How to Beat the Goliaths

Your store actually has a fighting chance with the retail giants, in the view of CAMEX21 Reimagined keynote speaker Jay Baer, in his session 4 Ways to Win: How Campus Stores Can Thrive in 2021 and Beyond.

Baer is the author of six books, has founded five multimillion-dollar businesses, and recently was inducted into the Speakers Hall of Fame. His business consultancy has worked with many clients over the past decade, including a dozen universities.

“You have to play the game you can actually win,” he told the audience via Zoom. “It’s not the same game as Amazon plays.”

Campus stores even have a bigger opportunity right now, Baer said. “The changes wrought by the pandemic have changed all customers’ buying decisions,” he explained. People are more willing to try a new retailer or a different product brand, Baer said, noting a survey last June showed 54% of consumers had made a switch. “That’s higher now, I suppose,” he added.

“You might think purchasing decisions are driven by economics, but the data doesn’t bear that out,” Baer said. “If price doesn’t matter, what does? Customer experience.”

Customer experience has always been critical to retailing, he emphasized, but it has taken on greater importance “with the world upside down. Nobody wants any extra friction or obstacles, ever.”

He defined “customer experience” as the sum of anything that can affect the customer’s feelings about the store, filtered by the customer’s own expectations of the store. If the store falls short of those expectations, the customer feels the experience has been negative. While a campus store can’t be all things to all customers, “you get to choose which parts of customer experience you work on in your store,” he said.

Baer laid out four ways to hone the customer experience in your store:

Reassess the products and services offered in your store, including your reasons for selling them. Some 86% of NACS member stores saw a revenue decline in 2020, he noted, but some product sales are way up—slippers, for example. With people working from home, slipper sales skyrocketed 70%.

Pay attention to the needs and wants of your customers. You may need to carry items the store has never stocked before. One campus store, he pointed out, created a social justice section at the request of students. Doing something different doesn’t have to be “weird and scary,” Baer stressed. ATMs were once a new idea, he noted, and so too was contactless delivery.

“What do people need that our stores are uniquely positioned to offer, and how can you offer it both in-store and online?” he questioned. “By the end of the semester, what can you do to reimagine what you sell to whom and where?”

“It’s not enough to have e-commerce, you need to have mobile commerce,” Baer said. A smartphone is the device of choice for Generation Z. They hate email, so product codes and special offers need to be formatted for mobile.

One caveat, he noted: “Gen Z has ridiculous speed expectations.” Customers will give campus stores only a little consideration when it comes to download speeds. You’ll need to make sure mobile pages load quickly.

“We assume if people have a good experience at a store, they’ll tell everyone about it. They don’t. Competency doesn’t create conversation,” Baer said. “We discuss things that are different and ignore the average.”

That means campus stores need to have a strategy to build word of mouth. “It’s not enough to run a good store, you actually have to do something different that your customer will notice and talk about. You have to give your customer a story to tell,” he said. One example: A burger restaurant in Sacramento, CA, lets each customer pick a card from a playing deck; if they pull the joker, their meal is free. Winners—and there are usually about four per day—typically post about it on social media.

“By the end of the semester, what can you do to be more remarkable?” he asked.

“We trust people more than businesses,” Baer said. “For Gen Z, they particularly trust influencers.” Some 44% of Gen Z consumers have bought something based on the recommendations of a social media influencer. Friends and peers also influence their purchase of new products.

“You should be using your unique access to and relationships with your community,” Baer said, noting that’s something the mass retailers can’t do. “Make your customers the star of your show.” Student ambassadors are one way to achieve that.

In trying to reimagine and rewire, and become more remarkable and more relatable, Baer cautioned campus stores to keep it simple and specific.

“The hard truth here is 70% of customer experience initiatives fail to produce return on investment,” he said. “Why? Because people make it too big.”