Category — Retail
Walmart Life
Marketing chief Stephen Quinn taps into Walmart’s past to shape its future. When you get right down to it, everything — and nothing — has changed about Walmart in the 50 years since Sam Walton built his first store. Stephen Quinn, Walmart’s marketing chief, appears determined to keep it that way.
“What we’re really selling to people,” says Stephen, “is that they can count on us for their everyday needs at the lowest price. Keeping that interesting is tricky because it will be the same promise three years from now.”
It was also the same promise 50 years ago, which is why Stephen drew on something Sam Walton said a long time ago to arrive at Walmart’s modern-day tagline: “Save Money. Live Better.”
“Sam Walton talked about how Walmart would help the world save money and have a better life,” says Stephen. “We had reams of research and tested all these different taglines and then we just looked at what he had said and thought, hey, that’s pretty good.”
Living up to that deeply rooted principle is very much at the heart of Walmart’s past, present and future. Stephen is convinced that Walmart’s growth depends on “keeping that promise to more people.”
Such fidelity to the past requires changing with the times, too. It means navigating the vagaries of today’s fragile economy while pioneering the frontiers of social media and the newly empowered shopper.
These and other realities has Walmart launching a Facebook page for each of its more than 3,500 US stores, as well as tweaking the role of its famous greeters and communicating “low prices” in new ways.
It also has Walmart realigning its merchandising and marketing operations, so it can better integrate the two and keep the focus where Sam Walton always said it must be — on the shopper … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
The Hub Top 20
Growth and diversity power the next great phase of shopper-marketing excellence. By Dan Flint. Welcome to the 2012 and fifth annual Hub Top 12 report on shopper marketing excellence that, thanks to industry growth, has now become the Hub Top 20! We want to thank all who participated in the survey this year and especially those who took the time to add insightful comments.
The University of Tennessee is pleased to continue the tradition of tracking shopper-marketing excellence, initiated and created by Hoyt & Company and The Hub Magazine in 2008. The intent of this study is to allow brand marketers and retailers to evaluate working relationships with agencies on 13 criteria and to let agencies evaluate working relationships with brand marketers on 13 criteria, as well.
This year we had 990 usable surveys — up 224 from 766 in 2011, or up 29 percent! That’s great! This speaks to the attention being given to shopper marketing in the industry. Brand marketers and retailers named 153 agencies while agencies named 144 different brand marketers … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Test & Learn
Packaged-goods brands must change their culture to capitalize on digital. By Seth Diamond. Much to the contrary of current belief, there is little connection between shopper influence and “liking” a brand on Facebook. Even when you entice with a coupon, or throw in a branded, exclusive piece of swag to “buy” a like, the consumer experience pretty much stops there. Frankly, it’s unknown whether any of the tactics like Foursquare, Pinterest or QR codes are really moving your business.
If that’s the case, why invest in them without understanding if and how they will enhance purchase behavior? Culturally, packaged-goods brands need to change how they approach digital marketing. Facebook is not a magic bullet for all of your marketing experiences; it’s tougher than that. Chasing a new digital tool just because a competitor is using it doesn’t work either — not without insights, analysis and an understanding of how that tool is used by shoppers.
To fully embrace digital marketing, packaged-goods marketers need to change their organization’s culture to one of test and learn. Secondly, they must position digital tools to be a solution to a program and let the metrics guide them to those marketing approaches that have earned the right to scale up for success … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Divining Insights
Let your creative people take a bath in data. By Beth Ann Kaminknow. Data, and its sister, analytics, are the new sexy in advertising and marketing. Every agency and company now has an in-house data and analytics practice. It is blasphemy even to think of making any business move without the aid of sifting through mounds of data, given its ability to lead to better (more accurate) decision-making.
In today’s technologically-advanced environment, the ability to capture and report data is much more accessible. With increased data-processing capabilities, we can build more complex models that can churn out more complex data. Both descriptive and predictive analytics can now do an exceptional job of uncovering the answers to “who, what, where, when, how and why.”
So, with all of this data at our fingertips, you would also expect that we are becoming smarter, more efficient, and productive marketers. Perhaps in some instances this is true, but in many cases we have yet to optimize a data-driven creative process. We are overflowing with data, but there is a critical missing link … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Play Ball!
E-commerce is threatening in-store, but it ain’t over ’til it’s over. By Ken Barnett. The start of the baseball season always seems to bring with it the sense of the possible. Whatever happened last year is past and we have the luxury of a clean slate.
As we envision how this year’s slate will be written for the consumer packaged-goods industry, and particularly supermarkets, another baseball memory comes to mind: Yogi Berra. Who better to call on than the master of absurdity to help us fix a system that is, quite simply, broken?
