The Art of Being Chosen: Secrets of Success from the Giants of Retail

The book provides a series of categories that falls in line with much of Senteo’s teachings and principles. Three categories stand out as stunning examples of how retailers, and in turn banks, can improve their offerings: Trust, People, and Being Different. These three categories highlight how businesses need to address the desires of their customers for an emotional connection and unique, memorable experience. Each of the three said categories emphasizes key business principles:

• Trust: “Companies must adopt a mindset that views facets [of a business – not just the easy ones] as welcome opportunities to build trust”
• People: “Delighting customers by satisfying their needs that hadn’t existed before.”
• Being Different: “In a world crammed with options, being different delivers an immediate emotional connection with customers and builds brand equity in a business.”

Additionally, personal testimony by retail leaders provides the solid evidence that these categories and topics are valid and applicable in retail scenarios. Based upon these interviews, the book provides an interesting glimpse into what has made businesses successful, and these concepts can be adapted to suit other business ventures as well, namely those in the banking sector.

What this book is ultimately lacking is a sense of innovation and free thought. Effectively, much of the book serves as a compilation of the thoughts of retail leaders and their effective strategies; we were hard pressed to find a great deal of insight from Martin in regards to his personal thoughts on how to improve businesses. The categories stem from the interviews, but there are no formal methodology steps available to implement within another business. Rather, that information must be gleaned from the interviewed, scavenged from the dozens of retailer testimonies to understand what systems work and what the best ways to implement them are. What we would have preferred to see is more of a step-by-step approach that used the case histories to highlight companies that followed the model rather than summarizing the histories through a category. Yes, the first “Secret” offers a small step-by-step guideline, but that concept is absent in later chapters. Granted, the information can be inferred and methods can be synthesized, but it could be presented in a much simpler fashion.

Intimately affecting the lives of everyone on the planet, retail is the world’s largest business. But what does it take to be truely successful in this highly competitive and cut-troat arena? What makes some retailers successful while others fail? Discover the six guiding principles for retail success – no matter how large or small a retail business may be.

This book is best utilized as a tool for understanding the broad categories that all retailers must focus on. Case histories serve as prime examples to all companies of the retail secrets in practice. Management across the board would do well to understand these principles, but the most customer facing individuals must also realize that these skills and concepts are vital to business success at the store level as well. We would suggest marrying this book with Designing the Customer-Centric Organization to give a complete understanding of both what it takes to be chosen by consumers as well as what comprises an effective customer-centric organization.