Product Description
Solutions for falling sales and faltering retailers
In Winning at Retail, two prominent retail consultants offer strategies for retailers and chains suffering at the hands of decreased sales numbers. Using case studies from such success stories as Costco, Target, and Walgreens, they cover customer service, retail strategy, demographics, and the latest trends in retailing. For retailers to survive, they must adapt to the new realities of the marketplace. McMillan’s cutting-edge advice and the unique "EST" model in this book shows them how. Willard Ander (Chicago, IL) is a Senior Partner at McMillan Doolittle who specializes in strategy and the analysis of consumer trends. He has worked with such clients as General Motors, Sears, McDonald’s, and Amoco on strategy and new store development. Neil Stern (Chicago, IL) is a Senior Partner at McMillan Doolittle who specializes in strategic planning and the creative development of new retail concepts. He leads the company’s food consulting practice and has worked with such clients as Publix Supermarkets, Chevron Oil, and Procter & Gamble.
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 Looking for a framework to focus your retail strategy?
When thinking about how to win in retail, there must be millions of thoughts and ideas. All of your ideas will be made more effective when they are directed in one focal point. But is your focal point relevant in the retail world? This book points to 5 focal points that matter.
For example, this book helped me settle into a Easy-Est strategy for starting up a Next-Generation Pharmacy. In this context, both The Wellness Revolution and Blown to Bits complemented the Easy-Est strategy.
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 Insightful! ( rolfdobelli )
Montgomery Ward, Woolworth's and Pets.com stumbled into irrelevancy before they knew what hit them. Authors and retail consultants Willard Ander and Neil Stern explain what went wrong and tell retailers how to stay alive and thrive. They prescribe their theory, called "Est," as in the superlative suffix. Be the best, they say, in assortment (biggest), price (cheapest), customer service (easiest), speed of service (quickest) or fashion (hottest). Being "pretty good" at everything no longer works. The abundance of choices in today's transparent, digital marketplace has spawned information-overloaded, fickle, demanding customers. The authors tend to generalize about what good companies are doing right rather than describing how also-ran retailers might turn things around, but there is plenty of advice here for those who are willing to take it. We recommend this glib pep talk of a book - if for no other reason than to jolt retailers out of believing they're doing everything possible to keep customers coming back.
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New 21st century of retailing ( jewelerprofit )
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
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A Winning Book
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.
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The est model wins in Winning at Retail
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.
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