Quantitative Data – Do You Understand It?

Quantitative Data – I can remember being somewhat scared by this term when we started to investigate it for our business plan, now a year ago.  Data suggested lots and lots of numbers whereas Quantitative had connotations of quantities or amounts so I guessed it was information to do with quantities of products.  I was half way there!

For our business plan, we had to research the number of customers we would be likely to have, how much money they would be likely to spend and where they were currently spending their money so we could work out how to get them to shop with us and calculate our turnover.  We researched to find out the target market’s overall spending on specialised cheese in order to come up with raw facts and figures for the bank which they prefer apparently. We’ve decided we need to revisit this part of our business plan, or at least sit down and compare the figures we anticipated with the reality. We do this after each quarter and it’s close to that time of the year again.  We’re also revisiting it for another reason as we’ve noticed that shoppers aren’t spending as much during the middle two weeks of the month.  Our turnover seems to increase by about 10-15% in the final week of the month as our customers get paid and we’ve noticed that the sales of our speciality cheese increase that week as shoppers reward themselves a little. The first week of the month remains about the same or slightly higher than the previous month, month on month but then the middle two weeks take a dip and we can only put it down to the recession as our customer’s purse strings become tighter during that time.

The question is what do we do about it?

• Footfall remains the same so we need the same amount of staff on those middle two weeks, hence we can’t make savings there.
• We still want customers to increase their spending on the fourth week so we don’t want for them to spend prematurely.
• Are they spending elsewhere during those two weeks – we need to investigate if other shops are doing offers during that fortnight?
• We are going to experiment with BOGOF for the next 3 months. Buy one – get one free by working with our suppliers and by featuring a different cheese each week.
• We hope that will not only increase spending during those middle two weeks but it will also increase footfall and generate more interest in our products.

Have you ever noticed a similar downturn during any particular week in your business? Were you able to analyse your quantitative data in order to alter your plans and increase your turnover?  We’d love to hear about it.

Millie x

The Value of a Business Mentor

Are you in business for more than six months?

Are you planning to start a business in the near future?

Do you have a mentor?

Do you really understand how best to create a social media strategy, to write a business plan, to evaluate your progress, to understand the needs of your customers?

We have answered ‘yes’ to the first three questions and while we would have answered ‘no’ to much of the fourth question some time ago, we are now well on the way to answering it with a ‘yes’.

One of the aspects of business that cannot be underestimated is that of ensuring that you have access to a mentor. We find our local enterprise board is wonderful.  It provided us with three mentoring sessions for free when we initially started our business and although we now pay for the mentoring sessions, it really is money well spent. Apart from improving our focus in that we have to prepare for a meeting with a mentor, we also have to ensure that we have completed our ‘homework’. All of our various mentors help us to ‘think outside the box’ by encouraging us to review and evaluate, to consider the business from different viewpoints including that of the customer and the bank!, and helping us to plan effectively. ‘Mentors in the plural’ – are you exclaiming in surprise?  Yes, we have more than one mentor. We don’t meet each of them every month but occasionally as the need arises.  Sometimes we might meet one of the mentors once a month for three or four months if we are focusing on a strategy or a campaign. The Beacon Coach helps us with our sales and marketing strategies, from evaluating our business plan and moving it forward as circumstances change. It was the Beacon Coach that helped us to realise that the Whisker Street shop wasn’t listening to its customers and it was important that we should.  As I said last week, she was right as Whisker St is now closed and we have had record sales this week. We are also considering starting a second blog, following advice from the ladies at Write on Track.  If we are going to extend our business by setting up a franchise or of offering online shopping, we will, of course, require a website.  An integrated blog could be used to improve the search engine optimisation of our website as well as showcasing our ranges of cheese, our customer care, our knowledge and our expertise. We could use it as a communication tool with our customers too.

This blog is used more to share our business knowledge and experience with other entrepreneurs and start up companies, as we wish to improve our profile and sell more copies of our ‘What is Marketing?’ book so a blog specifically for our Cheese Mall customers is a good idea. Do you have a mentor for your business? If yes, have you found them to be useful and helpful?  If no, are you convinced you are really doing as well as you might be?

