Effective Strategies for Motivating Millennial Retail Teams

I was a retail consultant in a store, teaching a manager how to create a display. We made a simple four-tier display using navy and yellow as the primary colors. 

I explained the basics of great visual merchandising to the retail employees: why height captures our interest, the power of a couple of colors, and the need to make it a logical display and one different item. The manager got it and created a couple, too.

The next day, I came in, and everything had been taken apart and reassembled. There were the four cherry tumblers next to a plaque about cats. The solid blue mugs had been combined with all the blue mugs, from navy to periwinkle to baby blue. The risers were gone, and everything was on one level.

Four hours of visual merchandising efforts were wasted.

The manager was gone, so I asked the assistant what had happened. "Oh we moved things around, we always like to change it."
"Yes," I said, "I can see that. Did she tell you why she did it that way?"
"I just liked my way better."

I was boiling, as I'm sure you would be if you had spent time creating a killer window, display, or marketing piece and that had been trashed.

Don't worry. I didn't blow up on her...

But it led me to think about how Millennials and Gen Y are different from my generation. "I have an opinion, and it is valid" seems to be a recurrent theme from an early age.

Participation, equality ... but that has to be based on a shared benchmark first.

My friend Melodie sent me a presentation prepared by interns at NASA. It is a pdf of a presentation presented to NASA about what NASA needs to do to get Gen-Y interested in the space program.

It is an excellent window into how Millennials, born around 1976, think and shows how they approach things very differently from us baby boomers. 

Retail managers and store owners must avoid criticizing Millennials' creativity and interest. As for the assistant manager, I realized it would have been better to teach all the employees the steps to merchandising rather than just one.

After the displays were redone, the assistant should have been asked to leave them so that their effect could be evaluated. In hindsight, we should have also included her in the re-set.

Millennials bring a lot to the table if we train them first. If they don't get trained, they'll do their own thing, resulting in a retail display that doesn't sell or worse...

Interested in other resources to help sell your retail merchandise with a staff of different generations?