Canadian Music Trade - December/January 2019 | Page 32

BUSINESS MATTERS
By Michael Raine
THE RETAIL DOCTOR
HAS A PRESCRIPTION FOR YOU
On Jan. 23, the day
before The 2019
NAMM Show
officially opens,
forward-looking MI retailers have an ap-
pointment with the doctor to fix what ails
their stores. Excuse the bad pun, but Bob
Phibbs, aka the Retail Doctor, is confident
that those NAMM members who come
early to Anaheim to attend the new Retail
Innovation Summit are going to leave
inspired and armed with practical and
actionable solutions to improve their sales
and marketing operations.
This day-long, two-part summit with
Phibbs will cover the top retail trends, such
as new technologies, platforms, and other
things impacting the customer experience,
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CANADIAN MUSIC TRADE
and offer a future-oriented look at business
strategies while also encouraging retailers
of any size to think more strategically about
adding value to their business for potential
customers. This will be Phibbs’ third time at
NAMM and he brings an intimate under-
standing and love of the MI retail industry,
being a musician himself and holding a
degree as a choral conductor.
“I am not going to be saying, ‘Wow, at
Target, you drive up to the door and robots
deliver it to your trunk. You all need to be
doing that!’ But what it will be is that when
they leave, there will be an actionable list
of what they can go back to their stores
and do to make them more competitive,
have more fun in it, and, more importantly,
have more effective marketing,” says Phibbs.
“I think it has never been easier for your ide-
al customers to find you, but the problem
is, for example, if you don’t pay attention to
your Google My Business and you don’t pay
attention to all the tools that are out there
that you could use, then what you look
like on the web is either invisible or, god
forbid, there is that one student who hated
Mrs. Appletree the flute instructor and they
went online and said, ‘This place is terrible
and I never go there.’ Now that review is
sitting out there as the lone representative
of your business online and 85 per cent
of potential customers are reading it. It
doesn’t matter if she doesn’t even still work
there or if it was right or wrong; it is still
out there and that’s the problem.”