Category — Shopper Marketing
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
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
Sandbox Bliss
Advertising and shopper agencies must learn to play by new rules. By Chris Hoyt. To help provide its readers with direction in 2012 and beyond, The Hub Magazine ran a survey last December to ferret out what product marketers and their agencies think will be the key functions and skill sets that agencies will need to help their clients achieve their objectives over the next five years.
The premise: As product marketers increase their focus on path-to-purchase marketing, the functions and expectations of agencies have shifted — for both advertising and shopper-marketing agencies. Given this, the survey focused on developing answers to the following:
What do current practitioners think the respective roles of these agencies should be in terms of planning, media development and promotion development in a path-to-purchase environment? What obstacles are seen for each type of agency in performing these functions? What are the areas of potential conflict — i.e., in which segment of the path-to-purchase is the battle occurring? How do these practitioners — again, defined as both product marketers and agencies — envision the ideal working relationship? … 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
With a Smile
How good is the customer service at the retail establishments you frequent? An executive summary of a Hub survey. If you are searching for excellence in the retail experience, you likely will lose your way in the customer-service department. According to our latest reader survey, only four out of 23 retailers were rated as “excellent” in customer service by more than 50 percent of respondents. Fourteen retailers languished in single or low double-digits.
We simply asked readers to rate the customer service at each retailer as “excellent,” “good,” “fair” or “poor,” and invited comments. Zappos was most highly rated as “excellent” (68%), followed by Trader Joe’s (58%), LL Bean (58%) and the Apple store (54%). Happy, friendly, knowledgeable and accessible employees were frequently cited as making the difference for these retailers … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Cool News
Bi-Rite Experience, Pier 1 Comeback and Line Science. When Sam Mogannam re-designed websites for his market and creamery, he made it about the experience, not transactions. Sam’s enterprise, Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, is “something of an institution” there and lines out the door are not unusual.
“Bi-Rite is a neighborhood market, feeding our community with love, passion and integrity,” says Sam. So, above all else, Sam wanted his website to be as much like the in-store experience as possible.
“This meant showing the bounty of the produce, prepared foods, and delicious grocery products we offer, for that wow feeling of surprise our guests have each time they come to the market,” he says … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
The Hub 47
The Hub Magazine, Vol. 8, Issue 47. The entire issue of Mar/Apr 2012 edition of The Hub Magazine, centered on retail, featuring a cover story interview with Phoebe Cates of Blue Tree.
Also featuring a roundtable on innovation, with Kensuke Suwa of Uniqlo, Jon Abt of Abt Electronics, Christophe Garnier of Totsy, Stephen Hoch of the Wharton School, Tina Manikas of Draftfcb and 13 other articles … download pdf >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Shop Now!
The retail experience must be wherever shoppers want it to be. By Ann Carr. Technology is exploding into the world of retail, bringing with it a stunningly different approach. In this world, a store is no longer a place but a customized experience, requiring as much or as little interaction as the shopper chooses. The store is ubiquitous — on the shopper’s desktop, in her mailbox, on her phone, in a subway platform, in a kiosk by the gas pump — every bit as much as on the street corner in the shopper’s neighborhood.
Retailers today, all around the world, recognize that winning a larger share of the shopper’s wallet will only come to those who innovate and integrate — who make it easy for shoppers to shop now! … read >>
January 1, 2012 Comments
Do The Math
The future belongs to those who measure the total brand experience. By Al Wittemen. Each and every one of us has endured our share of pain over the last several years. In all my years in marketing, it’s safe to say I’ve never experienced anything quite like the last five. It now appears that the worst of the economic calamity is behind us, but it would be foolish to think that the pain is over.
In fact, in many ways, it is just beginning. A recent IBM survey of 1,700 chief marketing officers across 64 countries spelled out the sources of our discomfort. It identified some of the biggest challenges facing chief marketing officers, each of which is a pervasive and universal game changer … read >>
January 1, 2012 Comments
The Demand Cycle
Technology re-defines the traditional path-to-purchase. By Mitch Blum and Jeff Williams. The current era of consumer empowerment is a wonderful thing — if you’re a consumer. From a marketer’s standpoint, things have gotten exponentially more complex and challenging. Time-shifting, customization, social integration, personalization and real-time customer service are all examples of how consumers are demanding more from brands while simultaneously expecting to pay less.
Underneath this consumer empowerment is one consistent catalyst: technology. Digital innovations have trained consumers to expect exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and all at the best value. Woe betide the brand that fails to deliver on the consumer’s heightened expectations. They’ll be punished with a scathing blog post, a negative review, a mocking hashtag and perhaps even a YouTube video about a broken guitar that receives more than 11 million views … read >>
January 1, 2012 Comments
DSM 3.0
A new study shows shopper technology has come of age. By Seth Diamond and Brian Cohen. The magic of early-stage technology is amazing to witness, but its application is more akin to mystery.
Potential users who get early exposure to these miracles of advancement go through the predictable litany of mental questions: "Wow, how did they do that? … How does it work? … Wait, what does it do again?"
Way back in 2009, when we really started tracking Digital Shopper-Marketing (DSM) in earnest, that was a pretty good approximation for how shoppers viewed this market — lots of cool, but experimental apps, widgets and interactive in-store hardware, but few real tools that could actually make the shopping experience faster, cheaper or better …
read >>
January 1, 2012 Comments
The Hub Prize
Procter & Gamble’s Tide Dry Cleaners tops the inaugural Hub Prize competition. First, our congratulations to Procter & Gamble’s FutureWorks Division and its partners, DeVries Public Relations and Summit Marketing, winners of the 2011 Ultimate Hub Prize — the "best of the best" in retail excellence and recipient of the Hub Cup — for Tide Dry Cleaners.
It was a close call, with two other candidates — The Disney Store and U by Kotex — rounding out the top three. The Disney Store certainly deserves accolades for its hi-tech re-imagining of itself as “the best 30 minutes of a child’s day.” Kimberly-Clark and its agency, JWT/OgilvyAction, are equally praise-worthy for a daring initiative that turned keen insights into a remarkable point-of-difference at retail …
read >>
November 1, 2011 Comments
