Google Rules for Retail
- by David Dorf
In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts. These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future. While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth. So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success. The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created.
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Google Rule
Industry Examples
New Retailer Rule
New Relationship
Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner
Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond
to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers.
Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Convert the critics to fans and the fans to
influencers.
New Architecture
Join a network; be a platform
Tesco and BestBuy
released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new
applications.
Become a destination for information.
New Publicness
Life is public, so is business
Zappos and WholeFoods
founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and
connecting to customers. It's not
always pretty, but it's genuine.
Be transparent. Share both your successes and failures with
your customers.
New Society
Elegant organization
Wet Seal helps their customers
assemble outfits and show them off to each other. Barnes & Noble
has a community site that includes a bookclub.
Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better.
New Economy
Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches
lululemon found a niche for yoga
inspired athletic wear. Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs
of T-shirts.
Serve small markets with niche products.
New Business Reality
Decide what business you're in
When Lowes realized catering to women
brought the men along, their sales increased.
Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy.
New Attitude
Trust the people and listen
In 2008 Starbucks launched
MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers.
Use social networks as additional data points for making better
merchandising decisions.
New Ethic
Be honest and transparent; don't be evil
Target is giving away reusable
shopping bags for Earth Day. Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays.
Being green
earns customers'
respect and lowers costs too.
New Speed
Life is live
H&M and
Zara keep up with fashion trends.
Be prepared
to pounce on you customers' fickle interests.
New Imperatives
Encourage, enable and protect innovation
1-800-Flowers was the first do sales
in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce. The Sears
Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo.
Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be
stifled.
Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.