One Door Closes, Another One Opens

I’m back with a bang! Yes, we’re just over half way through the first year of business and it seems a good time to evaluate, focus, re-focus,  garner some energy and goodwill and go full steam ahead for the next few months to when we will celebrate our first anniversary in style.

Many thanks for all the good wishes over the last week, in hindsight I think I was overdoing it and once I got a cold and cough, I didn’t stop to take some more care of myself and then it developed into a chest infection. Mum says we need a holiday but when you are self-employed, it can be quite difficult to stop and force yourself to take time out. However, I know that if I put a holiday in the diary, then I will work my schedule around it so that is just what I have done. Rather than risking an enforced ‘holiday’ in the sick bed, I am going to take 5 whole days away from the business in August and Matthew is taking a long weekend in July.  Hopefully we’ll be buzzing then having being recharged! Do you find that you find it hard to take time out from your business? If you have any tips, we’d love to hear them. As Dad said, holidays should be an important part of any business plan as they are essential.

We’ve delayed the final edit on our new brochure (which Matthew mentioned last week) for two reasons. One was that we found another two boxes of them at the back of the the stationary cupboard which was great. Another is that one of our competitors on Whisker Street has just closed down so we want to evaluate how we can best attract their loyal shoppers to move to us and then, to stay shopping with us.

Image from Here

Many of them have come to shop here and we’ve definitely seen an increase in turnover as a result.  However, we think that as our long term aim is to keep them as loyal customers, returning again and again, we really have to determine their shopping needs and discover how we can best meet them in our own marketing strategies.  Are their needs going to be different to our existing clientele? We can’t presume anything at this stage.

When we were building our business plan and evaluating our competitors, we noticed that the Whisker Street shop just wasn’t listening to their customers. Many of them were elderly and seemed to want a more personal and helpful service than was provided, they seemed to return to that shop out of loyalty, fear of change and the delivery service that was offered.  We know we offer the personal and helpful service, along with a superb range of cheeses.  We have just launched our delivery service and this will also test the waters as to the need of an online shop in the future.  Customers can now do their shopping, leave it here while they shop elsewhere and then they can either collect it or it will be delivered to their home that afternoon.  Of course, it needed the investment of a refrigerated van but with every cloud is a silver lining as we purchased a very good second hand one from another business that was closing down.

While the online shop will be way into the future if it does happen, we are now advertising our ‘phone and deliver’ service whereby regular customers can telephone us with their order, pay over the phone and we’ll deliver it that afternoon.

One thing for sure though, I am so glad our business plan was thorough when I see so many other businesses closing down. As the saying goes ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ and hopefully we’ve done sufficient preparation to ensure we succeed.

If you would like to read our book which incorporates the thinking behind our business plan, you can purchase a paperback or an ebook of The Cheese Mall online. We’ve been getting great feedback so I hope you find it useful too.

Benefits of Direct Marketing

What is Direct Marketing? Well, I have to admit that I struggled to understand how to implement direct marketing when Millie first explained it to me.  It’s Matthew blogging here today, by the way, to talk to you about Direct Marketing and how we are getting on with our planned direct marketing efforts for our business. Poor Millie has a bad cough that turned into a chest infection so she is nicely tucked up in bed and taking it easy for a couple days.

Our first print run of our initial brochure are all gone which is a good complaint I guess considering it is seven months since we launched.  We have decided to revisit its design and revisit the ‘direct marketing’ part of our business plan. Millie researched it at the time and explained it to me.  Do you know you can read all about it in our ‘Marketing Communications’ chapter in the Cheese Mall book?

We knew that  our brochure had to address the needs of the various segments in our target markets, from young teenagers to elderly shoppers, from parents to professionals.  We also worked out that we had to emphasise the benefits rather than the features.

Benefits & Features

As Millie explained to me at the time, features only account for 20% of the business decision so we had to ensure that the benefits, that would account for 80% of our market’s buying decisions, would be very much to the fore of whatever brochures or flyers we produced.

For example, one of the features of our Cheese Mall store is that of our variety of tills – from cashier tills to self service tills to a more personal service behind an old shop counter. The advantage of this is that the various segments can choose how they want to be served. They can pick up the pre-wrapped cheese and go to a self-service till and scan the products themselves or they can choose to pay at a manned till. Alternatively, they can go to the main bench where there are a number of staff waiting to advise on their selection of cheese, to cut whatever size they would like, to recommend wines to serve with the cheese and really offer a personal service.  This personal service is appreciated by many different groups – the older mice looking for some good old-fashioned service, professionals wanting to buy something special for the weekend or as a gift, parents wanting to treat themselves once a week or a month and even children who are trying to decide on a gift for their parents.

We really wanted to focus on this particular benefit (amongst so many others too) within our brochure. The question then was ‘How?’ and the question now is ‘Do we alter it?’

We included pictures of the traditional teak bench with 3 customers standing in front of it – a grandmother, a professional male in a smart suit and a ten year old child and we ensure that their body language didn’t suggest they were shopping together. We also included pictures of our other tills with different segments shopping there too – all with smiles on their faces of course.

At the time, we were told that using words such as ‘Easy, Save, Love, Free, You, Your, New, Results, Proven, Guarantee’ really bestowed emotion and of course, emotion sells. We included the words ‘You, Your, Save and New’ in our existing brochure.

It is difficult to decide if we focus on this benefit again, I think we should as we do welcome a variety of segments of society into our shop. Everyone knows they will receive good customer service, suited to their needs.   Senator Feargal Quinn recounted a story about wonderful customer service he experienced on a visit to America some time ago, and that is what we want to emulate and that is what we want to communicate in our brochure. That the customer comes first.

Phrases like ‘Easy Shopping’ or ‘Shopping is Easy at The Cheese Mall’ are coming to mind but I think I will wait until Millie is better before I put the final touches to it. Do you have any other ideas? Do you try to emphasise the benefits rather than the features? Has it worked well for you?

Building Your Brand Awareness

Building your brand is a challenge for every new business. We devoted a chapter to it in our book ‘The Cheese Mall’ and we describe it as the DNA of our business. It is our brand reputation and our customers’ brand loyalty to us that will largely determine our success and the future of our business.

We decided at the outset that our business wasn’t just about selling cheese but it is a retail experience that has something for so many of our different target markets. However, we need to stay in contact with our customers to ensure that we communicate with them and discover if we aren’t meeting their needs or if indeed, their needs change so we are ready to meet their requirements.

We use this blog to communicate with other entrepreneurs, to advise other start up businesses and those already in business about what we have learnt along our journey. If you are a start up business, we hope that you are finding it useful particularly if you are starting research for your own business plan.

However, we can also use so many social networking platforms to communicate with our customers and receive feedback from them.

Why we use Facebook:

We use facebook to inform our customers and engage with them. We promote this in the shop with some ‘Find us on facebook‘ stickers and it is mentioned on our receipts and leaflets too. All our customers have to do is search for ‘The Cheese Mall’ and then like our business page. It is really important that businesses check their facebook page twice daily so they can respond to any updates left by customers. If they happen to be negative, then it is good if the business are seen to respond to them quickly and if they are positive (which they usually are) you can say ‘thank you’ and it gives you a really good start to the day. Of course, we also use our facebook page to inform other businesses about marketing strategies and customer service.

How does Twitter help us to build our brand?

Twitter is another social media tool that we use and we enjoy.  We find that our followers on twitter are a mixture of friends, customers at The Cheese Mall, business owners, start up businesses, entrepreneurs and of course, cheese-lovers.  We found it a little difficult to grasp twitter at first but once we started engaging with other tweeters and partaking in conversations, we realised that twitter is perhaps the most sociable of all the social media tools.

How does twitter help us to build our brand you may ask. Well, we find it drives traffic to this blog and to our website where people can buy the book. It also helps to spread brand awareness so people realise that we’re not just about selling cheese but we’ve also learnt a lot about marketing strategies and business plans and are very willing to pass that knowledge on to others.

Do you use social media platforms to create brand awareness and work on building your brand?

