What are the keys to making customers fall in love? Although there is no closed recipe for this question, Comertia has focused its XXII Retail Conference on this issue, and has found decisive clues, all around the same concept: authenticity and acting true to one's own essence. And it has been a transversal element claimed by a wide diversity of profiles, from entrepreneurs like Cristina Cabañas, Josep Ametller, and Luís de Buen, to the cartoonist Pilarín Bayès, and the athlete Àlex Roca.
The conference, led by Xantal Llavina at Cosmocaixa, brought together representatives from the commercial sector to address the present and future of retail, also in the face of the rise of new technologies and new sales channels. The event, which also featured Lucas Morera (Brownie), Javier Carreras (Hurley), and Miguel Ángel Hernández (Nude Project), was peppered with mentions of AI and how it can and cannot perform functions previously exclusively human.
"We all work from the industry of making our customers fall in love," defended the president of Comertia, Ignasi Pietx. All with one goal: "To seek the happiness of customers and collaborators." To do this, Pietx highlighted the importance of working with passion, something he assured is only achieved from a human dimension, despite the rise of technology. According to him, technology should be a means, and never the end, and cannot replace the feelings that people evoke: "I don't think I will ever fall in love with AI," concluded the president of the Catalan association of family businesses in retail.
To achieve this claimed authenticity, self-esteem is essential. "The biggest goal I've had in life has been to have self-esteem, it's an essential element," defended Àlex Roca. Since he suffered cerebral palsy from a virus at six months old, his parents worked on this self-esteem, which has led to his motto: You set the limits: "There are things I am not capable of doing, but no one will tell me I am not capable. First I will try and, if that's the case, I will fall and learn." With this life motto and with a 76% disability, Roca has completed triathlons, the Titan Desert, and even the Barcelona Marathon, a feat he achieved last year.
In addition to his sporting challenges, Roca looks towards other areas, which have materialized in achievements such as having paraded in September at Madrid Fashion Week. "The most important thing is how we feel, how we face day to day and the attitude we put into challenges. Because a person without challenges is a person dead in life," Roca defended through sign language, interpreted by Mari Carmen Maza, his partner for eight years. Roca has emphasized the need to love oneself and be faithful to that: "We have to accept what we are, because life is a true gift."
Authenticity and being true to oneself has marked the trajectory of entrepreneurs like Josep Ametller, who recalled that he is part of the eighth generation of a family of farmers from Penedès. Since childhood, he dreamed of seeing his surname stamped on trucks distributing fruit, and promoting Ametller Origen "was closing the circle." And it is that success is possible "when you do what comes from your heart," and when you plan it. "If you don't project a plan, nothing is achieved," remarked the general director and co-founder of the company, which now has 4,000 employees.
"You always have to work from vocation and maintaining the essence," Ametller defended, in line with that authenticity that all speakers have agreed to claim. The most successful products of Ametller Origen draw on this authenticity: artichoke omelet, vegetable cream, apricots.
Roots and origins have also been key for Luis de Buen, founder of Fishhh!. From a family of fishmongers in La Boqueria, he has also focused on vocation: "If they taught us to find our vocation, people would be happier." De Buen has brought this vocation to all his projects, including his collaboration with Ferran Adrià as an advisor in the field of fish. This vocation led him to buy hundreds of Mediterranean coast Norway lobsters to find out which was the best of all: curiously, he assures that it is the one from Barcelona.
To make his clients fall in love, De Buen has highlighted the importance of quality and of offering more than just food in the case of restaurants: "You no longer go to the restaurant just to eat: you go to buy an atmosphere." But he defends that the falling in love should not only be from the client towards the company, but that it should be bidirectional: "I am also in love with my clients."
Along the same lines, illustrator and cartoonist Pilarín Bayès has synthetically summarized how she has lived in love with her profession, and how readers have fallen in love with her works: "The magic formula is to listen; it is to listen to oneself, more than to think. You have to go down the path of authenticity". And that's what she did, starting to draw before she could speak: "Just as spiders weave thread, I felt like making drawings." It still happens to her at 83 years old: "I see a blank paper and I get emotional."
Bayès explained it alongside the president of the Guitart Hotels group, Cristina Cabañas, a friend of the illustrator since they met 17 years ago at a charity event. Cabañas recalled that her husband, Climent Guitart, died in 2014 as president of Guitart Hotels and father of three children, aged three, four, and six. She, a pharmacist by profession and from a line of pharmacists, chose to assume the leadership of the company after her children stated that they wanted to be hoteliers, like their father. Cabañas left her white coat and dedicated herself to the hotel sector "for love" of her husband and children, and it wasn't long before she fell in love with hospitality, "the industry of happiness."
"I have fallen in love, because every day we make people happy. And we cannot fail, we have to do everything well and make customers feel at home." But Bayès contradicted her: "Not at home, ten times better!" The illustrator especially recalled one of the hundreds of books she has illustrated, 1.000 motius per viure. "They told me I wouldn't find them, but I had plenty left over," Bayès assured. And this inventiveness and creativity cannot arise from Artificial Intelligence (AI), although it can replicate it, as the illustrator pointed out. "AI will have great advantages, but it is a double-edged sword that will have many drawbacks. AI can create a drawing based on Da Vinci, but it could not do so without the original Da Vinci's prior work."
AI has also crept into the debate between Hurley executive Javier Carrera; Brownie co-owner and manager, Lucas Morera, and Nude Project retail director, Miguel Ángel Fernández. "Artificial Intelligence can help us, but not in creative tasks; we have to reserve that for humans," defended Morera, who ruled out using AI to interact with customers. From Nude Project, Fernández agreed, arguing that "technology must be transparent and should not be noticeable: it has to help in processes such as data processing, so that retailers can dedicate ourselves to what really matters, which is to be there for our customer and generate a positive experience."
And the three were clear: this positive experience, the one that makes a customer fall in love with a brand, happens in the store. And they defend this despite the fact that "the mobile is in the entire decision-making chain and is a tool also used in the store to compare with other brands," highlighted Carrera. But that falling in love with a brand happens "by connecting on a personal and emotional level," according to him: "And there is no better place to do it than the physical store."
Fernández emphasized that "there is no standardized cocktail to make someone fall in love," but that it is key to make the customer feel part of your message, and to serve: "Retail is about serving, and the greater your reach, the greater your obligation to serve the customer and your team." From Brownie, Morera also defended the importance of personal interaction with the customer. "The work is done from the store: I don't make people fall in love, the store manager and the saleswoman do," along with presence on social networks: "It's a pack that makes people fall in love, and we don't do something specific to make people fall in love, but rather we make people fall in love by how we are." It is that authenticity, that essence, and staying true to it, that makes people fall in love.