Curating Community: Selecting your partners
Part 2 of 3
By Nathan Froese
In my last article, I looked at how businesses can consciously build their communities by keeping their goals and values central throughout the hiring, training, rewarding, and modelling processes.
Now, I ask: how can retailers extend that same sense of community to the brands on their shelves and the brokers and suppliers who help put them there?
Here are four steps retailers can engage in with suppliers—a term I use to collectively refer to all of the aforementioned players—to develop lasting, meaningful partnerships.
Choice
Sometimes, it seems there is really no choice but to maintain purely <transactional partnerships>; you buy from whomever has the product you need at the right asking price. But I believe that developing relational partnerships with some suppliers is a critical feature of a long-term relationship grounded in mutual benefit.
If a transactional partnership is concerned with the trade of commodities, a relational partnership is concerned with the trade of stories, history, ideas, and future success.
Retailers can identify suppliers that align strongly with their core values and work to transition from transactional partnerships to relational ones.
Collaboration
Engaging in transparent exploration with a supplier can highlight the shared or complementary organizational goals you may have. A clear-eyed and honest look at the visions of both parties— and an examination of the areas where those visions converge and where they possibly conflict —can help gain a complete and fulsome understanding of organizational goals. This can create clarity that is absent in purely transactional partnerships.
Reward
It may sound like I am tiptoeing into some ethical grey area here, but when I refer to the term reward, I mean to convey the sense of earned acknowledgment through time and attention as opposed to financial rewards.
Relational partnerships might result in beneficial opportunities such as special promotional programs, bespoke marketing avenues, or educational opportunities with staff.
As long as both organizations (and the customer) benefit as a whole, rather than any one individual, these opportunities can create a unique experience not replicated in the rest of market, something rare and advantageous.
Action
Like modelling desired behaviours when interacting with staff, your actions must match your words in a relational partnership with suppliers. This is integrity on display, and it is the most genuine and meaningful way to strengthen the partnership.
Creating community
In my last article, I explored whether communities—specifically among staff—are spontaneous and organic or intentional and engineered. Now, I turn the question to suppliers: in my experience, the answer is yes to both.
Communities can be serendipitous and ephemeral, dissipating as naturally and quickly as they are formed. But they can also be intentional creations with long-term goals that depend on shared rules that each member understands and follows.
The most effective communities often exist at the intersection of serendipity and strategy. Common values and interests are the initial attractors that draw people together into natural communities, and intentional actions ensure that these communities grow and endure. Suppliers are an extension of your community, so the most important ones should know that you value them in the same way you value your employees and customers.