ThinkAbout: Inspirational Verve for Your Product Line!
By Andrea Syverson
About Andrea
Andrea Syverson is a customer-centric listener, connector and creator. As a right and left-brained creative marketing strategist with over 20 years experience, she holds customers in highest regard in all decision-making processes. By actively and intuitively listening to customers, she's created and developed best-selling products across a variety of categories, from gifts and stationery to books to gourmet food to apparel to spirituality, and many in between.
Her clients include large and small companies: Hallmark, Hershey Foods, Ben & Jerry’s, Celestial Seasonings, Wolferman’s and Boston Proper, just to name a few. While she holds an MBA, Andrea acknowledges that her true expertise comes from continuous hands-on customer experiences. Her new book, "BrandAbout: A Seriously Playful Playbook for Passionate Brand-Builders and Merchants," will be out in spring 2010. She's president of IER Partners, a national consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, brand marketing, merchandising, new product development and creative thinking.
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Merchandise as Kindling!
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This wish-book catalog couldn’t have been better timed to further kindle my summer cooking passion. Chock full of 40-plus new items gorgeously displayed on the front cover and through the first half of the 100-page book, I appreciated how in sync the merchants at Williams-Sonoma were with their customers’ cooking needs and desires. The timeliness and temptation of pages and pages of both new and exclusive grill tools, food prep tools, fruit tools and clever ways to make frozen pops all supported not only the creative theme of “the abundance of summer,” but my personal desire to be more experimental and playful with new recipes this summer.
As a Williams-Sonoma customer, I felt this well-timed product offering ignited this desire and encouraged me to add new tools and techniques to my cooking repertoire — things I didn’t even know I needed! From the exclusive fine-mesh grill pan that makes it “easy to brown and sauté even the smallest ingredients on your outdoor grill” to the square slider press and slider grilling basket to the four-in-one avocado tool, the merchants at Williams-Sonoma fanned into flame my quest to do more with all my farmers’ market treasures this season, as well as gave me the tools and methods to try new foods on the grill.
How well does your merchandising strategy kindle your customers’ passions and dreams? Do your customers think of your brand as a partner in helping them meet their goals — stated and/or unstated? Is your product line strategically positioned and timed to take consumers to whatever quest they may want?
This summer, why not chat about the strength of your merchandise’s kindle factor and see if there aren’t ways you can turn up the inspiration intensity of your product offering?
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