1 Functional Visual Increased Sales by £11 million

17 July 2024 (1st draft, awaiting images)

This is a true story about the unique way I increased sales by £11 million, on a £42 million highly profitable product category, for a major UK retailer.

It's a story about how 'pretty' gets in the way of selling.

A tale of how a fixation with 'pretty' means the path to £11 million was nearly dismissed.

It's an example of how huge potential for growth often hides in plain sight.

Most of all, it's an account of how the key to unlocking sales was simple and low investment.

The sales were increased entirely under the radar of the retailer's competitors too. It's why I'm keeping quiet about who I did this for – I don't want to alert their challengers.


It all began in the middle

When this story began, I was working as part of a transformation team. We were mid-way through a two year project involving a £1.3b retailer.

The trader was owned by a £6.4b UK PLC. The consultancy I'd joined had been working for the PLC for a year or two before I arrived.

It was the consultancy's third operating model project for the PLC (and my second).

I was heavily involved in all aspects of the initiative, and leading the customer experience workstream.

It was half way through the project when the retailer’s Board of Directors asked us to look at something outside the original project scope.

The founder and owner of the consultancy, my boss, tasked our analyst with examining the performance of this new addition to our scope.

So in the middle of a large project, this story began…


A mystery in sales data

The first thing that happened in our tale, was a mystery surfaced. Our data analyst uncovered a picture of customers buying something the business was not selling (!?).

What were they selling?

A lot of propositions involve choosing between predetermined combinations of features. An example is 'Se', 'Plus', 'Pro', or 'Pro Max' mobile phones.

Others allow the customer to self-determine the combination of features/parts they want. 'Build your own gaming PC', holiday packages, and self-service investment portfolio platforms, for example.

The proposition in this story was a 'build you own'.

What customers were buying

On average, the product should have consisted of eight elements, according to market data.

The majority of customers were buying two or three. Four, perhaps five. Purchasers buying more from stores were outliers. The average sale was something like 2.3 boxes – nowhere near eight.

It explained why there were so many slow-movers in the range, but otherwise stumped the analyst, boss, and those within the retailer.

I surfaced from my customer experience analysis, and was asked to investigate the proposition's presentation in‑store (Online, visual selling is even more important, so keep reading).

The retailer's idea of a purchase experience

I visited a number of the retailer's stores to assess what customers were being presented with.

All the stores were uniform, and generally tidy.

The proposition was relatively easy to find within each store.

The product display itself was colour coded, with large upmarket and appealing product shots, and only a little promotion / deals / 'Sale!' noise.

A brochure with a “Step 1, Step 2…” section in it existed, though I couldn't find any in any of the stores. All the brochure holders happened to be empty in the middle of the week and first thing at the weekend.

There were neat clear labels on the self-serve boxes.

Everything was sleek and colourful.

At the end of the day, the proposition was generating £42 million in sales, so how much head room for growth could there be?

Pretty, but was it shoppable?

There's usually a reason

The shopping experience for this proposition, both in‑store and online, was ‘the usual’ in my opinion - found everywhere.

There's two possible reasons why it's everywhere, and both can apply:

  1. It works 'well enough' for the businesses playing in the market, and…
  2. No one in the market has any better ideas

Neither means anything works for the customer – for them, the 'usual' might be the 'best of the bad'. And neither means there's no headroom for growth.

Out of step with the customer journey

The product presentation was entirely ‘marketing’ orientated. “Ooo, look at this lovely picture. You want this, it’s so desirable” it said to the customer.

The customer, however, was in the store trying to make a purchase. They were way beyond the marketing stage.

Customers in ‘active buying’ mode need to understand what's in front of them before they can go forward. Telling them it's all beautiful is irritating, like an relentless salesperson on a roll with their script.

Every store I visited had empty brochure holders. I only knew what was in the brochure because we’d analysed them as part of the wider project.

Despite containing a "Step 1, Step 2…" guide, the brochures only coordinated with the store in appearance, not substance.

Critically, the brochures did not provide clear information about what was on the shelves.

Relating the brochure to what was in front of the customer was hard. The effect was similar to school homework, despite being nicely designed.

It was everything except intuitive.

A pretty limiter on sales

Though this sounds brutal, the store display was effectively saying to the customer: “Here’s a load of boxes, you figure it out”.

And remember: the boxes had nice labels on them.

It all added up to a ‘pretty’ barrier to customers wanting more than a couple of items.

My assessment was there was no mystery. It was unshoppable for anyone wanting to buy the proposition in full.

To this day, I'm still mystified by how many incredulous reactions I got to explaining the above. No one in the retailer seemed to 'get' it. The customer did, immediately – but I'm getting ahead now.

