Mary: Queen of Charity Shops TV show: what can we learn?

While needing to remember that many business shows on TV (like “The Apprentice” and “Dragon’s Den”) are really more reality show and entertainment shows than actually telling or teaching us about business or marketing, I cannot help love many of them.

Though I do wonder how much I and other viewers are actually learning about business and marketing.

My 2 favourite shows in this genre are "Hotel Inspector" (helping failing hotels turnaround) and "Mary Portas: Queen of Shops" (turning round failing shops).

A recent short 3 part series had Mary Portas trying to breathe life into the worst performing Save The Children charity shop in the UK ina show called “Mary: Queen of Charity Shops”. While very entertaining, I did find it taught or made me wonder about a few key things:

You need to be very strong minded and very determined to take on entrenched old dears
But on a more serious note, she battles to get a team of volunteers aged from 60 to well into their 80s who have been volunteering for up to 20 years to make change happen. The learning is that, no matter how good your visions, your ideas, your plans are, you need to get the team on board. Or get a new team who will sometimes! Without that you are doomed. Getting people to accept change and do things differently, without them seeing what is in it for them is a big issue.

You need to get better than damp pants, dirty bras and used junk
The problem she faced was people donate junk that is largely unsalable, and the 30 per cent or so of donations that are tend to very low value. The "supply chain" and "suppliers" are shoddy, erratic and appalling. People going into the charity shops know that. The learning is that it is all about getting better product from better suppliers more reliable on quality. You need to have a great and reliable supply chain and great products to succeed.

You can't sell for over five pounds
The volunteers argued no shopper will ever spend over five pounds in the channel. Mary argued you could train shoppers through better products to reinvent the way they think about your offer. But only through dramatic change in service, products and the “packaging/ look” of the store so they rethink you and your offer. I am not so sure you can train consumers away from price expectations and habits, but if you have any hope you need to look and offer something very different from what they have “learnt” about you. You need a new product and shopper experience.

Did you see the show? Any thoughts?

watch a video of Mary Portas speaking on ITV "This Morning" about the show: click here to watch on YouTube or on the blog posting