Rainer Strnad
DIY plus

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Innovative selling

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In actual fact, the DIY store trade is on a role at the moment - not despite, but because of the many political crises all over the world. Because once again we realise: when the world outside gets tough and uncomfortable, people tend to retreat back to their private lives and value its design more. They make everything nice at home.A comfortable situation - and a dangerous one. Because if you get too comfortable, you don't have to put in any effort, for example in offering something new. But that doesn't apply to the DIY industry, where there's more innovation than ever before, does it? True, true, but they all come from industry.And what about trade? The field in which innovativeness can be proven isn't known as product development, it is quite simply: sales. At the Global DIY Summit in Berlin we will also hear and see lots of good ideas on this again. But still, we have to realise: retailers aren't really putting everything into their innovative spirit in terms of store formats and sales concepts as they could.Particularly in Germany, which this edition takes a closer look at in a regional report, the industry is finding it quite difficult. So the foreigners have to step in: Screwfix from the UK or Clas Ohlson from Sweden are showing the Germans that when it comes to marketing DIY store products, you don't automatically have to get stuck in gigantic floor spaces.And even in the most modern of all sales channels today, in e-commerce, it's not as good as it could be all over the industry. There's lots of talk (for example at the summits too) but the DIY retailers still aren't generating really significant sales shares online. Which is understandable - after all, trade has built up extremely large floor spaces, and they first have to produce a profit.
Traders now finally realise that they have neglected to build up an online market, similar to the way they have done over the past few decades in the peaceful analogue world. Because industry is quite rightly asking: which specific sales services is trade actually carrying out under the new digitalisation conditions?More and more manufacturers are coming out from under their covers and are starting to take the online sales of their products into their own hands. Trade has…
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