“Second Thoughts About a Strategy Shift” follows Augustin Rey and his efforts to reshape and revitalize Emilia, a retailer. From his conversations with Maria and the conversation with Nico, it becomes evident that he failed to validate his ideas / coup beforehand and often deflected Maria’s questions and concerns regarding his strategies. It looks like Augustin failed to understand his customers or to do research on his target customers and their habits as it relates to shopping/retail. For instance, when Maria raises a concern that “this generation is so obsessed with the internet” and that she “doubts they’ll ever set foot in stores again”, Augistin replies that they are replicating the experience online and that he “thinks” physical stores will continue to be important to people. This is a very dangerous and big assumption to make, especially given how much money, effort, and time the company has put into renovating many of Emilia’s stores. Augistin even mentions that “Every Emilia store was to be redone over the next four years” – That is a lot of money, commitment and time that could easily go down the drain if research isn’t done on the need for such an big move beforehand. It’s just like building a product and spending lots of money and hours doing so only to realize that this is not what people want (and that time and money can’t be just gained back immediately). By doing more research into his target customers and their habits and desires, he could have found an alternative, potentially less expensive and more effective, approach to revitalizing Emilia and considered other options to solving Emilia’s customer and sales issue instead of diving right in. He is also very arrogant and not humble enough to really consider other options that could “jeopardize” his coup. Here, we do not have strong opinions loosely held – they are very strongly held to the point that he is blindsided by his goal and missions. Further, by being more humble and doing more user research, he could have realized how demeaning his plan was and how it made customers feel. No one wants to feel condescended, misunderstood, or offended, especially as a customer.
I would advise him to take a step back from everything and re-evaluate. He seems very lost and blindsided (blind optimism) and I think he should really think about what’s best for the company now and long-term. As Nico mentioned, his four-year plan can’t work if there’s no company in four years. I would consider him to stop his efforts so far and to re-evaluate. He already knows that the revenue is not likely to increase over the holidays. It’s late but perhaps not too late to do user research and to pivot now (feelings of sunken cost fallacy is real but it looks like investors believe in him which is great).
