We study the market in the old-fashioned way – by meeting staff and customers face to face

Straight-talking, common sense from the front line of management

Q During your career you must have seen a massive increase in the information at your fingertips about stock and sales and your customers’ buying behaviour. Computers now help to define your target market and tailor digital marketing to reflect the tastes of individual consumers. How does your marketing department use this research and analysis to make major decisions?

A Prepare for a shock! We don’t have a marketing department, we don’t use consultants and haven’t used market research since 1991. That was the year we unplugged the electronic point of sale statistics that most retail head offices use to run their businesses.

We installed our first computer in 1960, and in the first few years received plenty of promises from IT companies who guaranteed cost savings, sales increases and detailed information on our target market.

I learnt a lot from pioneer retailers who embraced the computer world, including Mothercare, Sainsbury’s and Next. Computer-generated retail engineering changed the way shops did business, with loyalty cards supplying marketing executives with a bucketful of data to plug into their algorithms. But we at Timpson prefer to study the market in the oldfashioned way.

I don’t need to analyse customers by age, sex or socioeconomic group, because we provide our services to everybody. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that our success depends on doing a good job, provided by kind, expert and friendly colleagues.

So why bother paying good money to discover whether we are serving more posh people than hard-working families? They will all return if they get a good service, especially if our colleagues impress with a random act of kindness. Satisfied customers talk to their friends and personal recommendation is the best form of advertising.

We don’t need market researchers to analyse our customers – we do the job ourselves through regular shop visits. My son James, our chief executive, is out and about up to three times a week. On a typical day we visit about 15 shops, chat to a few customers and meet up to 25 colleagues. We could view the branch performance on a computer screen without leaving the office but being out there in the shop brings the numbers to life. The best way to judge our performance in the centre of Burnley is to go to Burnley and see for yourself.

Our visits are usually unannounced, but once we’ve been to the first shop of the day, word soon spreads to the rest of the area. We are not there to carry out an inspection, the aim is to have a conversation. We ask colleagues their views on the current state of trade and whether any obstacles are getting in their way, then the conversation usually moves on to ask colleagues if they are happy and get support from their area team.

On a recent day out, I discussed a colleague’s holiday in Corsica, another’s recovery from chemotherapy, a daughter who is training for the Olympic Games and a colleague’s dog that sadly was put down the previous week. Understanding the business means knowing about the people who serve your customers.

It is like living your life with the cast of Coronation Street or The Archers

– you need to know what is happening in the lives of the key characters to keep up with the plot. Spreadsheets get nowhere near to the information provided by talking to colleagues during a day visiting shops.

I must have been to Burnley at least 30 times over the last 45 years, so I can visualise the shops as they are now and as they were decades ago. Our digital database gives me more information than ever before, but regular visits and first-hand knowledge of people working in our shops let me base my judgements on facts as well as figures, while regularly taking soundings that measure the health of our business.

It’s a management style that worked for my grandfather and it still works really well for us. I can’t help thinking that it would have made a massive difference to sub-postmasters in the Post Office who were so cruelly misjudged by a management team stuck in head office.

Sir John Timpson is chairman of the high-street services provider Timpson. Send him a question at askjohn@telegraph.co.uk