Page 21 - Sphere No.25 (Aug 2009)

SPHERE 19
XCELLENT SERVICE has helped Watsons build up
an impressive following in China – close to three mil-
lion customers a week patronise the country’s 450
stores. The company is constantly looking at ways to up-
grade and fine tune service levels to meet the increasingly
high expectations of discerning shoppers.
To that end, the Retail Academy was recently launched
in nine Asian nations, including China, to help train staff
to even higher levels. The in-store programme is for all
staff – from the most junior employees right through to the
most senior and experienced – and has two levels, with
additional modules for beauty and healthcare advisors.
Subjects covered in the training sessions are customer
service, selling skills, product knowledge and store opera-
tions. As well as helping customers, the Retail Academy
also allows employees to develop their skills and increase
their job satisfaction. This, in turn, helps to reduce staff
turnover and grow the business.
In China, the Retail Academy scheme was launched ini-
tially in the southern provinces, close to Watsons home
base of Hong Kong, a city renowned for its great service,
and will expand to other parts of the nation.
LEARNING THE ROPES
E
said Mr Nothhaft. “Men are persuaded
to use the products by their wives or girl-
friends. The recent launch of Man Code has
been phenomenal, one of our biggest prod-
uct launches.”
The China outlook is so bright, despite a
worldwide recession, that this year will see
the opening of a total of 150 new stores,
including cities such as Hohhot, the capi-
tal of Inner Mongolia. Even in cities where
Watsons does not yet have a presence, peo-
ple are familiar with the name through the
Internet. Beauty-related blogs and forums
on sites such as Sina and Sohu discussing
the best products and services have the po-
tential to reach tens of millions of people.
Young women in the larger cities began
patronising Watsons long before blogging became a popular
pastime. Watsons first opened in the capital city of Beijing some
20 years ago, growing gradually at first, with subsequent outlets
opening in the coastal cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The early part of this century saw rapid expansion, with the
100th store opening in 2005, the 200th in 2006 and the 300th
in 2007. There are currently more than 450 stores which cover
some 60 per cent of the cities in China.
The Watsons formula of offering quality
products, great display and efficient ser-
vice sounds simple. But if it was just a case
of transplanting a western-style business
model into China, every brand would
succeed and that is patently not the case.
“Looking at it from the outside, it
sounds like a no brainer to sell products in
a population of 1.3 billion but it is not that
simple,” says Mr Nothhaft “You need to
have the right timing and be in the right
place with, of course, the right people and
to stay ahead of the competition.
“You have to make sure that you ar-
rive in a city with the right location and
premises at the right time, in other words
not too soon, just when that city’s population has the spending
power to be able to afford to shop at Watsons.
“You have to have a way of predicting when the growth will
come. We put a lot of time and effort into planning. Two years
from now we want to be able to say that that particular city is
ready for a Watsons store. We are now looking at second, third
and even fourth tier cities up as far as the Russian border.”
Heilongjiang Guizhou Shanxi Jiangxi Hainan Neimenggu Zhejiang