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Rules of Engagement

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Cotton’s 24-Hour Runway Show and Push-Pull 2.0

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The retail universe has long-since expanded beyond the confines of physical floor space and time. Online retail outlets have made shopping a 24-hour option for brands with or without brick-and-mortar complements. Brand marketing, too, is now a brave new digital world in which presence and consumer engagement are essential cogs in the machine. To succeed, there must be a synchronicity of disparate channels that encompass traditional advertising, digital advertising, social media and most importantly, the often-unpredictable consumer.

Hyper-dimensional marketing, or Push-Pull 2.0, plucks multiple messaging strings in the hopes of striking a chord with consumers. In traditional push-and-pull strategy, push referred to offering incentives to the supply chain, and consumer marketing was the pull. Today, Facebook, Twitter and the like, have shifted the strategic emphasis squarely on the consumer; push is now defined as brand outreach to the consumer, and pull is their outreach to the brand. The objective is to enthusiastically engage the co

nsumer in the brand experience; to have them participate, promote, and eventually purchase. [Read more...]

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Posted April 24, 2013

Finding the Best Fit: The Modern Woman’s Solution

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PrintMe-Ality™ Market Insights from Unique Solutions

Women are clearly leading the way to the future. With more and more women holding significant positions in today’s workforce, it’s no secret that professional parity continues to improve. According to a recent Pew Research report, women made up almost half of the workforce in 2009. Furthermore, in terms of education, women earn more bachelor’s (57.2%), master’s (60.4%), and doctoral degrees (52.3%) than men, and just fewer than half (49.0%) of all first professional degrees. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010)

It’s also no secret that today’s “Wonder Woman” wears many hats for many different roles: working professional, supportive partner, caregiver, and primary shopper—just to name a few.

Today’s Modern Woman is a multi-tasking, working mother. According to the Department for Professional Employees (2008), 71.2% of women in the overall labor force had children under the age of 18. Many of these women are single mothers as well. Even in households with two caregivers, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2012) found that housework duties still fall predominantly to women. Moreover, 74.9% of women identified themselves as the primary shoppers for their households in 2011, according to the annual MRI Survey of the American Consumer.

But it’s not all on equal footing at home. Despite overcoming obstacles to achieve professional equality with their male counterparts, domestic traditions for women such as household shopping still persists in today’s society. [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

Sleight of Hand

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The Touch, the Feel — but Not the Performance — of Cotton

The recent ruling by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to fine four retailers, including Amazon.com and Macy’s, for mislabeling textiles made from bamboo rayon as simply “bamboo,” underscores the seriousness with which the government is enforcing truth and clarity in labeling. Some onus, however, is also on consumers, some of whom are largely unaware of recent fiber substitutions in traditionally cotton-dominant apparel—a shift that can impact the care and thus, perceived value, of their purchases.

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Click to Enlarge

The ubiquity of cotton in apparel and home textiles has made it the fiber to beat, or at least the one to imitate. Manufacturers of synthetic fibers and some wood pulp rayons have become adept at duplicating the tactile softness long associated with cotton. To consumers, cotton is a known quantity, especially where the feel, or hand, and laundering are concerned. Many consumers have discovered, to their dismay, a sleight of hand in the form of fiber substitutions in traditionally cotton-rich apparel. [Read more...]

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Posted February 11, 2013

How Can You Get There if You Can’t See It?

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The Robin Report

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What performance measures and goal-setting metrics are you currently using? How do you know they accurately reflect individual store performance? Are they helping to create a high-performance culture? We are immersed in a data-driven environment and increasingly dependent on metrics and tools to measure and monitor our businesses. But most of us are willing to admit that transforming data into valuable insights is an ongoing challenge.

In the December Robin Report, I introduced a new customer-centered metric—Return-On-Visit (ROV)—that enables retailers to uncover hidden opportunities to drive incremental sales. Before we take a deeper dive into how ROV and other new metrics can provide better insights, let’s take a quick look at the limitations of traditional performance measures and goal setting.

Do Your Metrics Provide a Complete Picture of Performance?

