#34 Inside Friction vs Reward: Richard Hammond on Smarter Retail Strategy

sure absolutely um so the kind of taking it right back to first principles um i've been a retailer for 39 years now and i started as a as a kid who wanted to save up for a video recorder and the best way to do that was go and work for an electrical retailer because you've got staff discount

and

right from the start I was just fascinated by what was making customers come to our store instead of, at the time, the other 18 places you could buy the same products that we were selling.

And without giving away my age too much, that was long before the internet had even been a real twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eyes.

So everything was physical and there were 19 places you could buy our products.

And something was making people come to our store instead of the others.

And I was just obsessed by that.

And I took that into my retail head office career.

And what I was always then looking for was a metric, a way of describing what I could see as a kid when I was working in the stores.

I stayed in stores for quite a long time before I flipped to head offices.

And what was apparent really quickly was that there just wasn't a metric that was able to describe human behavior.

know when you say it like that you kind of go well of course not that's a that's a giant subject and it's no surprise that that people found it tough but you know we had things like feedback based reporting we had customers telling us what they wanted more and less of and instinctively it just didn't seem to represent the reality and the truth is actually when you ask customers for feedback however you dress it up they'll tell you they want two things they want lower prices and more choice And what they actually mean is, I want to make sure you're great value.

And also, I want you to show me the thing that meets my need.

But it's a good example of why feedback is so unreliable, because what the human being is asking for is the right choice.

They're not asking for more choice, but they don't know how to express it.

And so, cutting a very long story short, I just found myself utterly frustrated by not having a good metric.

And then you had things like net promoter score came to the surface.

And I thought maybe that was the answer.

And net promoter score turns out to actually be a measure of nothing and an unreliable measure of nothing, but quite a useful number to rally people around.

And so then you started to see, well, actually, the need for a metric is gigantic.

The need to have a representative number is crazy powerful.

Why aren't those two things coming together? I then flipped myself to the agency side and I started running my own troubleshooting retail consultancy.

And I did that for quite a long time where I'd get to go all around the world in the lovely big seats at the front of the airplane on my client's dollar and all those kinds of things to go and solve problems.

And it was brilliant.

I loved it.