Jewelry marketing, for most jewelry retail businesses, is often the highest operating expense after wages and rent, yet is one of the most unaccountable and misunderstood areas for jewelry store owners.
Rent is carefully negotiated when the regular review comes up and the productivity of staff members is always being discussed but when it comes to advertising and marketing many jewelers don’t take responsibility for their advertisements, or worse, just don’t do any jewelry marketing at all.
This often comes from a lack of understanding of the marketing/advertising process and the fact that advertising is never a finished task. Staff can be hired, or rent reviewed on a periodic basis, but marketing of the stores jewelry is ongoing. Last months good jewelry promotion counts for nothing after the last day of the month – you have to start the process all over again with a fresh angle – a new method of getting the customer in-store.
There’s a saying in many sports that you are only as good as your next game and marketing fits this to a tee. There is no ongoing applause once the jewelry promotion ends -you have to start fresh whether you like it or not.
This constant need to market and reinvent promotions and advertisements causes many jewelers to give up -they don’t have the skills to do it and don’t appreciate the cost of failing to do so.
Yet we are all marketers.
Regardless of our profession our objective is to persuade more people that we have the solution to their problems.
Wikipedia defines marketing well when it says that marketing is used to create the customer, keep the customer, and satisfy the customer. Marketing originally grew from the professional approach of large organisations who, faced with competition and an obsession with market share, changed from a production focus (a focus on making products with little thought on who would buy them) to a marketing focus (a focus on the customer).
Sadly many small and medium sized businesses, running as Mom and Pop operations, have been much slower to appreciate the need to appeal to their customers more and have lost market share to the majors as a result.
From supermarkets to hardware, the corner store has been replaced-in fact wiped out -by the arrival of the conglomerate. Yet in the jewelry industry the chain stores, although having a significant market share, have failed to take over.
Of the almost four thousand jewellers in Australia less than a third are chain stores -almost 2700 stores are still run as part of a family operated business or by an owner who has only one of two stores.
Why has jewelry escaped the trend of so many other industries that have become the sole domain of the large corporation?
One word – trust.
At the end of the day when a customer buys a diamond they don’t know what they’re really buying. 99.9{429ab47ec6edc388b6294e86ae75f304ecbd477a894283ff02535d40af3f3097} of customers would have no way of knowing whether they have been ripped off or not. There are few other products where the customer is so reliant on the honesty and integrity of the vendor.
Because of this the idea of dealing with a jeweler who they know, with a member of the community who attends the same clubs, who might worship at the same church, or whose children go to the same schools, provides comfort to the customer that they have bought right.
This, and the last remaining vestiges of personal service, protects the corner jeweler from chain store obliteration -however it can also be a cause of downfall.
This protection is a comfort, but still leaves too many jewelers content to function with average profits in the clubby atmosphere that this protected environment can bring. Too often these same jewelers feel they can get along without it so they see no reason to try.
Sadly the game is changing. The wall of trust will not last forever with any guarantee, and the jeweler whose marketing consists of opening the door and waiting for the customer to walk in will go the way of the dinosaur.
Any jeweler in the future who is not spending at least 20-30{429ab47ec6edc388b6294e86ae75f304ecbd477a894283ff02535d40af3f3097} of their time thinking, planning and strategizing how to “create, keep and satisfy the customer” will find the problem solved for them.
They will simply have fewer customers.
