Attending the 21st Philippine Retailers Association Conference and Expo gave me the following ideas that you may find helpful.

1. Surprise Your Customers

This is not rocket science but sometimes Success makes us lazy. Unmindful that this bad habit erodes the number of customers.

Surprising customers like what Costco does by displaying products on the retail floor that customers can see only once in a year.

This brilliant move caused a spike on its sales.

2. Focus on the small basket

This means we have to pay attention to the profit we generate from small items that cater to the mass market. So the question now is are you doing this to generate sales?

3. Integrate ecommerce to your business

This is a commonplace in other countries but is slowly gaining ground in the Philippines. Do not jump on the bandwagon. Study the landscape and be aggressive after finding your space. One model would be Zalora.

4. The Philippines is nearing the sweet spot

I read a lot of positive news about our country's future. In this conference, I heard it again being mentioned by Janet Toral, one of our online gurus.
So you be ready to plot your way how to take advantage of it.

5. Be a proud Filipino

Mike Carandang, t.v. Producer of America's Next Top Model, speaking in this conference how he convinced Tyra Banks to try Filipino Fashion Experts to show their masterpieces and the rest is history. The world now gives a big respect to the Filipino talents in this industry of our society.


This will be it for now. Second day promises more learnings.