I spend an inordinate amount of time following NFL offseason news.
One story that was building in plain sight was the kerfuffle around the NFLPA’s annual survey and report card of team ownership.
Apparently, NFL owners did not appreciate being criticized and won a grievance to keep the results confidential. But everyone knew the results would leak. And they did. The episode is another reminder of how one-sided the relationship is between the players’ union and the league.
The survey and report cards are one of the few tools players have to exert any meaningful leverage.
So what does that have to do with you?
Well, while retailer-vendor relationships are not directly comparable, they are often similarly imbalanced.
At the same time, there are clear reasons for retailer-vendor relationships to evolve into something more constructive.
This time, I’m going to use the home improvement sector as the backdrop to this discussion. I have become curious about this segment of retail.
And in my research along with discussions with category experts, I discovered that retailer-vendor relationships are often more transactional than collaborative.
Which is precisely the case in the apparel business too!
Moreover, I’m also told that vendors are frequently hungry for insight that goes beyond surface-level sales data. In some cases, they even pay for access to the annual store managers’ meetings held by Home Depot and Lowe’s. This is not just to pitch products, but to gain face time with field leaders to really understand what is happening on the front lines.
That’s exactly the type of information that can go a long way in helping vendors.
This is a dynamic that we explored in depth in our book, The Material Life. There, we discuss how (at least in apparel) a lack of trust between retailer and vendor prevents the sharing of information. In turn, this means hindering collaboration, strategic direction and innovation.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the Home Depots of the world suddenly crank the faucet and flood vendors with first-party data. That is neither practical nor realistic.
The better path is to create a framework with defined boundaries where vendors and merchants work together to curate current assortments and shape future ones. Even access to a data portal may mean little without the right guidance from the merchant team. More importantly, such constructs are where new ideas and real innovation can be surfaced.
From our point of view, such a framework is very much derived from our “field of play” approach which we have used in other contexts. We present an example below.
The purpose here is to define the boundaries of the relationship. We chose our four boundaries in this example arbitrarily; you might want something completely different. Also, not all data would need to be shared. Only the information that is relevant within the field will be rolled out.
This is the basis upon which relationships can grow in both trust and strength. Any violation of the boundaries means the field gets shut down. If there is success, perhaps the field gets bigger or the identity of the boundaries become more consequential.
I would offer this “field of play” drawing to both the NFL and the NFLPA.
But they already have a literal field of play to work with.
