How Sports Basement Thrives in a World of eCommerce
Three Lessons for Brick and Mortar Retailers
By Adam Winski, Strategist, Jump Associates
Follow Adam on Twitter @winski
‘Brick and mortar retail is dead. Get ready for a world where everything is bought online.’ We’ve all been hearing this for quite some time now. Certainly, Borders would agree that times are tough out there for a retailer with the added expense of stores and retail staff.
Despite conventional wisdom, however, certain offline retailers are flourishing. The most successful are those that are have discovered that the parts of their business many people perceive as structural disadvantages — the stores and the staff — are actually their greatest assets. These key pieces can create an experience that e-commerce cannot match.
Sports Basement, the popular San Francisco-based sports and outdoors retailer, is one of those companies that has cracked the code to successful offline retailing.
When I first moved to San Francisco, just about as many people insisted I go check out Sports Basement as those who recommended I check out the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently this is a common enough suggestion, because Sports Basement is listed as one of the top 100 destinations in San Francisco on Trip Advisor!
Looking at this local favorite can reveal a variety of lessons for how retailers can thrive in a world of e-commerce. Here are the top three.
1. Create an experience that a website can’t mimic.
Sports Basement hosts daily events ranging from yoga and group bike rides to baby music classes and comedy showcases with free beer. This range of events attracts mothers, families, and elite athletes, along with comedy-loving casual sports fans. These are tailored to the communities of each location. For example, in the family-friendly Presidio neighborhood, the classes skew towards being baby friendly. Down in the more hip Mission/Potrero area, classes are geared towards a younger, beer-swigging crowd.
When Sports Basement opened its new store in Berkeley, they held a huge bash replete with free food, free beer and free lift tickets. Hard not to love that! These events and classes not only create a powerful reason to visit the store, but they also help breed a community of shoppers, which drives even more loyalty.
Two retailers, Pirch and Bass Pro Shops, each demonstrate how this idea can be brought to life.
Pirch is like Sports Basement in that it has no online sales. Yet, Pirch has created an in-store experience that is aspirational and fun — no easy feat for a kitchen and bath retailer!
Pirch merchandizes its stores with working products, set up as they would be in a home. When I visited, I saw chickens roasting in a spit/oven combo and enjoyed delicious handmade coffee. If I had wanted, I could have come back the following morning — before the store officially opened for the day — to try out their showers and steam room…with a bathing suit, of course!
This type of interactivity inside stunning room setups (not to mention the free lattes) creates an environment where people can’t help but want to visit.
Bass Pro Shops has nearly perfected the art of experience design, but in a very different style. Their stores feature massive dioramas with enough mounted animals of all kind to rival the Natural History Museum in New York. In their store in Springfield, MO, they opened up the NRA Museum, celebrating hunting, conservation, and freedom. This museum has clearly resonated with their customers, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors since its opening in 2013.
2. Hire expert employees to create trust that online reviews can’t match.
When my brother kindly handed down an old snowboard of his, I couldn’t wait to get on the slopes. Before going, I wanted to make sure that the board was the right size and set up for me. I took it to my local Sports Basement, ready to get the full car salesman treatment. The experts at the snowboard shop let me know that the board was indeed a good fit for me. They also recommended I get a tune-up, rather than the more expensive overhaul I’d originally planned. Their expertise was evident, and their customer-centric advice earned them a great deal of trust.
Getting the same advice online would have entailed taking photos, posting them to various forums, and then doing due diligence on the people offering opinions to ascertain what was trustworthy and valid. This is a much greater hassle, and far less reliable, than taking my board in and having a conversation with someone whom I could quickly tell was a pro.
This is not to diminish the wisdom of the crowds on the Internet. If thousands of people have rated something highly, there is good reason to believe it’s a solid product. Yet, online reviews do not take personal circumstances into account, making them less useful than a conversation with an expert.
Both seasoned veterans and novices alike enjoy talking to experts. Someone like me, who hasn’t been snowboarding in over a decade, will be assured through conversation with someone who can offer specialized advice and clearly knows what he is talking about. At the same time, someone who is a snowboard enthusiast will be jazzed to chat with someone who gets her and speaks her language.
Lowe’s is one of the best at this. They hire many former home professionals, such as electricians and plumbers. These in-store experts can recommend products based on their own experience and use their expertise to make tailored suggestions by diagnosing customer issues. This is especially important for new homeowners who are learning the ins and outs of taking care of their home. Trying to find personalized information online for complex home issues is not easy, even with a lot of time. In a high-pressure situation like a repair emergency, just being able to go into a store, talk to an expert, and quickly get home with what you need is critical.
Ann Arbor’s famous Zingerman’s Deli is a great example of how companies can use specialized knowledge to convey trust and enhance an experience. Their staff training is so renowned that they have created an entirely separate business line–ZingTrain — to spread their methods. At their utopia of a deli, with 125-year-old balsamic vinegars, spreads of cheeses, meats, honeys, sweets, and more, the staff will let you taste everything and can tell you all you ever wanted to know and more about each and every product.
3. Offer low prices and a generous return policy to give people the confidence to one-stop shop.
“Showrooming” is one of the key knocks on the brick and mortar model today. This is when people come into a store, shop around, and then order the item cheaper online. The best way for retailers to combat this is to develop a reputation for having the lowest prices and a generous return policy.
Sports Basement has both of these. If customers find a better price within three months, Sports Basement will match it and even offer discounts on the better price. They also send out frequent coupons for further discounts. Customers can always get 10% off with a social media check-in. These policies makes people feel confident that they are getting the best deal and have no reason to shop around.
Sports Basement allows customers to return products at any time for store credit or a refund, no questions asked. This is critical because a recent Forrester report showed that over 80% of people will be more loyal to retailers that have generous return policies (e.g. free return shipping, ability to return any time for any reason).
Wal-Mart recently took this a step further with their Savings Catcher. With this program, customers enter in their receipt and Wal-Mart will scour the web to find better deals. If they are found, customers are offered a gift card in the amount of savings found.
As REI discovered, however, there is a limit to niceness, and an overly generous return policy can negatively impact a business. But there’s a large gap between accepting a return from 1970 and creating a reputation for no-hassle returns to ensure customers can shop confidently.
These three principles can help brick and mortar retailers maximize their two greatest assets — their stores and their staff. By creating a store that customers are excited to visit, staffed with people that customers want to talk to, and combined with deals that all can feel good about, brick and mortar retailers can win now and in the years to come.
Copyright 2015 Jump Associates. All Rights Reserved.
Jump is a registered trademark of Jump Associates.
All other marks reserved to their respective rights holders.
