Guest Post: The Neighborhood Store — Fact or Fiction?

This post was written by Kelly Auerbach, a consultant for M Squared Group (my company) who specializes in customer retention and database marketing.

As a Gen Xer, I’ve been in marketing for well over a decade.  I began my marketing career in the branch of marketing known simply as “Loyalty” (capital “L”).  If you’ve flown in an airplane and have a frequent flier number, you know what I’m talking about.

Being steeped in this business, it has recently dawned on me that I have never once truly experienced one of the foundational assumptions of relationship marketing:

• People actually want a relationship with the companies they do business with

Within Relationship Marketing, there is the over-used metaphor of the neighborhood grocer as the iconic figure.  You know, that Mr. Rodgers-like man who knew you so well that he would special order your favorite items — like Sam did for Alice on the Brady Bunch.

The mythology goes that, as consumers, we migrated away from our mom-and-pop stores, dazzled by the layout, products and prices of the modern “big-box” grocery store.  So long, Sam.  The question became, how do you leverage the strategic advantage of being one of the big guys, while also recapturing that personal touch?  Database marketing and by extension, relationship marketing, were supposed to provide solutions to this personal-touch high-scale problem.

Your grocery no longer knows you personally, but based on what you purchased, “he” can now offer you “targeted” coupons of items you might buy based on your last purchase (just think of the coupons printed on the back of your receipt).  I’m pretty sure that friendly neighborhood Sam would have thought this a bit tacky.  So our “relationships” have come to this?

But then I ask myself, as a Gen Xer, did this relationship-based neighborhood grocer (or retail business) ever really exist?  If so, it disappeared before my lifetime and has settled into collective legend.  Otherwise, it never really existed and is a fabulous myth we in marketing aspire to.

I’m so accustomed to shopping anonymously with no one, not even at my favorite stores, recognizing me, that I almost can’t believe the friendly, neighborhood grocer ever existed.  (Boomers, am I wrong?)  I’m used to direct mail that still has my maiden name; customer phone lines where I enter my personal information AND then have to repeat the same information to the call center rep.; 100% technology-driven online purchasing; and checkout lines where I am positive I will never see this person again.

I’m still not sure I want a relationship with a company, but at the very least, I would like to be recognized and acknowledged by a company for more than my current transaction.

Did the corner store ever really exist?   Do businesses actually behave like they remember you and put things aside?   I would love to hear about businesses that know the real value of their customers.

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Tagged as: Brady Bunch, Business, Database marketing, Grocery store, Kelly Auerbach, Marketing and Advertising, relationship marketing, Retail