O regresso dos comerciantes

Em Janeiro de 2024 escrevi o postal "Não é impunemente ...". Depois na mesma onda estes outros de Outubro de 2024 "Outro mindset - cada vez mais uma necessidade" e ""Businesses ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximisers"".

Agora na revista Bloomberg Businessweek deste mês de Fevereiro encontro, "Retailers' survival depends on putting merchants back in charge, says Amanda Mull":

"Bad in-store experiences have been, in a certain sense, the defining retail trend of the past 15 years. Between understaffing, locked-up products, metastasizing self-checkout kiosks and endless nudges to shop online, it's begun to feel like some retailers resent the necessity of hosting customers at all. Wouldn't it be more efficient and cost-effective, in the end, to operate something more like a big vending machine?

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For decades, retailers had been run by merchants-people who directed overall assortment and strategy, usually with careers built if not in merchandising itself, then on the sales floor or as buyers or product developers. Many of them had spent decades in the retailers' now-diminished training programs, which groomed talent from the ground up. They learned how to spot trends, select products and analyze consumer interest. When the Great Recession kicked the legs out from under retail, management consultants, tech experts and corporate financiers without much or any industry experience flooded in, sometimes ascending to the top post, as they did at Gap, Barnes & Noble and, more recently, Nike. These executives were billed as clear-eyed outsiders-people who could transform a dusty industry, unencumbered by the baggage of its traditions.

The results were at best mixed, if not disastrous. [Moi ici: Durante anos, os retalhistas deram prioridade às análises financeiras e métricas em detrimento da experiência do consumidor e do conhecimento dos comerciantes. Isto levou a lojas mal geridas, experiências de compra negativas e ao declínio das marcas tradicionais, aquilo a que chamo aqui há muitos anos de hollowing. Algumas empresas começaram a perceber que colocar comerciantes experientes no comando novamente pode reverter esta tendência]

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When traditional retailers began stocking up on those number-crunching outsiders in the early 2010s, many of the companies were already in some kind of trouble-department stores, for example, were buckling after decades of increasing pressure from big-box discounters. Instead of investing in new products or services to compete in the e-commerce era, executives arrived holding a knife. This theory of retail "is very much about cost control," says Neil Saunders, managing director of the retail practice at GlobalData PIc. "It's 'Let's reduce capex. How can we squeeze every cent out of the business?'"

The problem with trimming a retailer's operations down to the bone, though, is that the company still has to give people a reason to keep shopping with it. When the online competition offers rock-bottom prices, infinite selection and fast shipping, enticing shoppers with human customer service and intriguing displays to help them discover new stuff can give the old guard an edge. Merchant-led companies aren't infallible-think Bed Bath & Beyond, with all of its lumbering decision-making and bad bets-but the bean-counter method, even if it manages to improve financial optics in the short term, has often proved "a recipe for failure," Saunders says.

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Bean counters in retail have spent so much time and money over the years trying to replace these kinds of traditional tactics with the wisdom of data. What B&N and A&F show is that people who've spent decades in finance and people who've done the same in merchandising can look at the same data and come to different conclusions."

Mais uma vez: Não é impunemente que se vivem e se acumulam experiências de gestão. 

BTW, recordar o Big Data ... tantos postais sobre o tema, basta seguir o marcador com a mesma designação.