The innate ability to retail

With two retail marketing experts leaving David Jones to join branded product and service vendors, Colette Garnsey and Damian Eales join a list of execs that are comfortably crossing the boundary between retailer and manufacturer. It is for the betterment of the companies they join.

In Europe and the US, the blending of retail boards and manufacturer boards to reflect both retail experience and product and brand management experience has been successful. The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, now has several ex-Pepsico execs in its leadership team and on its board.

So the move by Damian Eales from David Jones to Westpac will allow Westpac to better serve shoppers within their own branches. Part of Damian’s focus will be to apply a purely retail perspective to creating footfall and providing excellent service in well laid-out bank branches.

The move by Colette Garnsey to join Pacific Brands will also see a retail perspective applied to how brands and products are developed and marketed with how a shopper behaves in store front of mind.

Both of these very capable retailers came from under the tutelage of Mark McInnes.

Several days before the David Jones/Fraser-Kirk case fed into the media, I was at an Australian National Retail Association luncheon where Mark McInnes, Gerry Harvey and several other great Australian retailers were talking. A very well respected Australian business journalist asked me if I thought that retailing ability was ‘innate’, whether retailing is in the genes and make up of some people. If so, would I be happy to nominate any Australians who I believed were innate retailers?

While I believe retailing is a vocation – good business people can move between retailers and manufacturers – I also believe that truly inspirational retailers do exist. They live it and love it – and it shows in the consistently strong results their businesses deliver.

Within Australia, among others, I nominated Solomon Lew and Mark McInnes.

Both are polarising characters, but both have spent their careers shaping hugely successful retail companies, creating jobs and paying dividends. And both have made money for their staff and shareholders out of the high end, discretionary, luxury retail space where shoppers have to be wooed and entertained into spending money. Nobody ‘needs’ a $500 handbag or shoes, but if consumers are wooed with a great store and great staff they will spend money in their stores. That isn’t an easy act to perform over a couple of decades. In much bigger markets than Australia, high-end department stores in Germany, the UK and Canada have closed their doors.

I am not sure where Mark McInnes will turn up, but there is little doubt that his understanding of shoppers, and his innate retailing ability, will be a profitable addition to any company.

In his role as CEO of CROSSMARK, Kevin Moore looks at the world of retailing from grocery to pharmacy, bottle shops to car dealers, corner store to department stores. In this insightful blog, Kevin covers retail news, ideas, companies and emerging opportunities in Australia, NZ, the US and Europe. His international career in sales and marketing has seen him responsible for business in over 40 countries, which has earned him grey hair and a wealth of expertise in international retailers and brands. CROSSMARK Asia Pacific is Australasia’s largest provider of retail marketing services, consulting to and servicing some of Australasia’s biggest retailers and manufacturers.