As the growth of smartphone adoption continues to impact the way consumers find and buy products, a new guide from the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) was released yesterday to offer strategies to help retailers assimilate to the new mobile commerce landscape.

The M-Commerce Guide is the first output of MEF’s M-Commerce initiative led by an expert committee of members and written through consultation with leading industry players to engage, educate and evolve the potential of mobile. The guide was designed to help retailers better understand how to leverage the mobile device to drive customer acquisition, retention and most importantly, conversion.

As the mobile device increasingly becomes a tool to facilitate m-commerce, the ways to engage consumers with discovery tools also increases, the report said. But it requires more than just translating existing channels of communication, such as trying to replicate the Internet storefront on the mobile deice — it requires a dedicated and well thought out strategy to maximize the potential of m-commerce.

By Tom Ryan, Managing Editor, RetailWire

Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from one of RetailWire’s recent online discussions. Each business morning on RetailWire.com, retail industry execs get plugged in to the latest news and issues with key insights from a "BrainTrust" panel of retail industry experts.

The Walt Disney Co. last week opened the first of its 300 planned revamped Disney Stores in Montebello, CA. Inspired by Apple Inc.'s design team, the store features multimedia technology and interactive storytelling with a goal of keeping shoppers entertained for 30 minutes.

Among the features of the 4,800 square foot store:

• A Pixar RIDEMAKERZ area that allows people to assemble and accessorize their favorite Cars character. A wide selection of rims, side pipes, hoods scoops, blown engines, spoilers and other accessories enables customer to customize the cars to their liking;
• A child-sized Disney Princess Castle including a "Magic Mirror," in which a Disney princess can be summoned with a wave of the wand to tell stories to children.

Retailers are tasked with the ever-present challenge to give customers what they want, when they want it — and even perhaps offer customers things they didn’t even know they might want. Targeted recommendations have been helping one one retailer accomplish just that, creating an automated way to offer customers extended options with a “helping hand” while shopping online.

Ranked #197 on the Internet Retailer 500, Motorcycle Superstore is an online motorcycle outfitter with more than $60 million in annual online sales. The e-tailer sought to replace its existing in-house product recommendation system with a more scalable solution. The company tapped RichRelevance to implement its RichRecs solution, which includes extensive merchandiser controls.

“We wanted to find an effective way to engage our customer with relevant products that really fit their needs as motorcycle enthusiasts,” said Greg Anderson, Head of E-Commerce, Motorcycle Superstore. “We were doing our own recommendations on the site — but it wasn’t a cost effective way for us to display recommendations — and we wanted to find a way to interact with customers on a more individual basis as opposed to setting global rule sets for product groups.”

By Bruno Aziza, Co-Author, “Drive Business Performance: Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution”

The economic crisis has reminded business leaders that developing a great strategy is not enough. They need to execute that strategy within an organization that empowers them to make the right decisions, better and faster. Doing so requires systems that can adjust to market conditions. But most importantly, it requires that your organization’s culture is geared for performance.

I recently had the honor to talk about Developing a Culture of Performance in Retail with Henrik Amsinck, Lego Group Chief Information Officer and VP.  Lego’s experience is a great story and Henrik embodies the spirit that drives the performance of this amazing company.

Every Lego employee I have talked to shares a strong passion for Lego, their products, and their customers. And we all know some of their customers can be passionate, too. Even over the phone, it’s almost as if I can ”hear” the sparkle in their eyes when they talk about the company. Lego has a strong culture of performance and it shows. In the first half of 2009 the company reported sales gains of more than 20% and outpaced the competition. Read a great coverage of Lego’s story published by London’s Daily Telegraph this past December here.