Essay About Ban Boredom And New Customer Intimacy Strategy

Store24 – New England’s Largest Convenience Store Chain
Store 24, one of New England’s largest convenience store chains, implemented a new customer intimacy strategy referred to as “Ban Boredom.”CEO believed that providing an entertaining shopping atmosphere, including frequent themes and promotions, would differentiate the shopping experience at the chain from its competitors. Hoped to create loyalty to Store 24 among its targeted customer base of young, urban adults between the ages of fourteen and twenty-nineActively promoted Ban Boredom strategy on billboards, buses, and trolleys. Its retail outlets placed a large display case at the head of the center aisle to feature high margin promotional items for the current theme, such as life-sized cutouts of movie stars and discounted videos for an “old movie” theme.Store managers given significant autonomy and flexibility in implementing Ban Boredom themes => Manager and crew skill may be key to success of strategy.Ban Boredom strategy meant to complement core strategy “Cause you just can’t wait” (CYJCW).After several years of Ban Boredom, CEO became concerned that strategy was not working.The question: Is Ban Boredom working?  If not, is it a bad strategy or is it just being poorly implemented? How can Store 24 use their strategy map and measures from their balanced scorecard to address these questions?To address this issue, recall that the strategy map posits cause and effect relationships:        Learning & growth => internal processes => customers => financial outcomesStore 24 strategy hypothesized that: Ban Boredom => Customers => ProfitsIn their balanced scorecard Store 24 includes a Ban Boredom execution quality measure.  To test for causality,  examine the statistical relation between stores’ Ban Boredom execution quality measures and their future store profits.The relation is slightly negative!They also found that customer satisfaction was positively influenced by the quality of the Ban Boredom implementation.Thus, customers noticed differences in the quality of the strategy implementation, but measured customer satisfaction did not translate into higher profits.Suggests the strategy itself might be flawed!Stores with high crew skills that implemented Ban Boredom effectively had higher profits than stores with high skilled crews that were less effective in implementing the strategy.Stores with low- or average-skilled crews that faithfully implemented Ban Boredom were less profitable than stores with low- and average-skilled crews that focused on operating efficiency (CYJCW) and did not implement the Ban Boredom strategy. Success of the strategy critically dependent on skills of the employees in the store.Inexperienced personnel who followed Ban Boredom rules did not serve customers well and introduced inefficiencies in operations, and that led to lower store profits. Experienced crews, in contrast, maintained operating efficiency and customer satisfaction while creating the differentiating buying experience of the Ban Boredom strategy.Drop Ban BoredomKeep Ban Boredom, but increase expenditures on increasing the skills of store crews. Keep Ban Boredom – but implement it only in stores with properly skilled crews.Firm dropped Ban Boredom strategy Performance Measurement system updated to reflect efficiency (CYJCW) strategy onlyIs there something wrong with the strategy or is it poor execution?  Can we cite examples of facing this dilemma in your organization?[pic 1]