Find Your Store's Superpowers

In a world where anyone can buy almost any product online, what makes your campus store so special? Why should the school administration even keep the store around?

In the last two years stores have functioned basically in survival mode. Now things are normal (sort of) and administrators are expecting accountability again. Your store needs to highlight its strengths and demonstrate how it delivers value to the campus, but many stores aren’t comfortable with bragging.

CAMEX22 keynote speaker David Avrin provided an exercise that campus store leaders can undertake with their teams to identify specific advantages in the store to report to administrators or promote to customers. The exercise is easy and intended to provoke a lot of discussion among your staff, including student workers.

Be sure to have a flip chart, white board, or even just a stack of sticky notes on hand to record and organize the group’s thoughts. Now it’s the team’s job to develop “persuasive and informative claims you can make about the store that, if stakeholders knew, would double your business,” Avrin said in his keynote. Doubling your sales might be a stretch, but the point is to identify strengths that might not be apparent to your customers or institution.

Reveal those strengths by using a series of categories and unfinished sentences to get discussion flowing. Avrin provided some sample starters:

Supremacy: “We provide more --.”

Expertise: “As part of the university, we --.” (“To show you’re not just purveyors of sweatshirts, you’re more than a stop on the tour,” Avrin explained.)

Convenience: “Instead of waiting for --.” (“To push your on-campus location, he said.)

Simplicity: “With just one click --.”

Clarification: “Too many still think the store --.”

Action verb: “We developed, pioneered, launched --.”

Participants must use full sentences, Avrin said, and cannot just list out products and services offered by the store. Team members can create as many additional categories and sentence starters as needed.

Avrin suggested coming up with at least 10 statements—20 to 30 is even better—on which the group agrees. “Then here’s where it gets hard,” he said. “Pare those down to just five.”

The five statements will form the nucleus of your messaging to students and administrators.