Board Retailers Association Summit: Day 3

josh hunter

• April 26 2009
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Day Three of The Board Retailers Association’s sixth annual retail summit got started off with a presentation on merchandising and visual presentation by Quiksilver VP of Merchandising Charlie Cotton. Cotton now operates Path to the Rack Consulting, and helps educate retailers on what they can do to improve their sales through in store product displays.

His basic concepts can be boiled down to six strategic bullet points:

1. Energy Sells Merchandise

2. Understand your customer and you’ll sell more product

3. Getting market share is war—having your own identity wins battles

4. Only by knowing how many units you can sell, can one determine how much inventory to buy.

5. Customers will come if they know they can get the product they want.

6. If you have only one price to sell, you have no story to tell.

Following Cotton’s presentation, Mike Duncan, CEO of Sage Island web marketing firm, Owner of warehouseskateboards.com, and BRA director took the stage to talk about productive uses of social media such as facebook, twitter, and blogs.

Duncan said that there are three major analytics that a Web site’s performance is measured on:

-Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who immediately leave your site after they’ve opened it.  Average is around 45 percent. Duncan’s site, wareshouseskateboards.com has about a 20 percent bounce rate.

-Page Depth: This analytic measures how many pages visitors click through on your site. Duncan’s site averages twelve pages per user, which is far better than most sites.

-Time On Site: This one is obviously how long the average visitor stay on your site. Ducan’s site averages around seven minutes, which is basically unheard of.

One of the ways he says he is able to have such high marks with his Web analytics are through careful use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Duncan is a wizard when it comes to understanding the algorithms that search engines such as Google use to direct users to the proper Web pages. He offered some insightful tips on how to improve site results to the group of retailers on hand. To find out how your site ranks up, visit websitegrader.com.

Twitter is another hot topic, and Duncan did a great job of explaining how it can be used in relevant ways to reach potential customers. Twiter is the third largest social network, behind Facebook and Myspace with over six million active users and more than 55 million monthly users. It’s estimated that more than 5,000 new Twitter accounts are created every day.

Here are some Do’s and Don’ts from Duncan to help you find a Twitter strategy that works for you.

DO

-Initiate discussion around your brand.

-Listen to what people are saying about your brand; be proactive in resonding.

-Keep it positive—this is reputation managment.

-Respond timely to @ replies and DMs.

-Keep things interesting; vary Tweet styles and subject matter.

DONT’S

-Don’t toot your own horn

-Don’t bombard followers with links

-Don’t disrespect the Twitter community

-Avoid auto-DMs and low quality @ replies—it’s annoying and makes followers think you’re a robot.

The last presenter before lunch was Matt Ford from 3point5.com. The site offers retailers a way to train employees on tech-related product like outerwear, surfboards, goggles, et cetera. Ford walked retailers through some of the potential uses of the site for the skate, surf, and snow markets. The site’s interface is slick, and runs smoothly. It even allows users to be tested on what they’ve learned. It’s been a useful tool in other industries for years, and Ford hopes to increase awareness and use of the site in the action sports space.

After lunch Javier Guerrero from Surfaid International spoke to retailers about what the organization’s ongoing efforts to reduce the impacts on malaria and malnutrition in Indonesia, and what they can do to become involved. If you’re not familiar with what this organization does, visit the SurfAid Web site.

Next up was Board-trac’s Angelo Ponzi with the top line data from BRA’s Specialty Retail Survey. The presentation offered a snapshot of the specialty retail environment in 2008, and some projections about 2009. Stay tuned to TransWorld Business for a more in-depth look at these results.

The last presentation came from Frank Scura of the Action Sports Environmental Coalition (ASEC) on the potential of natural product section integration in specialty retail locations. Scura (shown above far right) was joined by a panel of experts in the field including (L-R) Jeff Baillargeon of Verdi Gras Consulting, Ryan Kingman of Element Skateboards, Joe McElroy former VP at Hurley, Kiwi Gullixson former director at Quiksilver, and professional skateboarder Bob Burnquist.

Topics ranged from how retailers can find affordable ways to utilize sustainable materials in their private label programs to methods of merchandising natural products together in a section sponsored by ASEC called The Green Room to potentially boost sales.

Overall the presentation was very well received and retailers (like Sun Diego’s Pete Censoplano and Dave Nash shown above) were interested in what the ASEC crew had to say.

Overall, the retail summit was yet again successful, bringing retailers and manufacturers together to discuss the challenges they’re facing and working on ways to work together to help solve them. We’re already looking forward to next year!