If you operate a brick and mortar establishment and have been keeping up with the digital trend, you’re worried. You know that traffic on the web is up. You know that it’s that use of the web by people shopping for what you sell is also climbing, with predictions of stratospheric hourly sales totals that equal your annual sales. You know you cannot compete in price with the dot com stores who are providing exactly the same products gathering dust on your shelves. You know that your doors don’t swing anywhere near as many times as the clicks sound, and you especially know your cash register total comes nowhere near the cyber merchant’s total. So what to do?

Hang in there baby! There are two trends that seem to offer help, clustering and personalization. Let’s examine both.

CLUSTERING
Clustering is what you don’t get when you go to the mall. Today’s modern mall is purposely designed to send you scurrying from one end to the other, making sure you detour into each wing, when all you wanted to do was look for the perfect shirt or pair of shoes. When you’re soaking your sore feet after trudging from mall store to mall store looking for the one thing you need right now, do you, as do I, complain to your significant other with questions like: “Why don’t they put all the shoe stores together in one place?” Or better yet, “Why don’t they put the furniture stores in one wing, the clothing stores in another, and tools where I can get to them asily?”

By now you’re seeing the reasoning behind these seemingly helter-skelter store arrangements. The mall owners want the ability to tell space renters that their mall has been designed to FORCE shoppers to go past every space, so any location is a good location. The problem is, those space allocation decisions are now coming back to bite the hand that designed them. Today’s shoppers don’t want to spend hours trudging halls, they want to go to one place and be able to quickly compare similar products, then buy.

So let me ask you. Which would you rather have, shoppers of other goods and services passing your window (attractive as it is), or shoppers looking for exactly what you provide even though it might mean less profit per sale because of intense cluster competition? If your mall hasn’t made the change or isn’t even considering changing, ask them what their own industry gurus are telling them. Then look around your community for that new cluster mall, the one with great parking and a theme.

PERSONALIZATION
“I thought all that stuff on the web was called personalization?”, you ask. “Why, every time I go in that online CD store, they use my name and offer me CDs similar to the ones I bought last time. Isn’t that personalization?” No, that’s marketing. Personalization is when the owner of that shoe store calls you up and says, “Hey, remember when you were asking about a (and here, as a man, I haven’t the slightest idea of what words to use to describe shoes other than black or brown, dress or casual) shoe? Well we just got a new shipment, and you might want to come down and take a look.” Or when the clerk says, “Hi Mrs. Jones! Great day, isn’t it?”

Of course this means you have to learn to talk real talk with your customers, but put yourself in their shoes (no pun intended). Wouldn’t you rather shop at a store that recognizes you as a human being rather than a bunch of numbers on a card? Wouldn’t you tend to go back to that store when next you needed a product, or service, or advice? Shoppers, when asked, say, “Yes!” Again, industry gurus are aware of these trends. Are you?

WHAT TO DO
Neither of these trends, clustering nor personalization, will make a difference in your demise as a merchant if you don’t make changes in how and where you do business. But I’m sure that knowing what’s going on in cyberspace can directly help you to combat the ubiquitousness of the web with solutions. Take what you’ve learned or are learning from cyberspace and apply it to your present situation, then act!