The Importance of Customer Service Excellence

When we were doing our business plan, Matthew asked me which was the most important element of the Marketing Mix for The Cheese Mall and after I thought about it for some time, I decided that the ‘People’ is perhaps the most important of the 5 Ps – the Product, Price, Promotion, Place and People. After all, ‘People’ does not refer to our customers but to the people behind the business: the cashiers, the managers, the waiting staff, everyone involved in The Cheese Mall.

I was in a shop recently and was about to buy a product that was listed in one of their advertising leaflets.  As the price on the product was different to that in their direct marketing, I queried it with the staff member and although she amended it to the correct price, she made me feel as though I was a bit of a nuisance and a bit silly for fussy about fifty cent. I didn’t have a good feeling when I left the shop and I wondered if I would return.

That is exactly the type of service that I do not want people to receive at The Cheese Mall.  As we found when we were researching for our business plan, while the quality of products and service are critical to our success too, if the attitude and behaviour of the front-line staff is poor, it will reflect badly on us. After all, customers can be our best asset but they also tend to tell more people if they receive bad service rather than excellent customer service.

One of our heroes who encapsulates the importance of good customer service has to be Feargal Quinn, from his success developing the Superquinn brand and putting the customer first to the ethos in his book Crowning the Customer. As part of each staff member’s customer training, Matthew gives each of them a copy of this book  and we use it to inform our training manual too. Of course, our admiration for Senator Feargal Quinn meant that we were doubly delighted when he endorsed our book The Cheese Mall with a glowing review.

One of my favourite principles that Feargal Quinn talks about is his term ‘the boomerang principle‘ by which he means that if you treat people well, they will come back to buy from you again and again.  So many shops and outlets use ‘loyalty cards’ as a means to buy customers loyalty, to persuade them that they will be rewarded the more they spend.  It is something that works well and we are looking at developing it with our brand but if our customers don’t receive good customer service, they won’t return no matter how good the price or the rewards.

We have incorporated plans into our business plan to ensure that our customer service is second to none with reminders to review it, test it and ensure training is up to date. Have you emphasised the importance of ‘People’ in your Marketing Mix?

What Is A Logo?

We have just realised that although our logo is on all our printed materials, our shop front and our paper carrier bags, we have never shown it to you, our loyal blog readers so I thought I’d show it to you today and do let us know what you think of it.

When we were working on our business plan and were so busy working out our marketing strategies to our costings to our SWOT analyses that we left the logo design to our very talented graphic designers Cecil and Ana.  Although we had spoken to them in great detail trying to explain what we wanted our brand to communicate and what message we wanted to get across, we were still very apprehensive when it was getting close to D-Day and we really wanted it to look right.

Why is the logo a heart shape? Well, we had explained to Cecil and Ana how our enterprise will be a family business, we as twins working hard together and our mum helping us occasionally and Dad always hovering in the background.  As Ana explained when she went through it with us, the heart symbolises our unity as a family working on the business together and it also epitomises the fact that we put the customer first, our central ethos is to help the customer and ensure they have a good shopping experience.

We decided on the tagline ‘The Ultimate Shopping Experience’ as we wanted it to communicate the message that The Cheese Mall has so much to offer the different sectors – not just different types and price bands of cheese on offer but also the Museum, the cafe, the express cashier points, the friendly staff and personal service behind our counters too as well as emphasising the quality and diversity of our product range. We hope that the ‘handwritten’ font of The Cheese Mill symbolises the personal touch we offer to shoppers as well as the quality of our product, our mum also thinks that it shows our optimism too as somehow the writing is quite cheery.

And of course, the heart is made from a block of cheese – what else could it be made from?

A logo is so important, in many ways it can make or break a brand depending on the design. We have heard of cases where companies have changed their logos and had to return to their previous logo if the new one isn’t perceived well.  We are really pleased with it and feel it encapsulates our brand promise perfectly. We would love to hear what you think of our logo.

If you would like to read about how we put our business plan together and learn from it for your own business, you can purchase The Cheese Mall as a paperbook or ebook here. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Millie xx