Re-Merchandising
by Don Libey

What is merchandising, anyway?

The Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary assigns meanings to the Middle English and Latin prefix re- of “back, again” and even “backward.” It is an interesting prefix, re-. It denotes freshness and newness, a renewal, rebirth or revisiting, if you will. The word merchandise, used as a transitive verb, comes from Middle English and Old French and has the primary meaning “the occupation of a merchant” as in “to merchandise” and a secondary meaning “commodities or goods bought and sold in business” as in “stuff.” The noun merchandising was first referenced in 1932 and means “sales promotion as a comprehensive function including market research, development of new products, coordination of manufacture and marketing, and effective advertisement and selling.” And the related noun merchant means “a buyer and seller of commodities for profit” or a trader, as well as “the operator of a retail business” or a storekeeper.

As we can see, during the scant seventy-two years since the term merchandising was first coined (no pun intended...well, actually, yes, pun intended), we merchants of old have progressed only a short distance from the local market town fairs of Britain and Europe and the bazaars of the Silk Road. (I have always used the term peddler or peddlar to describe what it is that we do, which broadly equates to “one with wares for sale,” a not too-far-off-the-mark nomen dubium for the modern-day cataloger and, certainly, a bit more refined term than the 1713 French, back-formation, transitive verb hawk or “to offer for sale by crying out”).

And so, as we journey from the Middle Ages to the zenith of the Sears, Roebuck and Company age when the term merchandising first acquired its meaning the year after Sears, Roebuck and Company’s retail sales topped its mail order sales for the very first time (1931, at the height of the Great Depression), and thence to the present-day multichannel festival, where we are all still trying to figure out what merchandising is, let alone the meaning of re-merchandising.

Perhaps the best that can be said for merchandising is, “I really don’t know what it is, but I when I see it done well, I know it’s good” And the good examples of merchandising are easy to spot because there are so few of them that they pop up and jump out from the flat, one-dimensional drabness of the collective yawn that ninety-five percent of the modern merchants produce. After all, we have only been talking about, experimenting and testing merchandising approaches and principles for a little over seventy-five years, a veritable blink on the vast continuum of commercial time. The spice merchants of the 10th Century knew more about the basics of merchandising than we can ever hope to understand (and they had no deciles, RFM or square-inch analytics, focus groups, or multivariate regression analyses; they only had a bad-smelling, nasty camel).

The “Re-Merchandising” Buzz

Regardless of how we got to where we are, we’re here. And most of us have never had a course in merchandising, and it’s something we think we know how to do intuitively, and—after all—we hire people to do that, anyway. So, we have VPs of Merchandising, product merchandisers, product managers, copywriters, and we’re managing and supervising all that activity, and our basis for excellence is, “I really don’t know what it is, but I when I see it done well, I know it’s good.” Suddenly, the buzzword in business-to-business catalog and online marketing is re-merchandise. It’s being sounded as a clarion call by company after company frantically trying to find margin, growth, earnings and new market share; the Holy Grail has been deemed to be hidden in the Land of Re-Merchandising. Maybe we should try to get a little better handle on this thing.

Your existence as a cataloger is a constant state of re-merchandising. At no time is the merchandising ever done or stable; it is always in a state of reflux, redux, and re-bloviation. When you stop re-merchandising your products, you ossify. The customer is moving on down the road, and you are sitting on a bench in the park, enjoying the Mary Poppins-like tranquility of “practically perfect products in every way.” No such thing exists. There is no Emerald City, there is no Oz; in fact, there is no park.

It Starts with Positioning

By now, I hope you have read Chapter 7: Position in the book Christopher Pickering and I wrote last October, Libey LLC and Pickering on RFM and Beyond, available from MeritDirect Press (www.ForBetterBooks.com), 338 pages, hard cover, $59 + S&H (pay attention, this is merchandising) in which we discuss the principles of positioning as the first step to knowing how and why to sell products. This is the chapter where merchandising begins.

Before you re-merchandise, you have to have a total understanding on what you are merchandising to begin with. Based on the outcomes of many of my forensic consulting reviews, I have to believe that many, if not most, of our catalog companies have not nailed this basic down. Yes, they know all about their products, but they don’t understand what the customer knows and thinks about their products. Most owners and CEOs are merchandising their baby, the hallowed and sacred product they built the company with. Everything is merchandised through the owner’s eyes and beliefs, not through the customers’ experiences, desires, wants and needs. And when you are a worm in the horseradish, everything looks and smells to you like horseradish.

The Position Blockage

The primary merchandising blockage that I commonly encounter in consulting is the misguided belief that everyone understands everything that you understand about your product. Stated another way, this is what I call The Merchant’s Fallacy. Isolated in the vacuum of your own product development and merchandising vision, you are excluding every other possible application, interpretation and product understanding that exists in the vast realm of potential buyers. As an example, I once unsuccessfully merchandised business-to-business holiday cards for their beauty, gold foil embossing and up-market elegance; in other words, all the elements of card creation that I found attractive. It wasn’t until I asked the question, “Why do you send holiday cards in December?” that I began to understand how this product needed to be re-merchandised. It had nothing to do with beauty, elegance or up-market embellishments; it had everything to do with ‘top-of-mind’ memory, appreciation for that year’s business and the protection of next year’s customer retention. The motivation (that is, the merchandising reason) was greed. Send a card, make a buck. While not, perhaps, the “vision of sugar plumbs” that we hope would pervade the holiday spirit, the appeal to greed did sell a bunch of cards. I just had to re-think my positioning for my product.

Consider this common merchandising cause and effect. It is an outdoor art fair and there are painters and watercolorists and photographers, all with their displays and walk-in booths. Generally, the artist is sitting in a director’s chair or a lawn chair, quite often painting or reading, but almost never customer engaged with other than a cursory interest. In other words, the artist is merchandising by conveying, “Here is my work. It is self-explanatory. If you wish to buy something, I’ll sell it to you, but—otherwise—don’t bother me.” The merchandising approach here assumes that I understand exactly what the artist understands, and that only one out of every one or two hundred people will have a positive connection and actually buy something (a merchandising practice, I might add, not unlike most cataloging).

But, what if the artist walked over and asked, “What kind of space would you like to enhance in your home with artwork?” The positioning and the point-of-view now have shifted from the artist to the buyer. If the buyer says, “Great room,” the artist says, “What do you have there now?” The buyer says, “Landscapes,” and the artist says, “Here is a lovely gardenscape that would bring focus from the distant landscapes to a more intimate conversation area or, perhaps, a smaller, unadorned focal wall.” Suddenly, the seller and the buyer are involved in planning and selection; or what is known in merchandising as intellectual product involvement. The next step is closure. How much better is that for sales than sitting and cleaving to the starving artist’s innate and stubborn sense of product merchandising omniscience?

How is it that so many merchants know that they know everything there is to know about their products? That is a conundrum that has haunted me since my first week in direct marketing.

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