When I was a little girl buying new shoes was always an event. We went to a local shoe shop, the one that advertised the credentials of their ‘specially trained fitters’ in the window. We patiently waited our turn for the magic that was about to happen. This usually involved a matronly woman and what was essentially a metal ruler in the crude shape of a shoe. The green plastic strap that she threaded around your instep to measure the width of your foot was important of course. This was science and not art, after all.

And yet when we think about the job of the sales assistant back then, we understand that everything she did was an art. The art of understanding her customers enough to know that a ritual was required. The art of building trust. The art of reassuring a man, who as one of eleven children, had walked out of school for the last time at the age of thirteen without shoes on his feet, that spending half a week’s wages on an impossibly small amount of black patent leather was the right thing to do—if you wanted to give your little girl the world.

It felt good to be able to sit and wait patiently for the small stack of green boxes to appear from behind the curtain, to have the assistant carefully buckle the shoes up and to ‘take a little walk up and down’ to make sure that they weren’t slipping.

We bought more than something to cover small feet with those worn green notes.

While the whole world has turned on its head in the forty years between then a now, some things haven’t changed at all and it’s those things that as business owners we really need to pay attention to. Experts, technologists and futurists will tell you that you need to be agile, to be ready to move with the times and embrace a multi-screen world that is changing right before your eyes.

The platforms and tactics we use to reach our customers in a digital world keep changing, but the strategy for touching human beings who make decisions with their hearts and not their heads remains the same.

Image by Ray Creation.