Principled Innovation LLC

Simplicity and Staples

May 26th, 2006

Last week, I posted about the need for greater simplicity in associations, posing some questions that I hope we will be able to explore going forward. One of those questions had to do with a new business model that would allow associations to fully embrace simplicity, a subject that has been on my mind a great deal in recent months.

So I was pleased to discover an excellent article in the June issue of Business 2.0 about the strategy office supplies giant Staples has pursued to make its customer shopping experience simpler. (The article is not yet online, but can be found on page 43 of the magazine’s print version.) In 2001, Staples was suffering from poor sales and a tidal wave of customer complaints. The company, which had built its reputation on its comprehensive selection of products, was dealing with customer unhappiness around unstocked shelves and unhelpful staff. What customers really wanted was an easier shopping experience, which the company’s leaders recognized as a unique strategic opportunity. The article describes it this way:

Staples’s subsequent rebranding effort is one of the most successful mass-marketing campaigns in recent memory, and one of the most holistic. Rather than simply bombarding customers with a new slogan–”Staples: That was easy”–[Staples’s executive VP for marketing Shira] Goodman and her team led a companywide overhaul that actually simplified the shopping experience.

Staples didn’t try to convince its customers that it had made shopping its stores hassle-free with flowery marketing speak. The company embraced simplicity as a differentiator from its competitors and made a subtle shift in its business model from stores with a product panoply, to stores that have what you’re most likely to need, including a specific emphasis on most critical supplies, such as printer cartridges. Stores were re-designed and sales staff were trained to be more helpful to customers. The company also created a compelling icon, the Easy Button, as a symbol of its shift toward simplicity. The button itself has become the subject of word-of-mouth marketing, including Staples commercials on YouTube and a blogger who turned an Easy Button (Staples sell them for $5 each) into a garage door opener. Staples’s embrace of simplicity has paid off handsomely for the company, both in terms of brand identity and financial performance.

In stark contrast to everything that Staples has done in the last five years stands the “all things to all people” association business model. For years, we’ve discussed the need to jettison this way of looking at our work in favor of a new approach. And yet, “all things” endures. Perhaps the problem is in the all-or-nothing way we often talk about abandoning it, so let me propose an alternative: something for just about everybody. It would represent only a minor shift in our thinking, but even some small moves toward greater simplicity would be a good start, so here are three questions to get that conversation started:

1. What were the ten most highly valued/financially successful offers our association made to our members/customers in each of the last three years?
2. How do we reduce/eliminate offers that don’t make the list?
3. How do we make those offers on the list easier for our members/customers to access?

I hope association leaders will soon recognize the value of simplification as a strategy for making their organizations more inviting to the members of both today and tomorrow. The Staples example offers important evidence that simplicity can be a successful strategic priority if implemented with intelligence, care and a bit of humor. Now let’s get going!

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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover