Pat Bolland: Well we turn from one Wolf to another. What do Best Buy, Gillette, Canadian Tire and Molson’s all have in common? They all are making news today. Our next guest says there is an ongoing thread out there in consumer products that kind of ties them all together. Rick Wolfe is the president of PostStone Consulting. Rick, great to see you.

Rick Wolfe: Great to be back, Pat.

PB: What is this thread that you’re seeing amongst all these consumer products companies?

RW: Some call it customer-centricity, some call it customer experience, but it’s a whole new and more intense focus on the customer. And in the case of a retailer like Best Buy, a superior ability to deliver something powerful based on that focus.

PB: It’s amazing, Best Buy is saying they are going to open up 90 new stores. They could possibly be cannibalizing themselves by offering so much service, couldn’t they?

RW: Well, when you understand your customer as well as they do, you learn exactly where to put a store, exactly what kind of staff to put in the store. It’s not just a question of where you put the store and the products you put in the store, but who are the people you put in the store and how will you empower them, so that they can tell the difference between you and me and be able to give me the kind of experience I’m looking for and you the kind of experience you are looking for in the store.

PB: Canadian spin to this, Canadian Tire, are they doing it well?

RW: Not as well as Best Buy, but they are moving in the right direction. Their numbers are good. They were at death’s door a decade ago. Critically, they were always out of stock. And that was the first thing that they had to figure out. They had to figure out how to keep the store in stock. Once they did that, they developed a strategy. They are working on the customer experience in the store. They are using technology, they are using staff. They understand, they are better than most people at understanding the relationship between your financial services, through their credit card, and what they offer the customer in the store. They’re moving in the right direction.

PB: OK, so then the flip side is the less direct connection to the customer. And I’m thinking of Gillette or Molson Coors.

RW: Well let’s start with Molson Coors, because the beer business is really getting hit from pretty much every direction. Demographics are against them. You know, not you but me, I’m getting older. And I’m not alone. And as we get older, beer consumption goes down. Competitors from around the world are getting smarter. So there is a hit on the size of the market, there is a hit on new competition. Prices are dropping in the beer business.

It used to be in a growing market that all you had to focus on was share. And you got that share by having more exciting brand images and more exciting advertising. That is insufficient today.

You move over to another part of the beverage world and look at Coke and Pepsi, they have a different position and they’ve made good use of their different position. They have taken their core lessons of distribution and brand from their original products and they are offering more and more beverages. They are doing a better job of getting the product to market. They are stripping costs out of the system.

When we read today in the Globe and Mail that the cost of a basket of groceries has dropped substantially in the last decade, that would include the beverages that Coke and Pepsi produce – without impairing their profits. The better variety and the better value that you get in soft drinks makes for a better customer experience, in partnership with the retailer.

PB: What about somebody like a Gillette, though? I mean they just have, like, a six-bladed razor as the next answer.

RW: A six-bladed razor. Where to from here? Well the first thing you need to say about Gillette is, I think it was 60 billion dollars (actual price, $57 billion) that Procter and Gamble paid for Gillette. So you’ve got to imagine that a company as disciplined as P&G did their thinking very, very carefully before they made that spend.

In Gillette, they see a company with focused products, as opposed to a mass product like Tide. Products with great margins, great opportunity for innovation. Procter and Gamble is a believer in innovation. In a product like Swiffer, you see them doing innovation that falls between the lines.

What they added to Gillette is distribution, an ability to launch this six-bladed razor and get it out everywhere in one day. Plus, let’s get back to the customer experience. Think of how dull a razor used to be. Today a razor is electric blue with orange accents. Plus the six blades to make shaving more fun.

PB: And we’ve all got to shave. Rick, great to have you here.