With retailers shifting their marketing investments into new media such as online, email, and mobile platforms, Marketing Metrics will report on the best practices and metrics available for each of these emerging mediums.
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Written by Amanda Ferrante
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Thursday, 04 March 2010 12:32 |
 As the retail industry shows “signs of life” and retailers look for new ways to acquire and retain customers, advertising innovation is front and center. During this week’s RAMA Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference & Expo in San Francisco, retailers were honored for their top-notch concepts and consumer outreach.
Consistent with the retail industry’s hot buttons, several new categories were introduced this year, including Social Commerce, Mobile Apps and Rich Media Online Advertising and Promotion.
Sears was awarded the newly added Peter Glen Cause Marketing Award, which is reserved for winners that have given back to the community or environment in a unique way. Sears earned prestige for its partnership with Rebuilding Together, under which the “Heroes at Home” program was created to provide repairs and modifications to the homes of wounded soldiers and other military families in need. Since its inception in 2007, Sears has seen letters from military families all over the country giving thanks.
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Wednesday, 24 February 2010 09:47 |
By Doron Levy, President, Captus Business Consulting
 You may not be aware of this, but there is a good chance that someone has googled you. You may have been googled a few times today already. Someone may even be googling you right now. If you own a retail or customer service oriented business, those chances increase dramatically. Greater access to the internet, high speed smartphones and social media has changed the way consumers shop on the internet. Your potential customers could be making decisions about you without ever setting foot in your store.
The term googling sounds painful. It is actually a slang verb that refers to performing internet searches via Google or other search engines. If someone googles me, they are searching for Doron Levy or Captus Business Consulting through a search engine such as a Google. No power tools or medical devices involved in the process and relatively painless for the subject involved. Now, the results that come back are a different story. Those results could prove to be painful if you don’t check to see what people are saying about you. Have you googled yourself lately?
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Thursday, 11 February 2010 10:15 |
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By Robert Passikoff, Ph.D., Founder & President, Brand Keys, Inc.
 Niels Bohr once noted that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” but then he didn’t have access to predictive loyalty metrics. Happily, Brand Keys does. And they measure the direction and velocity of consumer values 12 to 18 months in advance of the marketplace and are uncannily accurate in terms of consumer behavior, especially when it comes to spending money.
According to our 2010 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index®, for all 518 brands in the 71 categories tracked, attributes relating to “brand” and the degree to which they affect customer loyalty, engagement and spending have increased significantly. This year’s findings indicate that a real brand can provide meaningful differentiation and act as a surrogate for value, but — and this is critical — that value is being carefully examined, category-by-category, and purchase-by-purchase.
In terms of retail trends and consumer spending the leverage of brand has reached its highest level of consequence since the 1960s. Having examined this year’s consumer and category assessments, we offer up some spending trends that will have direct consequences to the success – or failure – of this year’s retail marketing efforts.
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Thursday, 11 February 2010 10:13 |
By Mark Price, Managing Partner of M Squared Group
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. This article was presented on RetailWire as a summary of a current article from the Cultivating Your Customers blog.
Who would have wanted to be in Starbucks' shoes a year ago? McDonald's had launched low priced alternatives that had huge trial, the economy had stalled and consumers were balking at spending $4 per drink, even at a familiar place. Howard Schultz announced that the company had "lost its way," becoming too standard and corporate and less entrepreneurial -- less like a local coffee shop. The chain then closed stores on a broad scale for the first time.
Fast forward a year later. Starbucks blows its Q4 numbers out of the water. Get this -- sales were up 4% to $2.7 billion. Comparable store sales were up 4%, which was driven by both increases in store traffic and average ticket price. If that wasn't enough, the company's margins were up by 8.5% to 13%. As a result, the company earned 32 cents in the quarter, up from nine cents in the year-ago quarter. Starbucks now expects to launch 100 new locations in the U.S., and another 200 worldwide.
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Written by Amanda Ferrante
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Thursday, 04 February 2010 13:12 |
 Focused on providing new strategies to optimize the value of IT in 2010, IDC Retail Insights unveiled its Top 10 Predictions for the retail industry.
The report explores several hot retail topics, including social commerce, mobility and how demand intelligence is driving inventory management. Leslie Hand, Research Director at IDC Retail Insights, expanded on these predictions with an exclusive interview for Retail TouchPoints.
Retail TouchPoints: Centered on a hot button in retail right now, one of the predictions compares traditional retailers to the Titanic, and the approaching iceberg is social commerce. How can retailers prepare for this? Do you anticipate a change to favor online retailers? Retail giants with bigger customer bases?
Leslie Hand: Social networks are an unprecedented opportunity for merchants – with over 1.3 billion existing accounts on the top-10 social networking sites.
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