Category: Business Strategy

Keeping in mind modern standards, the store designing has become evasive. With bulk of ideas and the austerity are the factors that work like game changer. Store designing is very appealing to the senses of the common man. The austerities which these emblems of advancement depict are the combination of modern tools and fixtures like, modern lighting and metal Storage racks. The idea that is working behind the development of store designing is only to raise the standard of living and let the common people feel like they are special too. Moreover, retail designing is also inspiring for the people to become more brand conscious, thus making driving people towards the new marketing trends.

Store designing vs. modern standard of living

Here is driving force that is working to increase the store turnover. Thus making people familiar with the latest trends so that they can decide what is more beneficial for them. So store design is only to start a brand competition as we can see the battle of brands when we step in to the store and all the arrangements done to decorate the store is only to present the brands and metal shelving is the essential part of this store designing. So if a store is more inclined towards, window display or visual merchandising, it only means to introduce the brands before the people. We can observe brand marketing campaign when we entered into the store. Surely, this is the work of visual merchandising and brand marketing team that plans how to inspire the people by stimulating their all five senses.

Product arrangement appeals to the customers

First step that is considered in store designing is product assortment, the idea of making the product visible before the customers. Not only this, but the main objective is, to present the items in such a way that it quickly grab the attention of the customers, and this objective can only be achieved if proper lighting arrangement is done. In lighting, the lighting arrangement should be of different colors so that it could properly reflect the targeted product. Moreover lighting should have a soothing effect on the people; if the products have a dark color the light should be of suck kind that it illuminates the entire feature of the product. Thus making thing visible means to facilitate the shoppers so that they can easily select the item form the storage racks.

Store strategy for all brands

This is the strategy of store designing that is focused to present all the brands with same value and worth. That’s why at store, every brand is valuable and people would love to buy things that are placed on Supermarket shelving and refrigeration. The cool and calm environment is another key factor that strikes to the senses of the shoppers so that they can get the best. Certainly this is the environment that changes the mood of the customer and turn him into a buyer by conceiving his sensual behavior, visual merchandisers has made modern day shopping an art. Majority of the people that visits mega stores only to sooth themselves, because they find everything there. Here are world’s renowned brands along with the things that are in daily use kept with great care, under the umbrella of cool lighting and soothing environment truly reflects the need of modern man who needs only calm and comfort while shopping.

Go into a bookstore and browse through the titles in the bestseller section. Book publishing companies hire high-priced people to come up with a title or headline, because book publishing is a big business; therefore a lot of contemplation goes into making their titles as commercially-viable as possible. Many well-known and highly successful books started out with other titles. According to Dan Poynter, the father of self-publishing:

Tomorrow is Another Day became Gone With The Wind.
Blossom and the Flower became Peyton Place.
The Rainbow Book became Free Stuff For Kids.
The Squash Book became the Zucchini Book.
John Thomas and Lady Jane became Lady Chatterlys Lover.
Trimalchio in West Egg became Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby.
Something that Happened became Steinbecks Of Mice and Men.
Catch 18 became Catch 22

While you are at the store, notice how the other browsers pick up a book, scan the front and back cover, and then put it down again before going on to another book. The whole process takes about two seconds each. Thats all of the time you have to make an impression on a potential reader. In those two seconds, you must appeal literally to three of the five senses that human beings have, sight, speech, and hearing, and figuratively to the last two, touch and smell.

1) Sight: When someone first comes in contact with your books title, it is usually by seeing it on the front cover. So your title must be aesthetically appealing.

2) Speech: If a person stumbles over the words, it will add to the difficult in marketing your book. Even if you are writing only for family members and friends, and you are giving away your book for free, there is still an element of marketing.

3) Sound: Business philosopher Jim Rhone says in order to have effective communication, you must Have something good to say, say it well and say it often. Your title will be heard often, but will it be good and will it be said well?

4) Touch: Touch also means to relate to or to have an influence on. Figuratively, your title must allow itself to touch or be touched by being able to relate to your readers or have some type of influence on them.

5) Smell: Your title should figuratively give off an aroma. In other words it should project a distinctive quality or atmosphere. If the aroma the title gives off suggests that very little thought or concern was given to it, people will assume that the rest of the book is the same way.

