Stopwatch Marketing Blog

It’s going to be a blue Christmas. As a lifelong Chicagoan (who now lives in that other big city, New York), I still can’t believe we can celebrate Christmas without Marshall Field’s.  Like many Chicagoans, Marshall Fields was woven in the fabric of my family’s holiday traditions. Christmas shopping was the first experience I ever had in recreational shopping, complete with a visit to Santa, a brisk walk outside to gaze at the store windows, and a treat at the Crystal Palace. Making memories was the focus; purchasing gifts were nearly an afterthought. I can even remember my mother letting us skip school for a day to make the annual December family trip to State Street for many years. (Despite missing a few days from school over the years, we all fortunately graduated from college and graduate school. None of us ever received perfect attendance awards though!)

Christmas-in-Chicago is now colored Macy’s Red instead of Fields’ Green.  We lost more than a retail store; we lost a recreational touchstone that brands us as Chicagoans. 

I can’t help but think about the impact of the loss of the Marshall Fields’ brand on the brand equity inherent Chicago. Marshall Fields was Chicago. The Fields’ brand stood at the intersection of cosmopolitan and accessible. Upscale-yet-inviting. This is what we all associate with Chicago, isn’t it? Chicago is the big city with big shoulders – shoulder strong enough to for you to lean on, smooth enough to rest your head comfortably, and sweet enough to carry your green shopping bags home.

The loss of the Marshall Fields brand can be a gain for other retailers. An opportunity for a new retailer to start (or for an existing retailer to re-position itself) to exude the essence of Chicago. A new tradition can be born – one that combines the old with the new, one that includes the suburbs and the Magnificent Mile, one that emphasizes the gift of time vs. the gift of glitz. One that is uniquely the city of big shoulders. A true miracle of Christmas.  

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Commerce Bank has been sold to Canadians! TD BankNorth, leveraging the surprising strength of the loonie, anxious to get secure a bigger footprint in the US, and interested, no doubt, in learning about this strange “customer satisfaction stuff,” has purchased one of the exemplars we describe in the Recreational Quadrant chapter of Stopwatch Marketing.

The marketing story, as told by others as well as by AnnaMaria and me, is simple in its conception and extremely challenging in execution: Make the branch an inviting, pleasant place to visit, then people will visit it, and then (here’s the trick) capitalize on that time to sell them something!

There’s plenty in the book about Commerce, so I won’t belabor and repeat it all here. But, I thought I would share my response, below, to a financial newsletter writer who was publicly bemoaning the departure of a company he loved and a stock on which he’d made real money:

First of all, a disclaimer – as a personal investor, I did, indeed, make some nice money on CBSH stock over some of the period in your chart. I sold about a year ago.

Anyway, as noted, I write on marketing and my book, Stopwatch Marketing, includes a chapter on Mr. Hill’s brilliance in taking a heretofore Reluctant or Impatient consumer experience and turning into a Recreational one. We literally compare what Vern wrought with John Mackey’s accomplishments in making supermarket shopping equally exciting – Recreational, in our terms – at Whole Foods Market. Getting rid of the forbidding bars at teller windows, staying open long & weekend hours, including a change machine, presenting a generally appealing, inviting, convenient experience were all, seemingly, innovations (!) on Vern’s part. As a marketing consultant, I would argue, of course, that the great profits and skyrocketing stock price resulted from such a well-executed retail consumer satisfaction strategy. We aren’t the first, of course, to write about Commerce Bank in this vein, many commentators on marketing strategy have directed their readers to benchmark Commerce.

Herewith, however, something that isn’t in our book, but you may feel free to use it, or the logic behind it, in your own investments newsletters, etc.: While consulting on marketing to other retail banks throughout the nineties, I found myself often terribly frustrated, sputtering at them – and I am, indeed, quoting here – “this is the only retail category in the country that celebrates closing down branches, getting people out of the stores!” This was, of course, a period when “bricks and mortar” branches were considered cost centers not profit centers and everyone was ga-ga over the electronic future when branches would simply fade away entirely. I would shriek at my clients of the time that I couldn’t imagine top retailers (think Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Payless ShoeSource, Wal-Mart, and Target) celebrating how many branches they shut down, how many customers (!) they transitioned over to a remote interface, or “handled” via a call center rather than a store employee. “Why don’t you put in an espresso machine and some cookies?” said I. The response from my clients would invariably be that customers might then spend too much (!) time in the branch. I would continue with “And then maybe someone in the branch can SELL them something…like a car loan or mutual fund or credit card!”

So, the investment opportunity in, say, 1995, was the retail bank that acted like a retailer, not like a banker.

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So Sprint Nextel has fired Gary Forsee, who only a few years ago was being touted as the firm’s savior, a technology visionary who would blanket the country with Wimax, leapfrogging Cablevision, Verizon, AT&T and everyone else trapped in the old-fashioned, wired world, leading the company to unparalleled heights of wealth and power even a Caesar would never had dared to dream. What happened? Well, on one level, what happened was that it was turning out to take longer – and cost more – to achieve that technology nirvana than anyone had predicted. Moreover, Verizon, AT&T, T-mobile, and the rest were stealing traditional customers at an alarming rate. My guess is that the new chairman will come in shouting an ongoing mantra of “back to basics.”

It occurs to me, however, that Mr. Forsee was also the victim of a shift in the perceptions of Sprint’s investors. Our quadrant approach to consumers can also be applied here – to investors. Put simply, these investors had moved from the right-hand side of the matrix (large, slow stopwatch) to the Impatient Quadrant. For some time, these investors were either Recreational (”We should really invest in these neato keeno new technologies; that’s a lot more fun than dairy products or (horrors!) companies that bend metal for a living”) or they were Painstaking (”We really believe in the Wimax bet that Sprint Nextel is making – eventually, the buildout will be completed, the leapfrog will happen and we’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”) Faced, however, with deterioration in day-to-day subscriber growth, their investors became quite Impatient. Forsee, unable to deliver short-term results, will not be given the chance to deliver the long-term vision he had so Painstakingly tried to sell to Wall Street.

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