Retail Trends for Small Businesses in 2022 with Claire Morris

Earlier this year, I interviewed the lovely Claire Morris, a retail expert and founder of Retail With Clarity.  What Claire doesn't know about retail is not worth knowing and she is an absolute specialist when it comes to merchandising.  Not visual merchandising, dressing and styling, but the functioning nuts and bolts of your business; the numbers, the stock management, the systems and processes that allow your business to function to its optimum.

So in this episode of The PR Spotlight, we talked more about these elements and we also covered seven of the key retail trends that Claire is predicting that we will see come to fruition and develop over the next year.

Read on for the scoop or take a listen to the full episode here:

So let’s find out a little more about Claire….

“I had always been a maths nerd, a numbers geek, but upon leaving university I had no idea what I wanted to do with it until I had a random phone call from a recruiter who said, ‘I don’t know if you'd be interested in this thing, it's called merchandise planning’. And she described it to me and it felt like this job was made for me; getting to use numbers, my analytical skills, but also getting to play with product.  So, I discovered merchandise planning and fortuitously it kick started a whole amazing career for me.

I worked for a number of large retailers in the UK and also in Australia, working with products areas from everything, from toys to books, to garden furniture, to computers. My role was balancing the numbers side alongside buying; all the numbers that sit behind the buying of the products is what makes sure that retailers are profitable and are in control of their stock. Think sales, forecasting, planning, pricing, the profitability of products, how much stock you're holding at any one time, how much you can bring into the business at any one time when you need to do markdowns when you need to going to sale and so on.”

With the breath of experience, Claire then started to gravitate towards helping others to understand and work on these areas of running a retail business.

“I am a complete Excel geek, um, loved making automated spreadsheets that took the out of some of the repetitive manual tasks that we sometimes have to do. I was involved in a few systems implementations and really enjoyed that aspect of the business, making sure that was what we were creating was fit for purpose. As I started to work that into my roles a bit more, I then actually started to take on roles that were really dedicated to this type of work. At some point I had an epiphany I've worked for large retailers; they have entire teams of merchandise planners, totally dedicated to doing this all year round, but there must be a load of smaller businesses out there who really benefit from these analytical insights, but don't have the people or the skills to do that. And also more crucially don't need it every single day, all year round. So that's where my idea for Retail With Clarity came from.”

Retail With Clarity is a boutique consultancy that supports small, to medium size product businesses and sees Claire bring together all of that skill, knowledge and insight to those businesses who just need it from time to time to make sure that they're going to be profitable, that they will survive and that they're completely in control of their business.

I always find it insightful to learn more about the people I interview; It’s fascinating to hear the stories of how expertise is accumulated and then leveraged, as Claire has shared in this instance.

The main reason I roped Claire into an interview with me for this blog and The PR Spotlight podcast is that she put this brilliant social media post on Instagram, where she shared seven key trends within the retail industry that she was predicting for 2022.  I read it and knew that it was absolute gold. I messaged message her straightaway and asked if she would come and do a podcast episode with me about this.

Now, yes, each of our years, respectively are going to look very different, but if you are a retail business, you need to have an understanding of context. You need to have an understanding of what is going on in the industry. What are the shifts? What are the trends? What are the predictions so that you can either be part of that wave, or you can preempt those changes or trends and just make yourself aware, put yourself in the best possible position for success this year. So with that in mind, let’s run down a few of the top trends that we covered in this podcast episode.

Influencer Marketing:

“So the first one is influencer marketing and I know it sounds a bit scary sometimes but the thing to be aware of here is that influencer marketing doesn't necessarily mean that we are talking about people on Instagram who have millions of followers.  There are huge variety of statistics out there, but 70% of people trust consumer reviews online, 70, 80, 90%, depending at which particular statistic you're looking at of consumers trust, word of mouth, more than they trust any other form of advertising. So trust and recommendations are absolutely crucial to how people buy right now. They're really aligning to people that make sense to them. People that share the same values as them, and is all about authenticity here. So, an influencer is not just for big brands, but find someone that aligns with your brands, with your values, and that has audience.”

Influencer marketing isn’t just about the sassy, Instagram starlets. An ‘influencer’ could be anyone. It could be a thought leader. It could be someone in your field that has an elevated profile. It could be someone that you respect or someone that you audience respect. It could be anyone with an audience. To an extent, we could almost weave in user generated content into this framework because everyone has an audience and everyone has an audience that they influence to a varying degree. So perhaps let’s see influencer marketing as an extension of user generated content.

Big Business Systems and Processes:

“There's a lot said about faking it until you make it and how to deal with imposter syndrome and this, I suppose, is an equivalent of that applied to your business. This is setting yourself up for scalability, for growth, for success in the future.  It comes back to you running your business and maybe just having a little bit of help with some outsourced elements here and there. You might be thinking ‘big business systems and processes be applicable to me’ but they absolutely are.  If you don't start to have in place documented ways of working and really clear processes behind what's going on in your business, if you employ someone tomorrow, where are you pulling all of your guidance, direction and training from?

These are the type of big business things that you can start doing right away.  Do you have a job spec for someone that you're going to employ? Is there a team structure in place so they know how they fit into the, the business and who else in the business does what? Is there a documented process that they can follow so that they know what to do when for a example, a website order comes in?  This doesn't just apply to employing but also if you are working in partnership with someone who might be a VA or a social media manager; even if you've just got someone who comes in and helps pack your orders for you. 

Do you have automation in place to reduce the manual tasks that you do to reduce the risk of human error? Do you have a documented strategy for this year, or is it just some thoughts and goals that are up in your head? Do you have a sales force, do you have a stock plan?  These are the things, once they're in place, they're going to support your growth and  ensure that you're ready for it when it does come.”

Synchronous and Asynchronous Video:

“Synchronous is real time live in the moment. Asynchronous is pre-recorded. So forget the fancy words, it really just means video video of all sorts. And this, again, look anywhere about what's driving businesses forward, social media platforms, website growth, about how you grow your business in the next few years and the common theme is video video video.

And it comes back again to trust.  Your customers want to get to know you. They love to know what goes on behind the scenes, how you actually do what you do. It actually often helps them to understand the value of what you offer when you give them this insight. A blend of both synchronous and asynchronous video is ideal. Having a good mixture of those types of video content, not just on Instagram, but across all of the platforms that you exist on, utilising video on your website as well is so, so powerful. Your video content can also be repurposed. What you create for your website, you can cut into smaller chunks and reshare on social. You can reshare that to your email database. There's so many opportunities here and just to really hammer this again, you'll see stats everywhere supporting this, but video content is more successful, 1200, yes, 1200% more successful than other content. It generates more shares and likes than text content and image content combined.”

It was a joy to speak with Claire and glean some incredible insight from her expertise.  For the full seven retail trends for 2022, take a listen of the podcast episode here.

You can find Claire here:

https://www.retailwithclarity.com/

https://www.instagram.com/retailwithclarity/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/retail-with-clarity/