M. Ruão (Fnac) at ESADE: 'We want to focus on customer experience and same-day delivery'

‘We will continue to enhance our customer experience, so that customers can come to the store, listen to music, read and charge their mobile’, said Marcos Ruão, general manager of Fnac Spain, at today’s session of Matins ESADE, sponsored by EY (formerly, Ernst & Young), in collaboration with La Vanguardia. ‘Some 15% of all floor space in our stores is dedicated to comfort, and we aim to continue in that vein’, he explained.

The executive also noted Fnac’s commitment to same-day delivery, a trend it is currently pursuing in Madrid, where it has a warehouse, and which it plans to roll out in other cities through its brick-and-mortar stores. ‘For instance, we could do it in Murcia, where we have a store, something that online pure players cannot do’, he said, alluding to direct competitors, such as Amazon.

New formats

The general manager of Fnac Spain also highlighted the company’s decision to open stores with new formats. ‘Until December 2014, all stores were very large; now, with omnichannel retailing, that’s no longer the case. Omnichannel retailing has allowed us to open smaller establishments, such as our 40 m² shop at Universidad Europea’, he explained. ‘In France,’ he continued, ‘we’ve launched the Fnac Connect concept, consisting of stores with an area of about 100 m², a trend we would like to export here.’

‘We’d also like to expand our offer into other areas, such as sport technology’, Ruão said. ‘We wanted an area dedicated to sports, only from a technological standpoint. We launched the project in Barcelona, and we have supplemented it with the online sale of accessories for different sports.’

With regard to the main subject of the talk, ominchannel retailing and online strategy, he explained that Fnac’s online channels receive more than 90 million visits, three times as many as all of its brick-and-mortar stores combined, and yet even so the company’s in-store sales are higher. ‘There are 800,000 Fnac members: 71% are exclusively in-store, 10% are exclusively online, and 29% are multichannel. This latter type is the most reliable and shops the most; these customers are harder to attract, but also much better’, he explained at Matins ESADE.

‘Today, we are investing more in responsive sites than in apps, and that is a general trend in retail; although loyalty is better with apps, the trend is towards responsive sites’, he said. ‘Besides’, he added, ‘all retailers are working on omnichannel retailing now: us, Media Markt, Desigual, etc., as well as the online pure players, and we have a lot of work to do.’

Expansion and transformation

When asked about the company’s geographical expansion and the Latin American market, the general manager of Fnac Spain answered, ‘In terms of online business, we have looked at whether we can expand into Latin America from Spain, but for now we want to prioritise the Spanish domestic market, as it has great potential.’ ‘For the time being,’ he continued, ‘we have a specific area geared more towards foreign customers in cities that receive a lot of tourism, such as Barcelona, and at certain stores.’

The company, which is in the midst of a transformation despite maintaining the Fnac brand, is ‘also carrying out an omnichannel transformation at the organizational level’, according to Ruão.  ‘All of the functional departments, such as Sales, Marketing, Logistics, etc., are required to think in terms of all channels; it is a very powerful transformation that we began in October last year, and it is also essential’, he concluded.