Cognitive Retail
New-School Analytics: Knowing Your Customers’ Communities
Personalization drives nearly every marketing and sales initiative nowadays. Businesses try to duplicate in the digital realm the face-to-face interactions that small-town grocers have with their customers. Advanced data collection and analytics help fill the void of actual conversation to make sense of all kinds of customer information: historical data from past purchases, behavioral data […]
Breaking Down Forecasting: The Power of Bias
When I first started my career, I was a demand planner for a large consumer products company. I had all these fancy algorithms (in Lotus 123, mind you) back when Excel was in its infancy, and before a lot of companies were leveraging big systems like JDA and SAP and Oracle. On the first Monday […]
UK Shell Station Puts 5-Second Checkout to the Test
Self-checkouts are supposed to save customers time, but the dreaded warning message ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’ can quickly turn a shopping trip into an extreme test of patience. And for retailers, testing customers’ patience can mean lost revenue with a study by Omnico finding that the average time UK shoppers, for example, wait […]
What Do Generation Z Shoppers Really Want?
Most retailers acknowledge the impact of the large millennial generation — a group far bigger than their parents, the baby boomers — but brands are quickly turning their attention to Generation Z. These young buyers have an estimated 2.6 billion members globally and their parents claim they influence 93 percent of household spending. To look […]
Leveraging the Blockchain from Transactions to Returns
The holiday season may be over, but retailers can’t let their guards down yet. From returns and exchanges, to everyday measures like ensuring the quality of the products they sell, competitive pricing and managing supply and demand, retailers are shining a spotlight this coming year on their supply chains. Retail stores know merchandise returns and […]
Breaking Down This Year’s Black Friday
The clock is ticking. It’s the countdown to Black Friday, an American tradition that kicks off the holiday shopping season. While the promotions begin earlier each year, Black Friday still remains the day to cash in on the biggest deals. For example, last year more than 101 million people ventured to stores on Black Friday, […]
Creating An In-Store Retail Revival
Though several major retailers, from Toys “R” Us to Aeropostale, have filed for bankruptcy protection this year and others have closed thousands of stores, all seemingly at the hands of online commerce, reports of the death of retail are greatly exaggerated. In fact, research shows that the industry is booming and that stores still matter. […]
The Holiday is Looking Green…Are Retailers Ready?
It’s that time of year again. The 2017 holiday season is looming large and speculation is in full swing as to how the next eight weeks will play out for retailers and consumers alike. There’s good news to report. Based on my annual Holiday Forecast, we predict the 2017 season will grow nearly three percent […]
Connecting Innovations to Support the New Retail Experience
As customers walk into retail stores today some of the first things they notice are interactive kiosks and screens offering convenience and fast new ways to find and pay for items. These electronic displays serve a very useful, customer-specific purpose, but there’s much more to this story than what meets the eye. Recent data from the U.S. […]
The In-Store Retail Imperative: A Return to Relationships
30 years ago the owner of the corner store knew each customer by name, what kind of gifts husbands wanted for their wives and what kinds of items families picked up each week. Over time things have changed. Retail shops merged into multi-category super markets and department stores and ownership consolidated into larger, and larger […]