Growth & Jobs | Vendors gear up for JN Mall Experience with expert tips on marketing, growth

AHEAD OF the second staging of the JN Mall Pop-up Shopping Experience this Black Friday weekend, the JN Group, in collaboration with the Creative Factory, hosted a dynamic workshop to prepare vendors for the upcoming event.

The workshop, conducted on November 16 at the Creative Factory on Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston, combined expert-led presentations with hands-on activities, providing the vendors with strategies and essential tools in marketing and product management to help them set the stage for a successful and profitable retail event.

“The activities you undertake in your business play a crucial role in guiding the steps of your product’s life cycle,” stressed a key presenter, Josette Smith-Scott, head of product and brand management at the JN Group, while noting that every product goes through the stages of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

“It is important to research and understand the factors that influence customer behaviour at each stage. For instance, a product newly introduced to the market will get a different reaction from customers compared with a product that is mature in the market or beginning to decline,” she added.

The session also highlighted innovative strategies to attract customers, including leveraging JN’s robust rewards programme and cutting-edge point-of-sale machines, all designed to enhance shopper engagement.

The vendors also received insights into other key products and services, including insurance and property management, which they can take advantage of to enhance their financial growth and ensure business security.

“It is very important that you plan and see down the line so you continue to grow, and you don’t stay stagnant,” Smith-Scott shared with the vendors, who are mostly local micro and small businesses and artisans primarily operating online.

To support the vendors’ growth, the workshop also included practical advice on content strategy and editing from the Creative Factory team led by founder Jason McNeish. The participants had the opportunity to use equipment at the factory to create their own content for marketing.

Using the marketing funnel concept, McNeish also taught the vendors how to strategically plan to meet their targets, highlighting how the funnel tracks the journey from the broad audience reached to the target audience engaged, and finally, to the actual number of customers who make a purchase.

“At the end of the JN Mall experience, your goal is to make sales, but you also want to get loyal customers who will return to buy again and also refer others. However, before customers make a purchase, they first need to know about your product. They should have the chance to try it, but before they even consider trying it, they must be interested, and for that to happen, they need to be aware that it exists. That’s the essence of the marketing funnel,” he said.

“In marketing, we typically use a 10 per cent [conversion rate] as a guide. What that means is, if you aim to make 50 sales, you’ll need 500 people to try your product, 5,000 to show interest, and 50,000 to be aware of it in the first place.”

The three-day JN Mall Pop-up Shopping Experience runs from November 29 to December 1 in the parking lot of the JN Bank Chief Office in Half-Way Tree. It will feature some 50 vendors offering a wide range of products.