If you’ve heard me speak at kitchen and bath design industry conferences, you know that I often advise on the importance of “the strategic showroom.” I define this as a showroom specifically planned and appointed to help you meet the strategic goal and business objectives you’ve set in your business plan.
This probably calls for a few more definitions. First: your business objectives. These are the quantifiable results you seek, such as growth in customers, revenue and profit.
Your strategic goal is defined less precisely, but it’s just as important. Think of your strategic goal as what you want your business to be recognized as within your market. It’s the simple yet compelling idea you’ll aim to own in your customer’s mind.
For example, in general retailing, Walmart protects its place as the low-priced leader, while Target kicks up the economy shopping experience with added dashes of style. Consumers can easily distinguish between these two store concepts and choose accordingly.
The strategic showroom thus makes you think hard about exactly what your storefront will need to accomplish. It can’t simply be a place to show product samples and talk. You must instead view your showroom as the place to create a uniquely valuable experience for your customer, so you can nurture an ongoing relationship of win-win benefit.
There’s no falling back on a belief in: “If I build it, they will come.” That may have worked years ago, but in today’s super-connected world, you can expect your customers to be savvy shoppers who have already explored and narrowed their buying options online.
Your strategic showroom must give your customer a compelling reason to visit you – and once they walk in your door, your showroom should truly exceed, not just meet, your customer’s expectations. It’s no longer enough to merely satisfy your customer; rather, your strategic showroom today should consistently work to surprise and delight.
Nor can your strategic showroom simply copycat other successful stores in your area. If your showroom isn’t appreciably different in some meaningful way, it isn’t strategic.
Marketing gurus call this competitive positioning – that is: No company, brand, product or service can be all things to all people. You must give up something to get something. This requires finding a strategic market segment where you can play to your strengths and be the leader. And your strategic showroom will be your customer’s most directly experienced representation of your competitive difference. It should help you win the preference of customers who want just this kind of shopping experience.
WINNING SHOWROOM STRATEGIES
Where will you look for a winning competitive position for your strategic showroom? I’m seeing approaches that are working well for storeowners in a broad range of markets.
Here are some possibilities to consider:
- You could focus on creating the experiential showroom. Here you may hold a regular schedule of educational events, with “get to know us” opportunities, on kitchen and bath design. This should encourage customers to see your team as friendly, helpful experts – a trusted resource. You can also carefully curate your product displays so your showroom operates as a kind of mini-museum of the current state of the art.
- Another proven strategy is to provide the exclusive showroom. Here your aim is for customers to see your showroom as “just for me.” This may call for you to rethink much or even most of your showroom space as a design studio. Displays may feature fewer but better-selected products – and you can designate areas, with high-style tables and chairs, for close collaboration between your designers and customers.
- There may also be an opportunity to create the localized showroom. This is a showroom that highlights your regional distinctions. A localized showroom can also draw upon community pride. For example, the hot-hot-hot Shinola stores, based in Detroit, have ultra-chic showrooms with decorative touches making nostalgic notes to Motor City heritage.
THE ONLY CERTAINTY: CHANGE
It’s up to you to find the competitive distinction that will work best for your strategic showroom. You’ll need a master plan. You must ask: Where are we now? Where do we want to be in the future? And how will our strategic showroom help us get there?
But your showroom design challenge doesn’t end there. Another critical success factor will complicate your task. That factor is, in a word: change. You’ve seen how tastes and trends in kitchens and bath design so quickly evolve – and you surely know that whatever showroom concepts seem new and fresh today will soon enough be out of date. In our business, change is always right around the corner. It’s only a matter of time.
“It’s not the plan that’s important, it’s the planning.” Have you heard this saying? Versions of it have been attributed to notable people past and present, in various fields.
I’ve thought of these words as I’ve consulted with kitchen and bath firm owners on their showroom designs. The most forward-looking owners will project five or more years ahead as they set their goals and devise their plans. And they see how strategically urgent it is to align their showroom designs to these larger purposes.
Yet no plan can be cast in stone. As you build the vision for your own store’s future, I urge you to keep that famous quote in mind. Yes, you should set your showroom’s master plan – but you should also plan to be flexible. The future can never be predicted with supreme confidence. The realities of your marketplace will inevitably twist and turn. In fact, the only certainty – in our industry, as in all others – is continual change.
In the showroom, what’s working well today may easily fall behind the curve within only a year or two – and could become completely passé just a few years beyond that. So you must plan to keep planning your strategic showroom, with a clear eye to market shifts.
This is not to say that you can’t have a hard and fast completion date for your master plan. But the time you invest in showroom planning can never really stop. Your steady attention to planning, even more so than your plan, will be key to creating a strategic showroom that continues to attract the kinds of customers you’ll need to succeed.