A unique way to increase sales

We set about developing a full-scale mock-up in our dedicated project space.

A store planner reviewed the distribution of the boxes on the shelving. The packaging itself was reviewed and developed in cooperation with suppliers.

I had sole responsibility for redesigning the visual presentation, including the labelling on the boxes.

Usually I’m “team”. My career has been spent working in complex multi-disciplinary team environments. I’m a “we” person – an evangelist for teamwork.

This is the one exception in my career that proves the rule. There are times when an individual's contribution should be protected from dilution. I credit my boss, the consultancy owner, with applying that wisdom here.

It’s how the ‘drawing’, a functional visual, came to be. There was no interference, or 'design by committee' effect.

The in‑store presentation, brochure, and online artefacts became a seamless entity, focussed tightly around the key to the whole purchase exercise – the unique visual.

An shocking pilot success

We presented the mock-up to the Board of Directors and the Group CEO. The board were underwhelmed. It wasn’t as colourful. It didn’t look as ‘pretty’.

They argued for the marketing images to be put back in. The argument against was compelling. So they insisted a pretty picture of each element should be on the box labels.

That was the extent of the discussion about the store format. The unusually functional visual was dismissed, saying with absolute confidence: No one looks up there anyway.

There was a detectable air of disinterest. Truth was, they'd only brought it to us because the boxes were being opened.

It was a £42 million category after all, so why bother doing anything beyond fixing that?

This is where chance played its hand.

As it happened, coincidentally, the company was piloting a store refresh in Doncaster, with a London design agency.

They said: We’ve no plans for this category, so put it in the pilot.

Luck, a pilot store in progress. Luck, they had no plans for the category.

The new category presentation flew. Sales rocketed in Doncaster. It shocked everyone (except me).

The only part of the pilot store rolled‑out across all 256 stores, despite ‘a tough trading environment’ developing, was…

Evidence it was the visual?

I arrived at work one lunchtime to find the category manager outside having a break. He was on the wider project's transformation team, and he told me his part of this story:

I get the sales figures for all the stores every week. And every week, I can see where the roll-out has got to. The sales uniformly jump after the new presentation has been installed.

Then there was one store where sales didn’t. I was sure it had had the new stuff, it was scheduled, but the sales didn’t move.

I rang them up. They said they’d put it all out, spent a day doing it, thought it was smart.

I said you can’t have put it all out, but they wouldn’t have it. The store was in Timbuktoo. I needed a trip up there like a hole in the head, but decided I had to go.

I walked in and saw immediately what was missing. Just one bit – the drawing (visual).

We searched the place but it hadn’t been sent. I phoned up, got it sent, they put it up, and the sales jumped.

Summary

So that's the story of how a UK retailer grew an established and profitable product category by at least 26% (‡) over a 12 month roll‑out.

It reveals how the 'usual pretty' presentation of products can confound customers and limit sales.

It demonstrates how a business can be so wedded to making things look pretty above all else, that it becomes strangely (to me) blind to what customers need.

It's a blindness that meant this retailer only realised the uplift by accident, truth be told. True stories aren't all sweetness and light.

Has the retailer taken the success and applied it to other categories? No, despite several other categories crying out for improvement.

Unlocking £11 million in additional sales didn't involve a huge investment. It only took a low-investment in new graphics.

I'd expected the big competitors to see what had been done, and to find similar moves popping up in their stores. It hasn't. So the retailer has a competitive advantage in its midst. Shame it's not making the most of it.

‡ £11million is the last figure I was told. “It’s still growing” said the Commercial Director. I don’t know what the final uplift was.


Could you be selling 20% more?

So that’s the story of how one drawing led to a sales growth that surprises everyone I tell it to.

I can see opportunities for similar gains staring everyone in the face everywhere, in every sector.

Steps to growing your sales

  1. Find someone who understands the following in equal measure:
    • Customer experience
    • Functional information focussed visual selling
    • Qualitative analysis methods
  2. Provide performance data and a full explanation of the proposition
  3. Task them with analysing the existing proposition along the whole purchase journey.

‘Mysteries’, disconnects, and holes will show-up. What drops out may be uncomfortable, but the solutions should be obvious and could be worth a lot of money.

If you'd like to speak to me about taking this forward, feel free to get in touch.


I'm aware how spartan, somewhat unrefined, and lacking in visuals these blog posts are. Despite the topic being 'visuals'! Rather than hold back this information while I source or formulate some illustrations though, I've decided to publish based on the 'Good Enough' philosophy: it's better to be productive than wait for perfection.

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