Group tutorial and an inspirational lecture

So this morning, bright and early I had a group tutorial with one of the lecturers, Heather.
The small group of 4 students took turns to update Heather on where we were up to with our portfolio and seminar presentations.
I felt quite confident with my portfolio work, my two sketchbooks are both nearly full of a load of ideas. However I wanted guidance on the next step for my portfolio work because at the moment I feel like I'm being too broad and I need to narrow it down and start to have a more clearly defined goal. Heather told me as much too. So her advice was I need to do some reflection on my work and look at what I've been doing and where I want to go next. 

So what I might do is write a short brief for myself, a few sentences, put that in my sketch book and work from that. Next steps, I also need to look at doing some digital printing onto fabrics that I might use if I was to design a collection. And get some fabric samples.

I also told her I had changed my mind about trend prediction for my seminar presentation, I decided yesterday to change it to 'Brexit - what does it mean for our industry?".
I got the thumbs up.

This afternoon, we had a talk my Richard Hammond, author of Smart Retail and owner of Smart Circle retail consultancy firm.


Here are some points I took away from his lecture:

• We will always need to find a way to engage a customer
• Wholesale will disappear in the next five years
• Retailer need to understand the affect heuristic on customers - that is the human tendency to base decisions on emotions
• People are hankering after products that are unique, hand crafted and that have some heritage behind them
• We are changing from an aspirational culture to an expectational culture

CUSTOMERS

• Need to reduce purchase friction
• Engage on social
• Understand emotions
• Differentiate
• Increase reward
• Have a defined retail purpose
• Become transparent
• Introduce theatre, narrative, curation and discovery
• Become consistent across the journey/platforms
• Location agnostic offline and online

CUSTOMERS HAVE ALL THE POWER - they can shop anywhere they want to

Examples of purchase friction

• travel distance
• time
• web page/app
• clarity of comunications
• trust
• discovery
• delivery
• product knowledge
• payment
• processes specific to the scenario

Examples of reward

• price advantage
• service quality
• emotional impact
• brand halo
• additional services
• needs beyond consumption
• tribal identification
• experimental elements
• FUN
• thrill of specialism
• reward specific to the scenario

APPS are dying

Questions I wish I could've asked if I didn't have a train to catch!!!!!:

• A lot of the examples shown as 'good retail' are American companies - are the sales skills they are using transferrable to the UK?
• Is retail the same around the world?
• Will the high street survive?
• Should Philip Green be made to pay back the missing BHS pension pot?

And maybe some more - but I always ask questions in class, so I would give the others a chance.

Great talk - could listen to him weekly.