“You can observe a lot by watching.” — Yogi Berra
Around 20 years ago, supermarkets were at the top of their game. They were the dominant outlet for food with 100 percent penetration and 83 percent share. Households were averaging close to 110 trips to supermarkets per year. Retailers had recently wrested information control from suppliers when scanners achieved 70 percent of ACV in 1988 … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Blue Tree
Former Hollywood actress Phoebe Cates casts herself as a friendly, neighborhood shopkeeper. As a little girl, Phoebe Cates loved playing store. She loved all of it: Setting everything up, pretending to wrap packages and making her toy cash-register ring.
Her first few jobs, as a teenager, were in retail. But Phoebe’s path soon took a different turn, first as a cover model for Seventeen and then as an actress in Hollywood films including Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins. She met her future husband, actor Kevin Kline, at an audition. He landed a part and she didn’t, but they got married and had two kids. Phoebe gave up acting and became a full-time mom.
When her kids began to fly on their own, Phoebe knew she wanted to work again, but didn’t want to go back to acting. The idea of opening a store just kept coming back to her and she kept thinking, "wouldn’t it be great?" Phoebe’s neighborhood, Carnegie Hill on New York’s Upper East Side, needed nothing so much as a neighborhood shop … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Trading Places
Retail is where cyberspace meets the marketplace. A discussion featuring Kensuke Suwa of Uniqlo, Jon Abt of Abt Electronics, Christophe Garnier of Totsy, Stephen Hoch of the Wharton School and Tina Manikas of Draftfcb.
How do you see the future of retail?
Kensuke Suwa: The gap between what is sold in the store and what is sold online is getting smaller and smaller. More people are becoming accustomed to operating the smartphone and also e-commerce. So, the ratio of sales coming out of e-commerce is becoming bigger and bigger.
For Uniqlo, this means the online experience has to improve, because you can’t try on clothes online the way you can in the store. That is the biggest challenge for us. What is the best way to buy something without touching it? That is more difficult compared to what we do at the store level. It is a big part of the future of retail … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Geek or Genius?
A human touch is at the heart of the future of retail. By Beth Ann Kaminkow. Who needs stores anymore when you can get exactly what you need, at the cheapest price, with a flexible return policy, delivered right to your front door? Or, delivered to your office — if you are trying to avoid conspicuous consumption on the home front.
The answer to this rhetorical question resides in the future transformation of the retail experience. This is not just an issue brought on by the emergence and success (finally!) of online retail. Retail as we knew it has been in decline for the better part of this decade.
A large factor of that has to do with the steady decline of the in-store experience and customer service. Even if there were no good alternative, the industry is in a state of flux, pain, identity crisis (add your own description here) … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
I, Shopper
Technology can create intimacy in today’s retail experience. By Michael Raleigh. Do you remember the 2004 sci-fi movie I, Robot? The Isaac Asimov-inspired blockbuster starred Will Smith and depicted a future world where sentient robots co-existed with humans.
Despite having the ability to reason and make choices, the robots that populated this (ultimately dystopian) world were driven by only three rules of robotics that governed every aspect of their existence — and guided all of the decisions that they made.
Once upon a time, it may have been nearly as easy for retailers to deliver an in-store experience to customers based solely on a handful of simple rules, much like those used to tame the androids in I, Robot. After all, retailers of yore only had to cater to traditional customer archetypes, and then deliver the appropriate shopping experience accordingly … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Smart Stores
Retailers need to be just as intelligent as their shoppers. By Sharon Love. In recent years, many companies have positioned their products as “smart” — smartphones, smart foods, smart sneakers, smart apartments, and on and on. It’s a word everyone understands and most people respond to favorably.
Smart is also a good word to describe today’s shoppers and how they behave when they are shopping. Smart shoppers are telling retailers to give them what they want, where they want it, when they want it and at a price they’re willing to pay. Quality cannot suffer but neither can value.
Smart shoppers use multiple channels seamlessly, and if a product, retailer or website disappoints them, they quickly move on to a different one. They’re constantly in touch with one another — telephoning, texting, emailing, gathering on social networks and blogs — sharing their likes, dislikes, and shopper experiences at a speed most of us couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Half Full
Shopper marketing needs better tools to execute bigger ideas. By David Diamond. Shopper marketing is inherently a powerful idea. By attempting to unify the needs of retailers with the needs of the vendors whose products these retailers sell, shopper marketing works to serve two masters and drive two agendas. When well executed, shopper marketing can achieve this ambitious agenda, because it tailors its programs for specific brands, specific retailers and, sometimes, even specific stores.
But because shopper marketing is always both inherently serving two masters and because it tends to be executed on a somewhat micro basis, execution is even more difficult and important to shopper marketing than it is to traditional marketing programs.
