At RSR, we’ve been working hard on a new methodology, called START. It’s designed to help retailers move from omni-channel angst and fear to actually doing something to improve their situation – to help them cut to the chase on digital transformation and get moving. We started with store as our first area of focus, with plans to expand to all areas of the retail enterprise. You can read more about it in Paula’s post on the topic.

What I want to focus on is some of the preliminary results. We’ll be publishing a full report on the topic in April, but in the meantime something very basic has come to light, and it’s pretty much one of those things that could easily get me up on a soapbox and yelling at retailers, yet again.

Here’s the deal. The “S ” in START stands for Strategy, as in, are your stores as they exist today well aligned with your company value proposition to customers, and do they take advantage of your internal strengths – your core capabilities as a company?

It’s a pretty basic question. And yet, depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, you may or may not be surprised to find that a majority of the retailers we surveyed to get baseline data for our benchmark reported their value proposition to customers in no way takes advantage of the core capabilities that are their strengths. And this is, of course, reflected in their stores.

Retailers reported that their top two sources of competitive advantage – their core internal strengths – were powerful brand marketing and superior product design. In the next breath, they reported that their top two customer value propositions are low prices and convenience.

So much for playing to their strengths.

Now, you could argue that powerful marketing can be a help in rising above the noise if your focus is on convincing consumers that you have low prices – except that this is not the same as powerful brand marketing, which goes deeper than just trumpeting out low prices. And you could theoretically argue that superior product design enables both low prices and convenience – except that any basic engineer will tell you that you can rarely deliver superior product design at a low price.

The likelihood that consumers will give a retailer loyalty and pay the premium required to support powerful brand marketing and superior product design, when a retailer is promising low prices and convenience, seems pretty small. And when you take that into the store, it’s no wonder the experience is confusing, inconvenient, not the lowest price, and still also not that great at telling the brand story OR in communicating the benefits of superior product design.

Stores are a mess today. They are a collection of half-baked promises that are not aligned with the company strategy, delivered in a half-hearted way, to customers who grow less and less enchanted with the “magic ” of stores. The question I always get is this: what can we implement to solve this? Tell me the magic technology bullet that will create an engaging experience that will turn around my stores.

My answer is, you are asking the wrong question. You’re on step 5 (the second “T ” in START), when you haven’t even figured out the answer to the question in step 1: What are your stores supposed to stand for? What are they good for? Are they aligned with the promises you’re making to consumers?

If you find it difficult to answer these questions, then your stores’ problem is not technology. It’s strategy.

You can try out the Store Health Assessment, using the new START methodology – just note, it’ll take a couple weeks for you to get back your personal results.