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Consumers today have more disposable income, are more confident, are happy to shop across channels, and are more selective — but less loyal. He pointed out that while the state of the consumer is much more positive than one might pick up from the daily news cycle, people have retained the smart shopping habits that they developed in harder times.
The ad industry is out of touch with the globalization, digitalization and democratization of its audience says Pepsico exec Brad Jakeman. Mr. Jakeman.
The world is changing quickly, and no one, not even high end fashion brands, is immune to those changes. The new era, what I’ve started to call the “second phase of disruption” is tied to two things: the ascendancy of Millennials into their highest spending years, and fast fashion retailers’ ability to bring products to market four times faster than their competitors.
“We have heard anecdotal stories of ‘procurement types’ as gatekeepers (to the software acquisition process). It was bad enough when retailers started using ‘procurement types’ to source merchandise, but to select technology? Seriously? Are any of you really doing this?”
Last week I attended eTail West, an eCommerce conference that has been held for years in Palm Springs. It has been several years since I attended eTail West — not since 2009, to be exact. To say that the show has expanded significantly since then is an understatement. But even the attendees who have continuously…
Dynamic pricing has come up quite a bit lately, driven in part by interest into whether the practice was used extensively during the holiday season, and a continued interest in whether it will be a big deal in 2016.
My take: at least half the hype around dynamic pricing comes from a misplaced definition of what dynamic pricing actually is.
So apparently I have a thing I do. I didn’t do it consciously, but I guess I have done it regularly: to declare the theme of the year in retail. I went back and looked at all of the articles I’ve written, and this trend started in 2009, when I declared it “the year of the customer”. Here are the rest of the years.
I got my start in the software world through supply chain software, specifically supply chain execution management. And quickly found myself at ground zero of Walmart’s RFID mandate. As the entire technology industry groped around, trying to figure out how to really implement RFID in the supply chain, it quickly became clear that there was a huge gap between the constant pinging signals coming from RFID tags, and the execution systems that needed to ultimately capture the meaning of those signals.
Ever since RSR’s webinar on the NRF Big Show, one topic keeps cropping up over and over: self service in stores. To talk about this topic in any meaningful way, you first need to keep in mind that the need for self service in stores differs significantly by retail vertical. No one expects (or truly, wants) an employee following them around while filling a grocery basket, but they very much expect employee assistance when shopping for high end clothing, to put it in extreme terms. Will self service go away for convenience shopping in stores? Probably not. Will it invade high-end experiences? Probably not. But in between is a whole lot of ground.
In the book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras spoke about the “genius of AND”. The basic idea is that companies who define their capabilities or their markets as exclusionary choices are limiting themselves. The real power comes when companies embrace the contradiction inherent in what otherwise might be two opposing concepts.