Retail Relationship Program

Encouraging and maintaining a personal business relationship with consumers must be viewed as a continuous process that requires continuous care and feeding to ensure success.  This requires a focus and a program to ensure that continuous review and changes necessary to engage and react to the changing demands of consumers and the marketplace. This is definitely not a ‘once and done’ project but a program that requires continuous review and updates in order to succeed.  This requires a program because the personal business relationship must be viewed from a long term perspective that will touch and change all aspects of the retail marketplace including the retailers and the methods that retailers interact with consumers leading to a collaborative relationship model build on social networking practices.

The first step for a relationship program is to understand and embrace a collaborative model that encourages communication and interaction across all participants in the retail marketplace.  This collaborative model must be built on the social network interaction model that support peer to peer connectivity in what I would call a honeycomb model that support direct interaction based on relationships without a hierarchical relationship to hamper the communication.  This communication model in itself will go a long way to encouraging a flat collaborative model that discourages a hierarchy viewpoint that is at the heart of the command and control model. This relatively simple first step is probably the most difficult concept to maintain over the long term.  The large legacy retailers have lived for years in a command and control organization that has bread a strong culture supporting the command and control model. This collaborative model of peer-to-peer relationships is very easy to employ for a short term, however it will be difficult to maintain a robust collaborative model of the long term while the retailer culture changes.  

The second step is to engage the partners in this model and begin to develop the social network connections and processes that will support the relationship program.  This is relatively straightforward, as long as there support from each of the partners, and the implementation requires a commitment to engage and develop new methods to interact rather than any specific deliverables.  This is where the continuous change model comes into play and will support the process to analyze, change, measure and react to the changing demands of the market and the consumers. There is no better model fo rhis than the continuous improvement model especially when coupled with a robust social network interaction to support the trial and error changes.  

There is a key requirement to the success of the relationship program and that is persistence.  The success of a relationship program requires persistence to maintain the program and not get discouraged from setbacks along the way.  Persistence will carry the day when setbacks and failures are encountered. The team must focus on collaboration and solving the problem at hand in order to move forward.  As long as the program moves forward the consumer will remain engaged and will return and that is the goal of the relationship program for consumers and all partners in the marketplace to return.