How Liz Reisman markets to women ..........“Music stores are just starting to catch up,” says Reisman. “The music retail industry is largely male-dominated, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I do think there probably has been a lack of awareness on just how significant a market Mom really is. And perhaps it is worth looking at how moms shop—and where they shop—in order to capture more of that market. I know I’d like to.”
Reisman, who holds a masters degree in journalism, wrote about business for Forbes and SmartMoney, among other publications, in a 22-year journalism career before entering music retail. “I think that everything that I ever wrote has contributed to something that I’m able to do now,” she says. “Certainly I knew how to read a balance sheet, and my strength has always been in marketing.” After five years on the staff of Golf Digest, she left the workforce for two years to stay home with her two children, now 11 and 13. “Then my husband just said to me one day, ‘If you could do anything, what would you do?’” Reisman recalls. “I said, ‘I would teach music to little kids.’” In the end she decided against pursing a teaching certificate, but it wasn’t long afterward that she heard her local music store, where her daughter once attended lessons, had closed. “My husband said, ‘Why don’t you buy it?’” says Reisman. “So I did.”
She ran Creative Music Center out of its original 2,600-square-foot location for more than four years before buying a piece of property around the corner, tearing down the house that stood on it, and designing a new 5,100-square-foot location with the help of merchandising and marketing authority Glen Ingles. The new store opened on Monroe, Connecticut’s main drag in December 2007.
“I decorated the store on instinct with the help of my female staffers,” says Reisman. “I just asked myself, ‘Where do I like to be? Well, I like to be in Starbucks.” To her store she brought a “Starbucks-like” color scheme of rich burgundies, greens, and grays. In her favorite knick-knack store, Blue Tulip, she studied the arrangement of gifts and picture frames and pondered how she might display capos and guitar straps in the same way. No detail—plants, music-themed rugs, wallpaper made from old sheet music—was too minute to consider. “I hate to say it,” she says, “but the store definitely has a woman’s touch.”
Besides her main retail area, Reisman built ten lesson rooms, a multipurpose room, offices, kitchen, a designated storage area, and separate bathrooms—with changing table in the ladies’ room. Her waiting room is decked out with cushy chairs, wi-fi, a flat-panel TV, and copies of Entertainment Weekly, In Touch, and Mommy magazines. “I know the value of 29 minutes of solitude in the waiting room because I’ve been there as a mom,” says Reisman. “Sometimes when you have kids, that’s all the quiet time you get in a day.”
There’s a saying in the automotive industry that when men buy a car, they want to know what’s under the hood—when women buy a car, they want to know how many cup holders it has. Similar rules may apply in music retail where, evidence suggests, male customers are likely to be sold on a product’s technical features or the endorsements it receives. Moms, on the other hand, “are looking for solutions,” says Reisman. “With a man, you might say, ‘This guitar has a solid top, and Bruce Springsteen plays on this model. A mom wants to know if this instrument solves her problem. Does it fit her price point? Will it make her kid happy? Is it going to last her child for the next two years, or is her child going to grow out of it and force her to buy another? A typical mom is super-busy, and she has tired, hungry kids with her in the afternoon. Our job as retailers is to cut to the chase, assess the issue she is having and offer a solution to the issue as quickly as possible.”
Moms, says Reisman, are among the most discriminating shoppers and the most likely to shop around. They’re also likely to trust the information they get from other moms more than what they hear from celebrity endorsers or technical experts—in fact the stores rated best on technical expertise by moms in the NASMD study were not the ones rated mostly highly overall. Statistics (unrelated to the NASMD study) show that more than half of moms reported buying a product because another mom had told them about it. “Moms are not influenced by which clubs Tiger Woods endorses,” says Reisman. “They are influenced by peers. If one mom says to another mom, ‘Hey, I went into this music store, but it was a little bit of a mess and they seemed disorganized’—the other mom is registering ‘mess’ and ‘disorganized.’ You need to consider how you can make them feel comfortable with their purchase, and you just can’t do that in an environment that’s messy and cold and lacking in understanding of the customer.”
The upshot of the study’s findings was that moms will shop stores that care about them as customers. Small touches that make a difference include comfortable seating in waiting rooms, warm color schemes, baby-changing tables, aesthetic details like wallpaper and plants—and items as simple as Kleenex in the lesson rooms. The moms who participated in the study favored pleasant, neutral music such as cafe jazz: One store they rated as being too silent; another borderline-offensive with its audio system tuned to an edgy rock ’n’ roll station. Other negatives included poor lighting, messy waiting rooms and bathrooms, and lesson studios that doubled as storage areas piled high with sheet music and clutter. In a case where an aesthetic problem became a matter of all-out confusion, one mom cited a store where the showroom carpeting abruptly gave way to industrial tile, giving her the uncomfortable impression that she was entering a part of the store she shouldn’t be in.
“Of course,” says Reisman, “that kind of thing can be confusing for both male and female customers. But when it happens with female customers, you’re more likely to lose them.”
As a town of about 20,000 in central Connecticut, Monroe resembles countless other small and medium-sized American towns where attention to the details that make a store mom-friendly could mean the difference between the survival of the local music store and further concentration of retail sales into the big chains and internet dealers. “You would hope that would be a point in our favor,” says Reisman. “I can’t compete with the demographic in a major city, but hopefully our attention to detail and personal service keeps people coming back.”
As a cost analysis conducted as part of the NASMD study illustrates, changes stores can implement to raise their mom-friendliness quotients come on a whole spectrum of affordability. For instance, it might take a large financial commitment to rip out the industrial tile and redo the floors, but it costs less to lay carpeting over an unattractive surface and put in some comfy chairs—and virtually no money at all to keep the lesson rooms stocked with Kleenex.
“Of course, some of this is just good merchandising, whether you’re appealing to men or women,” says Reisman. “But what’s been found is that if you make your store mom-friendly, you capture all the shoppers. You’re not going to turn off Dad. If you limit your store to being men-friendly, however, you may turn off Mom. You can’t go wrong by making it mom-friendly—which is a very powerful statement.”
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