Training tests survival plans - Dothan Eagle

Preparing for a life-or-death situation can be a grim truth, but installation officials said it’s a necessary reality that people need to face.

Organizations and offices on Fort Rucker participated in Tactical Tuesday to go over and implement hands-on training in a scenario Tuesday as if an active shooter had entered their building, and Deena Jones, plans, analysis and integration office director, said the training was beneficial and necessary for her office.

“What I wanted us to do was talk about some of the defensive measures and actions that we would take within our office,” she said. “This gives us an opportunity to get into a real situation of scenarios to see what we would do.”

Jones said that their office has had an emergency action plan for active shooter scenarios that has been revised since it moved to Bldg. 5700, but it has yet to have an opportunity to play the plans out.

“We want to validate that the emergency action plan will hit the high-level defensive measures that we need,” she said. “What’s paramount is safety and survival. We don’t like to talk about survival, but that’s the environment we could potentially be in.”

The office came together in the morning and began by first reviewing the materials and guidelines provided by the Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security.

Russ English, plans specialist for PAIO, facilitated the training and began by going over a broad view of the scenario if the incident happened elsewhere on the installation. They talked about how they would be notified, what they would do and reviewed evacuation routes for their side of the building.

In the event the shooter was in their own building, English reviewed with the staff the three actions of how to respond: evacuate, hide out or attack.

English said the course of action to take was situation dependent, and in the event that his office needed to evacuate, he wanted to make sure that each member of the staff knew exactly where the exits were, which routes to take and where their specific rendezvous point is.

Jones said it was important for all members of her staff to meet at the specific rendezvous point to make sure they account for everyone.

One specific point that English made was that they were advised not to pull the fire alarm in the evacuation process. Pulling the fire alarm could potentially put more people in harms way and cause mass confusion, he said.

Evacuating would be the course of action to take if it was known that the shooter was in the building. If the shooter was closer to their location in the building, the correct action response would be to hide.

During the exercise, staff members looked for potential hiding spots within their offices that they could find shelter and hopefully avoid detection, and even practiced barricading themselves in a room against an intruder. They went over different steps to take while hiding, like turning off cell phone ringers, locking doors and turning off lights.

As a final course of action, they went over the last-case scenario, which would involve the shooter entering their office and the staff having to attack the shooter as a last resort.

English said they should use any type of improvised weapon that they can from letter openers and screwdrivers to pencils and hot coffee. They discussed that they should only attack the shooter, however, if they are in imminent danger, and emphasized that in that moment it would truly be a life-or-death situation and that people should fight for their lives.

The office also reviewed and discussed what to expect when law enforcement arrives on the scene and stressed that everyone should comply with officers’ demands.

“The first responders aren’t there to assist the injured,” said English. “They are there to get the aggressor.”

Kristina Davis, lead management and program analyst at PAIO, said walking through the plans made it easier to reinforce the lessons learned.

“I think in emergency situations people can recite the steps, but you really have to take the actions to do the steps,” she said. “ Actually getting up and walking around and practicing just helps put that in your mind, and you’d be able to draw on that during a real emergency.”

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Retail survival will require both consumer and product centricity - Retail Customer Experience (blog)

The term "consumer-centric" has been bandied about in retail a lot recently. What does it really mean to be a consumer centric retailer? Obviously, it means to be focused on a consumer's point of view and their interests. Yet, retail has historically focused on merchandising and selling products when consumers come to the store or website.

To survive, retailers must profitably sell products. But today, omni-channel is the new retail normal. It’s not a question of either/or. To be successful long term retailers must essentially become schizophrenic and master the art and science of both consumer and product centricity.

Sometimes you are just "gob smacked" with a breakthrough idea

While traveling Europe this past week, I once again ran into the term "gob smacked." It is not a common expression in the West or in Asia. But, there is no better term to describe something that literally stops you in your tracks and makes you take notice. In writing this post I was reminded of a past blog where I used the term "gob smacked" in relation to getting people's attention through visualization.

When I ran across Don Peppers visualization of critical success factors to compete successfully, well, I was completely gob smacked by his elegant simplicity! So many retailers and vendors are fixated on just category management and SKU profitability. Yet consumer studies show that the world is quickly changing to the empowered consumer and the need to establish relationship with them. Peppers artfully argues that successful companies need to do both simultaneously.

Peppers Model explaining the duplicity of consumer + product centricity

Central to Peppers model is the juxtaposition of consumer and product dimensions:

"So first we should visualize a "marketing space" defined by the customer needs a business can satisfy (the vertical dimension) and by the number of customers it has (the horizontal dimension). Then we can map customer centricity and product centricity on the same diagram."

The value of this approach is that it inherently defines the core competencies of strategically competing in today's omni-channel world. Success is not choosing one over the other; it is being able to both manage and measure product sales and consumer relationships.

