache. "It's just about me!" You know, to hell with you -- it's about me!" He pauses, then starts in again as though someone were giving him an argument: "Well, it is! It's about intimacy, it's about my store!"

Mike leans back and smiles a wry, gentle smile, satisfied he's made his point -- which is not that he's self-absorbed. No, Mike's point is that retailers and manufacturers need to spend more time thinking about consumers as shoppers.

The notion that the consumer should be the focus of marketing attention may not sound like a revelation exactly. But Mike Shinall's perspective is from the sales side of the branding equation. He rose through the ranks of what eventually became known at Nabisco as "customer marketing," pioneering the concept of "category management" before turning to consulting at Glendinning Associates, Dechert-Hampe and ultimately as co-founder with Jeff Hill of Meridian Consulting Group.

Mike thinks that the biggest thing missing from the branding business today is the linkage between sales and marketing. "People on the sales side don't have a firm appreciation of consumer-driven marketing," he acknowledges. "An equal number of marketing types frankly don't understand the value, the power, of marketing through the customer -- the retailer."

Being a little biased I've always thought that sales guys were ahead of marketing guys.

His solution: The brand plan must integrate the voice of the customer, and the retailer plan must integrate and be concurrent with the brand plan. Except for one thing -- Mike Shinall would never communicate it that way because it sounds like something a consultant would say. He much prefers to take complex ideas and communicate them simply so everybody gets what he's saying.
Which brings him to: "It's all about me!"

Well, then, what's it all about, this it's-all-about-me stuff? Mike takes off on the question in the first-person, because it is, after all, all about him.

It's about gratification: I need it, and I feel good when I get it. They've got my brand, my size. Y'know they've got those gelcaps...they've got the 100 counts, the red ones -- thoses are the ones I want. And they've got it now so I don't have to wait. I want it and I want it now.

It's about stress. I've got to get in and I've got to get out. Don't hide the stuff from me. The single biggest problem in the cough-cold department is that I can't find the product I need. The problem isn't that the products they've got on the shelf don't work for me. I don't know what all that stuff on the package means, anyway. All I know is I don't feel so good and I've got a little cough.

It's about being taken care of. Caretaking. I want somebody I can ask. Why do I buy cough-cold at a pharmacy? Because I can ask them which one's for me. It's somewhat tied into intimacy -- my product, my store, my schedule, my life.

No longer is it just price and service -- it's all these other things that add up to an identity for the retailer. Does the store have what I need, when I need it? Does it feel like home, my store? The retail industry has to begin to build that kind of uniqueness or identity.

I grew up down South, playing blues and rock and roll piano.

Retail channels also stand for something, just like the stores within the channels. Think about the mass channel for a minute. What do you go into a mass channel and buy? I don't care if it's Kmart, Wal*Mart or Target. I go in there to buy soft goods, hard goods and at-home consumables. Stuff I take home and use. I don't care if it's laundry detergent or carpet cleaner or deodorant. I take it home and I use it. I use it up and I buy it again. It's not meat. Not produce, typically. It's at-home consumables.

C-Stores, depending on the C-Store, are about foodservice, big into breakfast or lunch. On-the-go consumables, defined as cigarettes, can of beer or soda, pack of potato chips or candy. It's on the go. Either in my car or on-premise. I stand outside and guzzle it down and on I go. You know, that's what happens.

Club stores are really a two-dimensional thing. Club stores are about consumables and hard goods. And I may never see the same thing twice. This week they have the Sony XDR2017. Next week they may not have that one anymore. Next week it's the XDR2043, because that's what Sony shipped them.

In the retail drug channel, a shift has occurred because they don't make money the way they used to. Drug retailers used to make 80% of their profits in pharmacy; now they make 20% of their profits in pharmacy -- thank you very much managed care. So, they've defined other places to create as profit centers -- photos, greeting cards, batteries, seasonal-- in what they call the front store.

What about supermarkets? Well, supermarkets have always been about meat, produce and groceries -- the center of the store. Why would I want to go to Stop & Shop and buy my shampoo? I typically don't even think about going there. My shampoo store is CVS because they've got more choices and I'm able to find them there. It's an identity issue. Supermarkets usually don't do very well in general merchandise, for example, because they have less focus on it. No uniqueness. They usually just line the products up on the shelves.

If it's all about me, then how do retailers create a "me-intimate" environment? Well, I've got an interesting little case study. It features a manufacturer we've been working with: Gibson Greetings. Who? It's not Hallmark, it's not American Greetings. It's Gibson Greetings. The number three player, but in a very profitable category.

The problem is declining consumer usage. As a nation, we're buying fewer greeting cards. Take teenagers today. They're not going to send one of their friends a birthday card. They're into rude stuff. Rude is good. Rudeness is one of any number of things that set that whole Gen X thing apart.

