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Can WHSmith and Boots ever win back customers?

By Sandra Perriot, Senior planner, retail and shopper specialist

June 2, 2019 | 5 min read

There’s a lot of frustration in the country right now, and not all of it’s over Brexit. WHSmith has been provoking its fair share of ire from the British public who have named it the UK’s worst high street retailer.

Can WHSmith and Boots ever win back customers?

Can WHSmith and Boots ever win back customers?

Shoppers surveyed by Which? slated WHSmith’s stores and its customer service. The anonymous critic behind the parody WHSmith account on Twitter, @WHS_Carpet, tweeted that the store is in a “downward spiral” of cutting costs to counteract falling sales.

There’s no end in sight for this downward spiral unless WHSmith rethinks its retail proposition. People aren’t buying WH Smith’s core offering - books and stationary – they way they used to. People’s relationship to these product categories has changed and WHSmith needs to change too. Books and stationary are no longer commodities but are now viewed as passion-driven purchases. The people buying them are passionate about them or consider them a treat and therefore expect a different type of shopping experience.

In its heyday, WH Smith could position itself as an information hub with newspapers, magazines and the latest bestsellers. But times have changed and the only places WH Smith does well at airports and train stations where people need distraction from boredom and books are considered a commodity.

Instead of tackling its issues strategically, WH Smith has responded tactically by introducing different products to the mix, in the same way that HMV did when it hit a sales slump. This has turned the shop into a big bazaar or convenience store. A store with a little bit of everything under its roof might work in an airport but it’s not suitable for the high street. Customers who want a book will just go to a Waterstones. If they want a snack, there’ll be a Pret a Manger round the corner.

WH Smith has also been pushing products, notably giant slabs of chocolate, on customers at the till. Having impulse buys at the point of purchase is an effective tactic in retail, but WH Smith’s rather aggressive hard-sell approach makes the tactic much too visible. It irritates customers and all they see is desperation.

But while it might be the most unloved store on the high street, WH Smith is of course not the only one in trouble. We’ve had a plethora of big names hit by sales slumps and store closures, including New Look, Debenhams, Mothercare and House of Fraser.

The latest is Boots, which may be closing 200 of its stores across the UK. Boots is not just battling discount stores, it is facing competition from online beauty specialists. Many brands have stepped up their game in terms of the customer experience and even department stores are working hard to make their beauty counters more engaging for customers. Meanwhile, Boots has grown in a vast generalist functional store with a sprawling country-wide footprint.

Having a big flagship store where customers can meet and immerse themselves in the brand is a good strategy, as we’ve seen with Niketown, but few brands could sustain the number of branches that Boots operates. Boots’ problem right now is one of scale and this must be faced head on or it risks becoming another high street casualty.

As well as reassessing the scale and cost of their store footprints, high street brands need to fully embrace online and offline commerce and stop putting them into silos. In this new era of retail, customers’ online and offline experience should come together seamlessly. This means big structural changes for brands and the merging of business objectives.

Brands need to be strategic, objective and embrace change rather than running from it. Customers aren’t stupid, they can see when a store has gotten itself into a losing battle to stem falling sales, and they won’t stick around long to help out.

They’ll just move on to a brand that’s doing it better.

Sandra Perriot, senior planner, retail and shopper specialist at Cheil UK

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