‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’ is the title of a song by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn from the 1922 Broadway revue, Make it Snappy. It became a major hit in 1923 reaching number one on the charts for five weeks. It is said that the catchphrase was coined by Jimmy Costas, a Greek American green grocer. While there are many renditions, click here to listen to one by Louis Prima. The lyrics are easy to hear. This song is significant for retailers in at least two respects. While the greengroc
cer hasn’t got any bananas, he hastens to tell the customer what he does have in stock.
He has string beans and onions, cabrillas and scallions, all kinds of fruit, an old fashioned tomato, a Long Island potato and so the list goes on.
It conjures up images of the customer who wanted bananas buying a whole heap of other vegetables and fruits. But of course the catchphrase is in the title.
Instead of saying “No! We have no bananas”, Jimmy Costas turns this into a positive.
How often does one go into a store to be told “no – we don’t have any” and that is that. You walk away and look elsewhere.
The salesperson makes no effort to sell you something else. But another lesson we can learn from the song is positive speak.
Especially in these difficult times, it is easy to get downhearted and depressed at our retail performance.
It starts at the top. The CEO must be bullish or else he/she will probably be seeking opportunities outside the organisation.
Having committed to the budget no matter how tough times are, subordinates are at best cajoled and at worst coerced to deliver.
This travels downstream with amazing efficiency, stopping at the poor sales assistant.
Morale suffers and so do sales and the downward spiral is heading just there – downhill. The opposite should happen.
Now is the time for team and morale building. It never ceases to amaze me how well the simplest of incentives work. Even a graph or two in the canteen.
And of course, positive speak. The word down is replaced by “un up”.
For example “how were sales yesterday?” The answer is either “up” if they are up, or “un up” if they are not.
This may sound silly, but if everything can be approached from a positive angle, the positivity becomes infectious.
It may be necessary to manipulate a target or two so that those graphs in the canteen create some winners.
Of course there is no such thing as a loser in positive speak.
There are only winners and unwinners. And so the language evolves. No decrease, but rather an unincrease. No negative, but rather unpositive.
An example of how this works. “How is business going?” “Yes, we have no increase in sales, we have an unincrease, but we are not being unpositive about it because we refuse to be unwinners.
And although sales are un up, we are doing the following so that they are not un up tomorrow.”
Try it. It works!
Stuart Bennie is a retail consultant at Impact Retailing www.impactretailing.com.au and can be contacted at stuart@impactretailing.com.au or 0414 631 702
