Welcome back.
This month we explore the topic of language. Do you customers really know what you mean when you use certain words to describe your business. We often get so caught up in how we describe things that we misuse terms and give people a wrong impression. Let us know if there are words you have come across that you often hear being used incorrectly or misinterpreted.
We wish all of our clients, friends, and family a wonderful and happy holiday season!
LANGUAGE BARRIERS
I recently was stopped abruptly while reading an article in one of the two Boston Daily newspapers when the author mentioned Olive Garden’s soon to open new restaurant in the South Bay Shopping Center. (The South Bay Shopping Center is a strip center that primarily serves the inner city and is anchored by Target.) Any knowledgeable person familiar with Olive Garden, a national chain owned by Darden Restaurants, Inc. a company that operates 1390 restaurants, would call it a lot of things but it is hard to imagine that many would use the word “upscale”.
Let’s be straight here.....this concept when compared with our image of a typical Italian restaurant is a generic, homogenized, tasteless, relatively unfriendly, and mass produced exact opposite of what anyone who appreciates quality would call “upscale”. Entrees on the dinner menu range from $9.25 to a $14.25 Steak Gorgonzola. If a $14 steak is upscale than pray tell what should we call the $45 steak entrees being sold at restaurants like Smith and Wollensky, Morton’s, Ruth Chris, Fleming’s, Abe & Louie’s, or Capital Grill? When you look up upscale in Wikipedia the first link is to Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago. Would anyone put Charlie Trotter’s on the same level as Olive Garden?
There is a place for lower priced restaurant formats and this restaurant is correctly locating itself in this center demographically but it’s customers and potential customers should be entitled to honestly and accuracy. According to dictionary.com, upscale is defined as “relating to high-income consumers “ yet because retailers so frequently misuse terms in the above manner (I assume the newspaper got the term from a PR kit Olive Garden sent to them) they are confusing and misinforming consumers. I subscribe to the famous saying popularized by Sym’s “an educated consumer is our best customer”. If you truly have the right products for your target customers whether you are value, quality or fashion oriented than accurate communications will serve your business well. If your products are without merit, then confusion and inaccuracy in your communications may be helpful in bringing in customers in the short term but I think Mr. Syms would say “that is no way to build a business that will survive the long haul”.
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Note:
We focused on the word upscale but there are many other terms we find being misused by retailers. Another word we hear often being misused by retailers is “lifestyle” to the extent that no two people in the retail business would give the same definition and it appears that consumers have absolutely no idea what it means though a number of stores remain infatuated with the word. You often hear this word in reference to “lifestyle centers” or outdoor malls with walkways and benches. Some call stores like Anthropologie "lifestyle stores". Stores that merchandise their products in a certain way i.e. showing items in context such as food in a kitchen and table settings in a dining area (ex: Crate & Barrel) are said to be taking a "lifestyle" approach to merchandising.
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