Forget trivia, focus on what matters

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I start with some shocking news: Waterstone’s is reverting to its original logo in the Baskerville serif font and dropping its apostrophe in order to reflect a truer and confident picture of the business.

Managing director James Daunt commented that “Waterstone’s is an iconic brand deserving a capital W and a font that reflects authority and confidence. It also reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which while created by one [Tim Waterstone], is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers”.

My first reaction was to think this was a spoof but having checked the website, no. While there is a logic in the digital age of communication when punctuation and English grammar generally seem increasingly redundant and old fashioned, it would appear likely to upset the traditional bookshop customer more than any other group.

Thus the chairman of the Apostrophe Society, John Richards (no relation) commented on Radio 4 “it’s just plain wrong.

It’s grammatically incorrect. If Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s can get it right then why can’t Waterstone’s ? You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slipshod with English”.

At a time when the future viability of any chain of bookshops is questionable and, in the UK, Waterstone’s is almost the last man standing, the expression that comes to mind is fiddling while Rome burns.

This all brings me inevitably to the other ‘shock’ of 2012 to date – Tesco. I remember being bemused by reading that Phil Clarke had marked his first day in charge at Tesco with a tweet to tell the world which cufflinks he’d chosen to wear. I would link dropping the apostrophe and the cufflinks tweet as an illustration of the dangers of the seductive powers of the digital age.

Of course regular readers of my column will know that Tesco’s news was not really a shock – the seriousness of the trading issues had been signposted by the dramatic change in marketing strategy with the Price Drop initiative, while earlier last year I had written that Tesco reminded me of the position that Marks & Spencerfound itself in towards the end of the 1990s – too big and too complacent with an increasingly blurred market position.

A major element of the strategy I agreed with Sir Philip Green for his first abortive bid for M&S was to shrink the space by about 2 million sq. ft. Happily, such retail giants have enormous strengths although changing direction can take many years and, in a food retailing industry which is a volume game geared to maximising promotional support and discounts from suppliers, it will be a painful process.

My priorities would be to improve the food quality and range, utilise underperforming space in the 212 Extra stores (41% of space) as ‘dark’ stores to power online growth (home delivery and click-and-collect), acquire a credible clothing brand, and ‘kill’ the US debacle.

And finally, as I pleaded last year, please, please change the annoying advertising – every little bit helps.