In business, there’s usually no shortage of good ideas. What’s typically lacking is the wherewithal to put these concepts into practice. Stauffers of Kissel Hill (SKH), a family-owned chain of garden centers and supermarkets in Pennsylvania, uses a team approach to plot a course that keeps the business moving ahead.
A big part of that approach is the Recession Action Plan company officials instituted in 2009 to guide the business. And a big part of the plan was an aggressive marketing strategy that has paid off during a time when many contemporaries have struggled to survive, much less thrive.
Jere Stauffer and Steve Gallion, chief operating officers of the company’s garden center division, kept thinking of something Gallion and Debi Drescher, SKH marketing manager, had heard at ANLA Management Clinic: The consumer is in a state of “aggressive indecision.”
“Consumers don’t know whether to spend money or what,” Gallion said. “You have to do something to move them to a buying decision. What we chose to do was a pretty aggressive coupon campaign and tried to move people into making that buying decision.”
SKH sent direct-mail postcards to more than 300,000 homes, which included a coupon for $10 off merchandise with a minimum $25 purchase. Amazingly, the company saw an almost 10 percent redemption rate on the coupon.
“We basically said to the customer, here’s $10 just for coming in,” Stauffer said. “Our average sale [with coupon] was just shy of $60.”
SKH was almost hyper-aggressive in its marketing efforts. But Stauffer justifies the strategy by recalling something he learned from his father. “I remember him saying years ago that you have to approach marketing like the locomotive on a long freight train,” he said. “You can get that train up and rolling, then whip the locomotive off the front. And that train is going to roll for a while, but sooner or later it’s going to roll to a stop. And you’re going to have to put all your energy into getting that train back up to speed. So why not keep the locomotive in the lead and keep that momentum going? That’s marketing.”
And, as the good folks at SKH also discovered ...
That's "Cha-ching!"
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