Winning At Retail : Developing a Sustained Model for Retail Success

Rating:
Summary: A Winning Book
Review: As a business student, the book "Winning at Retail" gave me effective and simple strategies for understanding how to evaluate and critique retail concepts. In their accessible text, Ander and Stern manage to distill complex and constantly-evolving retail concepts into an intuitive model that will guide readers who need to quickly and intelligently assess how successfully a retail concept delivers value to customers.

If you're seeking an outline for the particulars of cash-flow management, marketshare, procurement strategies etc., this book won't satisfy. Stern and Ander don't excavate details. Instead, they hover at a conceptual level and methodically reduce high-achieving retailers' major differentiating factors to a workable, comprehensible 5-point "EST-model". The authors concede immediately that no retailer can (or ought to) be strong on all points of their model, since vigor on one axis may preclude a company from muscle on another. They argue that a retail concept must prevail on at least one or two points on the EST model to secure a place among the top three retailers in a segment (which, the authors say, is how to prevent consumer neglect and ultimately, the company's failure). The strengths of the EST model are both its intuitiveness to the reader and its simple construction.

The tome is pithy and easy to read. Stern and Ander sustained my attention throughout by using a familiar -- yet diverse -- set of retailers to illustrate the models. I encourage any reader who wants to appreciate what differentiates compelling retailers that stay relevant to consumers from the many that end their days in "the black hole of retail" to read Winning at Retail immediately.


Rating:
Summary: The est model wins in Winning at Retail
Review: The same retailers win year after year, Wal-mart, Target, Home Depot,Amazon while the rest barely hang on. Winning at retail tells retailers what they need, to be the _ est. Biggest, Cheapest, Quickest, Hottest. Customers have more choice and more options. The build it and they will come approach of most retailers is no longer enough. Retailers need to have the right product in the right place for the customer, or the customer will move on. Just like Good to Great, every retail company should check their strategy against Winning at Retail. Most strategies wouldnt pass, the best ones will.

Rating:
Summary: New 21st century of retailing
Review: This book finally can show a retailer how to set their strengths apart from other retailers. Many retail books talk about setting yourself apart but this book shares the FIVE "EST"'s that you can be, like:

biggEST
cheapEST
fastEST
hottEST

etc

You can probably be 2 but not or 5 of them. Great history of stores that do welll. Even though the book talks in big names (like Target which is HottEST as in up to the minute designer fashions at good prices) a small retailer can do this. You jst can't THINK small.

One bad part.......If you read this and think it will be like a motivation seminar where you'll absorb this and it will happen-well, you're wrong. You need to do a lot of things different starting tomorrow morning. the same old drab store with the same old drab employees won't hack it.

You decide. But if you want to change this book will give you direction. Then go read "The E-Myth revisited"

David Geller