Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

I was reading an article over at the NYTimes website on the elimination of petite departments in three upscale clothing stores and thinking about all those angry customers and what I could talk about on this subject from a marketing perspective when an interesting thing happened. As I was navigating to page two of the article, the website informed me that I had been recruited for a survey.

Now, I generally like surveys - if I care about the subject - so I was willing to give some time to this. Except that they didn’t tell me what the survey was going to be about. All I got was a sight-unseen "I’ll do it" or "No thanks" option.

Okay. I could always abandon it if I discovered I didn’t care about the subject so I clicked the button to take the survey.

It would not load. Now, I’m irked. They got my curiosity up, teased me with a broken load, and now I can’t take the survey because it won’t load the next page. The page would have been gone forever except that I know how to use my History pane in my browser. But it still won’t load.

Lost opportunity for them. QuestionMarket.com needs to fix that page… desperately.

Back to petite sizes.

Some designers are abandoning them. Some department stores are, too, because sales in petite departments are down 5%. However, sales at petite specialty stores are up 11%. The indication is that a large part of the disparity stems from the impression that department stores seem to have of petite shoppers as being older and "unfashionable."

The emotional response from petite consumers has proved so strong that Saks is reconsidering its decision. "It appears that we have frustrated some customers," said Ron Frasch, the chief merchant at Saks. "We are trying to figure out how many we have frustrated."

Way to go fellas. A little bit of talking to your customers about what they really wanted before you made the decision to elimiate the department would probably have been a good idea. You might have even been able to give them enough of what they wanted to get close to the specialty store growth. The customers at the high-end department stores tend to be wealthy and loyal - and they talk a lot about their experiences with their friends.

[T]he petite department was not about indulgence or convenience, but about parity. It meant that even at 4-foot-11, she could wear the same sheer cascading vest from Eileen Fisher as a woman who was 5-foot-7 — with no tailoring required.

It meant that designers really did care about the little people.

And that’s what we all really want from our vendors. We all are, in the grand scheme of things, little people. We’d all like to be treated like we are important - with our own department and sales folks who understand our particular challenges and needs.

Surveys are good for finding out what those challenges and needs are - but they do need to actually work before you can collect data.