Don Peppers Model for explaining the synergy of consumer and product centricity

Product centricity … essentials and pitfalls

In my work with retailers and consumer product manufacturers, I experience many clinging exclusively to product centric marketing of the past. You can see it in the typical metrics used to measure the business and success criteria. Product centricity is reflected in scorecards focused on:

Unit sales volumes

Product mix sold

Customers reached and markets penetrated

Year over year growth of product sales revenue

Market share by category

There is nothing inherently wrong with a product centric focus. In optimizing their business, retailers need to analyze the profitability generated by each product (GMROII). They also need to analyze assortment mix and category management to optimize the total revenue and profit per sq. meter of space. Whether it be a bricks and mortar store or ecommerce, the retailer must be selling the right mix of products or the consumer simply has no reason to come. And, the most successful retailers are constantly engaged in product and assortment analytics to improve both the offering and the profit of selling through to consumers coming to make a purchase.

Consumer centricity … what share of a consumer's life are you participating in?

Unlike products and merchandising, consumers are experiential. They have memories about their experience in physical and virtual stores. Through social media they share their experiences with everyone they know!

Simply put, consumer centricity is about "share of wallet," not market share. Successful retailers today are focused on "life time value" – how many needs they can satisfy for each consumer, especially the most loyal ones Product centricity is about acquiring market share through the sum of product purchases. Success in consumer centricity is achieved by acquiring consumer relationships and optimizing them over time. It is not about "market basket" just today, but share of household value and use over time.

In the sage words of Don Peppers …

A product-centric competitor focuses on one product at a time and tries to sell that product to as many customers as possible.

A customer-centric competitor focuses on one customer at a time and tries to sell that customer as many products as possible.

It's not a matter of either/or, but how to do both well simultaneously

The results of Amazon and other successful e-tailers are not a fluke. They have done a masterful job of taking market share through optimizing their "long tail" assortment of millions of SKUs. They are the epitome of how to sell more things to consumers. Yet, at the same time, Amazon has created a superior experience focused on the consumer relationship. In addition to making it very easy to buy today, Amazon is a master in the art of following up and appealing to consumer needs and passions. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a core strategy and competency.

Many of the big box retailers were born in a bricks and mortar heritage of product centric selling. Some of the biggest retailers in financial trouble continue to execute category management strategies of rearranging products, assortments and fixtures almost like "deck chairs on the Titanic". The absolute telling metric is declining footfall traffic indicating that many consumers are not returning. If retailers only focus on selling products profitably, today they are missing opportunities to create and fulfill solutions and selling to the same customers tomorrow.

Consumer centric will be a success factor for omni-channel retailing

Inherently, bricks and mortar retailers have been steeped in a tradition of product centric retailing. For that matter, most consumer products companies have built their business on selling products to the masses. If market share or volume drops, the classic response has been to run more promotions and/or reduce price. In many categories this race to the bottom on price has climaxed with barely acceptable margins to break even.

In the new normal of omni-channel, survival will be highly dependent upon:

Making an acceptable profit on the products you sell today

Maximizing relationships to draw back consumers again and again to purchase

Don Peppers perhaps summarizes the duality required for success in his visual metaphors:

Tracking a customer relationship is like watching a movie in progress, while tracking your product sales involves taking snapshots of the business situation at different times.

The successful omni-channel retailers do both simultaneously extremely well!

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Glowsticks: The ultimate survival tool - allmediascotland.com (press release)

GLOW sticks are most commonly associated with parties and discos, but what many may not know is that glowsticks are incredibly versatile and have many different uses and applications. Their robustness and ability to provide light without the need for batteries or an external power source allows them to be advantageous in a number of different scenarios.

Although glowsticks are believed to be a simple toy, this could not be further from the truth. When the chemicals within the glow stick react, this creates the phenomenon also known as chemiluminescence which takes place when two different chemicals react and create light as a by product..

Originally created by the military, the plan was to create a light source that would be perfect for emergency scenarios. So if you happen to find yourself in a situation where gas may be present and any spark or fire would cause an explosion, you will wish you had a glow stick at hand. Ever since the creation of the glowstick, it has became not only the number one party essential, but also the survivalists dream tool.

Glowsticks are light, can function through high winds and are 100 per cent waterproof. When you combine this with their glow time that is anywhere between six to twelve hours, depending on the glowstick, it’s easy to understand why they are not to be underestimated.

Of course, glowsticks are not just suitable for natural disasters. If you experience a flat tyre or your car breaks down on the motorway, it’s vital to let the traffic know of your presence. A simple glowstick can provide much greater exposure and reliability than a torch.

And because Glowsticks give off a brilliantly bright and vibrant glow, this allows hikers and any situation where having a light on your clothes may be helpful in any event of falling or becoming trapped. This is not limited to cyclists and joggers.

At Glowsticks.co.uk you can find a number of products that not only make use of chemiluminescence, but also photoluminescence and electroluminescence, giving the UK access to products that will not only increase their safety, but also increase their party options.

All the products available at glowsticks.co.uk undertake rigorous safety checks and are fully UK certified and suitable for ages 3+, unless stated otherwise.

About glowsticks.co.uk:
Glowsticks.co.uk are the UK’s leading provider of glowsticks, glow necklaces, glow bracelets and flashing novelties. Glowsticks.co.uk combining both first rate customer service and the latest innovations. A company that is at the forefront of providing new and exciting products based on current and new technology that involves chemiluminescence, photoluminescence and electroluminescence.

Traditionally serving the events, fund-raising and party markets with glowsticks, glow necklaces and UV make-up and party products.

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