On a recent Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller list, out of 20 books, one had a one-word title; five had two-word titles; four had three-word titles; five had four-word titles; three had five-word titles; one had a seven-word title and one had an eight-word title. The point is, most honchos at major publishing companies believe that the simpler/shorter the title, the better. None of the titles were complex.

It used to be that performance management was managed in one department. Today, performance management has spread throughout the entire organization, where almost every division must focus on performance management to some degree in order to be successful. Despite this wider range of performance management, enterprise-wide performance initiatives are not widely practiced. And without an enterprise approach, it is extremely difficult to align your performance to organizational goals and objectives.

According to software vendor SAS, a recent survey of 1100 businesses revealed that performance alignment was the PRIMARY benefit companies hoped to receive from their performance management efforts. Aligning performance to your organization’s goals and objectives is critical to your organization’s success. On the other side, lack of alignment increases inefficiencies and risks and prevents optimal execution of the organizational strategy.

Think of this scenario as a model for linking corporate strategy to business objectives:

The executive board collaborates high-level strategic planning and identifies goals for the CEO and organization. The CEO then meets with his/her senior executives who in turn develop objectives derived from the CEOs goals and integrates those goals into the strategic plan. In turn, those executives meet with their managers who develop objectives derived from the strategic plan, and so on. Then, each subordinate goal is tied to one or more goals of their manager. Ideally, the final result is that every tracked goal in the entire company can map back to a corporate objective developed by the board.

Chances of organizational success are greatly increased by translating each high-level objective into a cascading series of focused performance measures. Using our previous example, the CEO may focus on net cash flow while the CFO looks at debt-to-equity ratio. The controller may focus on liquidity ratio, while the accounts receivable manager looks at days sales outstanding, and the accounts receivable clerk worries about percent of collections over 30/60/90 days.

This article discusses aligning corporate strategy to four key areas: departments/ divisions, workforce, finance, and systems.

Departmental Performance Alignment

Departmental performance alignment can be difficult when business processes within an organization span across multiple business units and functional support groups. To avoid bottlenecks, finger-pointing, and redundancy of work, shared performance measures that align people across organizational boundaries must be identified and responsibilities accounted for. For instance, a performance measure that includes percent of collections over 30/60/90 days might be applied both to accounts receivables clerks and sales representatives, thus sharing and integrating performance measures, encouraging collaboration and boosting overall performance.

Workforce Performance Alignment

When workforce performance is aligned with corporate objectives individuals in an organization develop a stake in that organization’s performance. Employees at every level are measured by something they understand and control, and that same measure is clearly linked to the goals of their direct supervisor and the organization as a whole.

Financial Performance Alignment

In an economy where results need to be achieved fast and investor confidence is low, CFOs and finance organizations are implementing integrated performance management to improve information quality and visibility. One challenge organizations face aligning performance is finding financial measures that are meaningful to those responsible for carrying out the work. Using the previous example net cash flow is a critical performance measure for executives, but it probably means very little to the accounts receivable clerk who has no idea of how their contribution improves net cash flow performance. Stick with simple financial metrics that employees can understand and control.

System Performance Alignment

The IT/IS department’s role is to provide technical support for the entire organization. While we know that this alone is a complex task, today’s business model requires systems to not only support users, but to align technology to meet the business needs of the organization. Understanding business unit objectives and translating them quickly and accurately into IT priorities is essential today. So how does an organization measure how well their systems are aligned to organizational objectives? By implementing vehicles for aligning and measuring IT performance, such as service level agreements, performance-based contracts, and products and services catalogs to generate reports that illustrate how well they are measuring up to business objectives.

If you can move closer to aligning performance in these areas your organization will be well on it’s way to surpassing all of it’s goals and objectives. While the goal of a performance initiative is to align performance to organizational strategy, it is most important to maintain flexibility and adapt to organizational changes quickly.

About Victor Holman

Victor Holman is a business performance and growth strategy coach, consultant, international speaker, entrepreneur and creator of the Business Performance Portal. He has provided his expertise to over 50 government agencies worldwide and hundreds of corporations of all sizes. His goal is to help small businesses outperform their competition by applying business growth strategies and assessment tools that work for large, successful businesses.

He provides business consulting for small and large size organizations, business coaching, team performance workshops, and in-depth on-site business assessments for business owners trying to take their business to the next level. His highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club delivers fast, simple, easy to implement strategies for growing your business fast!

You can access his FREE business assessment tools, business management kits, business training programs, videos, templates, and more at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com