To deliver on its promise, shopper marketing needs to be executed cleanly, consistently and excellently. Without this executional quality, shopper- marketing programs are destined to, at a minimum, underperform their potential. Often, poor execution can also make shopper-marketing programs outright failures … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Retailandia
Fight digital fatigue in the aisles and along the path. By Dustin Lehner and Jennifer Butcher. In the smart and quirky cable television show, Portlandia, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein perform a sketch in which Fred gets caught in a technology loop — he moves from photos of puppies on his laptop to text messages on his phone, then there’s the Netflix queue to reorder, another text, email, DVR, Facebook, Tumblr and back through each again.
He can’t help himself. Carrie tries to save Fred by showing him a picture of himself in high school, before he even owned a computer. It’s a happier, simpler time, full of personal connection. Of course, this fails. He’s pulled into the loop and shuts down, literally, like a machine. It’s a sharp example of how we consume media, our growing addictions to technology, the lack of relevance in content and how it all can contribute to fatigue in the digital world … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Brand Apptitude
Five tips for connecting with a branded app. By Richard Swain. Much research is being published around technology and emotional engagement, specifically with smartphones. For consumers, the smartphone is a ubiquitous companion that provides a gateway to the digital universe. For brands, it’s an opportunity to get closer to those consumers than ever before by way of branded apps.
However, the decision to invest in a branded app should not be taken lightly. According to research published by Deloitte in 2011, 80 percent of major consumer and health-care apps are downloaded fewer than 1,000 times. What, then, is the key to ensuring that your branded app is successful?
Obviously, it should be personalized and easy to use, as well as work seamlessly across all devices. In addition, here are five basic tips that can help your app not only get downloaded, but be used time and again, building a stronger relationship with your customers … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Bangalore Calling
Customer service is retail’s greatest missed opportunity. By Spencer L. Hapoienu. Why would anyone who sold products to millions of people through the hazmat-like comfort of a 30-second commercial want to actually engage a consumer one-to-one?
In the days depicted by Mad Men, brand managers and marketing directors enjoyed the lush life: without ever having to meet a single consumer, they would oversee production of big-idea television advertising and print campaigns for products that reached millions of them.
The years between the real Mad Men and 30 Rock have not been kind to mass marketing. One could argue that all marketing men (and women) are mad today because all they talk about is the individual — both retailer and consumer. The new sweet spot is one-to-one … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Virtual Virtues
Every day is Cyber Monday for packaged-goods brands. By Jason Katz and Angela Edwards. Sales jumped 18 percent on Cyber Monday, according to a USA Today headline this past holiday season. Clearly, online shopping has arrived and it’s here to stay. Purchasing books and electronics online is now the norm and recent trends suggest that packaged-goods categories, with compound annual growth rates at 20 percent, are the next to explode online.
E-commerce is dramatically changing the face of retailing for consumer goods. Pure-play e-tailers like Amazon have pushed beyond books and electronics and placed a strategic priority on developing their packaged-goods offerings. In doing so, they are moving beyond pushing for the occasional purchase of bigger-ticket items and gift-buying to capture stock-up and fill-in trips for household items.
Amazon has capitalized on its first-mover advantage, featuring strong consumer value-propositions to gain market share and lock-in loyalty. In many packaged-goods categories, Amazon has more than 50 percent market share of US online sales. This poses a significant threat to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, especially for “center store” items … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Must-Have!
Develop offerings so innovative that competitors are irrelevant. By David Aaker. The only way to grow, with rare exceptions, is to develop offerings so innovative that they create customer “must-haves” that define new subcategories for which competitors are not relevant. The goal is to win not by having a brand preferred over competitors but because competitors were not considered. You strive not to be the best but the only.
Winning this brand-relevance war involves engaging in substantial or transformational innovation to change what customers buy, to manage perceptions of the resulting new subcategory, and to build barriers to prevent competitors from overcoming their visibility and credibility barriers.
Creating a marketplace with weak or nonexistent competition has a huge potential payoff. It is Economics 101, the ticket to real growth in sales and profits. Consider the Chrysler minivan introduced in 1982 as the Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan, which sold 200,000 during its first year, 12.5 million since then and enjoyed 16 years with no viable competitors. It literally carried Chrysler for nearly two decades … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Pivot Point: Catch the Virus
The retail store can be a platform larger than itself. Have you ever wondered why it is that the Boston area has more than its fair share of homemade ice-cream shops? It’s no great mystery to me. As a Tufts student, I watched in amazement as my brethren stood in freezing-cold February temperatures to get inside Steve’s ice-cream shop in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Others (okay, myself included) stomped their way through snowdrifts to get to nearby Joey’s, which was serving up its own brand of high-fat magic. Steve’s and Joey’s basically introduced an ice-cream culture that then enrobed the region, and later the nation.
I thought of the viral effect of Steve’s and Joey’s while chatting with Phoebe Cates, a former model and Hollywood actress who now runs a boutique called Blue Tree on New York’s Upper East Side … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