I have a huge music library, including 5,000 vinyl records and I won't tell you how many CD's. It's everything from Robert Johnson to Mozart.

Anyway, greeting cards are the most boring aisle in the store. You avoid it -- like you would avoid the baby food aisle. I no longer have to go down the baby food aisle. I walk by there and think, "thank you God." I've got a lot of kids and I'm past that. So I just move on.

With greeting cards it's almost the same thing. I just don't want to go down there. It's boring. But Frank O'Connell, the ceo of Gibson, has changed the game with consumers, competition and retailers.

We start with the fact that fewer consumers are buying fewer cards. And those who are buying cards are buying fewer cards than they used to. Used to be that 30% of all people bought greeting cards, now 23% of all people buy greeting cards. By the way, in the U.K., greeting cards are up dramatically. Greeting card decline is not a global phenomenon; it's very much an American situation.

Gibson committed to a strong identity for its products and merchandising by creating all kinds of sub-brands of cards. They've got "Buzz Cuts," which are rude cards. They're a little bit edgier than shoebox cards. Not rated X. Woof-Meow is their line of pet cards, because people like to have pictures of a pet on a card. Plus they sell them in pet stores. Chicken Soup for the Soul is another one. There are religious cards if I want to do that religous thing. The whole point is, you need all kinds of different cards in this category because variety in this particular category is a big thing.

I mean, I've got to find that card that's me! It's all about me! What I don't want is to be confronted with a sea of cards. Actually, this just happened to me. I went into the greeting card aisle and all the cards basically said the same thing. They all said "Happy Birthday." They said, "I should tell you I love you more often." They all say that. Or, "This is the one day I get to tell you I love you."

Oh, boy. I send the same card every year. It gets pretty old. I'd rather say something different. I don't know what to say though, because I'm not terribly creative. So I need people to say it for me. That's what it's all about.

There's also different kinds of merchandising. So the cards themselves, the product, as well as the merchandising, has to change. Instead of having those slots, Gibson offers displays that are curved so the top cards are looking down at you. It's like a "C." You look down the aisle and it looks like a tunnel. It's not cheap fixturing. But it makes you just want to walk down there and see what that's about. The research says that if I can get you in aisle I can sell you a card. So, I've got to get consumers into the greeting card aisle. It's all about understanding, it's about me.

I pride myself on having the sales clerk look at the eclectic bunch of CD's I'm buying and then saying, "Yep, they're all for me!"

It's about bringing the traffic to the greeting cards -- not only through the tunnel merchandising thing -- but also in doing things like putting a little kiosk in the store. That way, I can run into Stop & Shop and buy flowers on the way home because I kind of forgot that today's my anniversary or whatever. Right next to the flowers there's a little display of greeting cards. They've got cards in the bakery, too. What a novel idea.

So there's not a lot of stress. It's about me and I don't want a lot of stress. It's like home meal replacement. I want to go to just one place to get everything I need. What Gibson is doing is bringing the greeting cards to the traffic and bringing the traffic to the greeting cards.

Greeting cards is clearly a category that deserves new products and merchandising. So we begin to have supermarkets say, "hey -- greeting cards -- I'm going to glom onto that. That's going to be a place that's not just a destination but an exciting, intimate atmosphere for people to shop in. So, maybe that's one example.-There are others. By the way, how do I bring excitement into deodorant? What do I do? There are folks in the oral care category that brought excitement into toothpaste and toothbrushes. They brought the two together and created a system. Whoa!

The essence of branding is creating a clear point of difference, but a lot of retailers really haven't done that. How do retailers identify the categories that are changing? Which categories do they look upon to retain, versus those that they look to let go of? When they decide to hold onto them, that begins to set some identity because then they're "in" that category.

When I was undergrad in Macon, Georgia I was lucky enough to hang out with The Allman Brothers. Lynrd Skynrd? Back then, the only place they could play was for free in the student center.

It's all about loyalty. There are markets in this country that are so overbuilt with supermarkets, the South in particular. They all can't survive. How do you become the survivor? How do you do that? How can consumers feel terribly loyal to a store when it's no different from the store next door, or across the street?

Retailers have to create a uniqueness. There has to be a notion of caretaking. That's about understanding what consumers are looking for. There's this whole time-starved thing, the notion of convenience.

Drive-through pharmacies is a manifestation of that. Then there's the service in the store, not unlike what CVS did with Pfizer, creating these health centers in the stores. That helps the consumer feel good about going to CVS. -- It's a point of difference, and the consumer feels taken care of. Caretaking actually is just one attribute of uniqueness.

It may be a particuarly important attribute. So the word that eventually came to me is not just price, not just service, but it's this whole notion of identity.

And that's all about addressing the me factor.