There is no shortage of measurement tools and management reports. The era of “big data” has clearly arrived on the retail scene, principally fueled by:

  • Advanced POS systems that capture and disseminate vast amounts of transactional-level information.
  • The development of data-mining techniques that pinpoint the buying habits of customers.
  • Easily created custom reports at all levels of the organization that may or may not lead the end user to make the right decisions. [Read more...]
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Posted February 11, 2013

Well-Wrapped at Retail: Savvy Consumers Meet Smart Retailing This Holiday

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Consumers may be wary this holiday season, but there are bright spots ahead. According to the National Retail Federation, overall holiday spending is projected to increase 4.1% this year, from $563 billion in 2011 to $586 billion in 2012. Technological advances have made it easy for consumers to shop from anywhere, at any time, and this year they are taking note; the NRF also projects that online holiday sales will grow 12% from 2011 to 2012, reaching $92 to $96 billion.

On average, holiday shoppers plan to spend approximately $568 on gifts this season, up 14% from $497 in 2011, according to the Cotton Incorporated Lifestyle Monitor™ Survey.

Cotton Chart I

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“What consumers give year to year doesn’t necessarily change much – but the way they’re making those purchases has changed tremendously over the last decade,” says Kim Kitchings, Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Program Metrics, Cotton Incorporated. “The rise of e-commerce and its ease of use, and now the increase in smartphone usage as a means to make purchases, have enabled consumers to shop wherever, whenever.” This is certainly a boon to the more than half (52%) of consumers who say they find holiday gift shopping to be stressful, according to Monitor data.

That stress may be due in part to procrastination; only about a third of consumers (32%) start holiday gift shopping in November, while an equal percentage (18%) start shopping in October and December. Just 14% of consumers say they buy holiday gifts throughout the year, Monitor data reveal.

Savvy shoppers plan to rely on a variety of mechanisms to ensure they get the best price; from doing more comparison shopping (45%), looking for deals on days like Black Friday (45%), to shopping around to find the best deals (43%), according to Monitor data. [Read more...]

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Posted December 9, 2012

Getting a Return on Post-Holiday Returns

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As a merchant, you’ve watched holiday shopping seasons come and go, and you’re well aware that in the last few years, consumer spending behavior has been through radical changes. It’s been a slow recovery since the precipitous drop in holiday spending in 2008. The excessive pre-holiday stocking of inventory and concomitant mad spending seem to be bygones.

Savvy retailer that you are, you’ve become very smart at balancing inventory with sales, and you’ve planned inventory very carefully this season. You’ve made well-informed estimates of consumers demand for the upcoming holiday season. According to industry analysts, this year’s second quarter saw the slowest inventory growth in the U.S. since 2009, and in light of that, you probably don’t have huge concerns about overstocking. Nevertheless, when you placed those orders into your suppliers’ line months ago, the world was a different place.

Which gets us to this point  one thing that hasn’t changed, and it’s almost as certain as death and taxes, is that there will still be a flurry of post-holiday returns and exchanges coming back through your doors come December 26th. How will you handle them?

As you’ve kept your stock lean and mean this year, there’s already a much more highly specialized collection of merchandise coming back than in previous years. While in prior years, these returns have always stretched your customer service goodwill to its limits, this year, and in this uncertain economy, you’re a little concerned about how to handle returned merchandise. [Read more...]

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Posted December 9, 2012

The New Age of Discovery

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The Robin ReportOne commodity retailers never seem to run out of is problems. We’ve seen no shortage of business challenges in recent years, as brick-and-mortar retailers have wrestled with overcapacity, flat same-store sales, Internet incursions, and a tepid economic recovery.

But amidst all the hand-wringing over the future of retail, it’s instructive to look at (and learn from) those who are managing to thrive: truly forward-looking explorers who are, in many ways, migrating from an old world to a new one, and finding better “trade routes” in retail markets that have become increasingly crowded and hypercompetitive. These merchants are leading the way in what I’ve begun to think of as a new “age of discovery” in retail.

Like the explorers of old, today’s smartest retailers aren’t expecting to simply stumble upon better routes to that new world. They are exploiting new and better tools, and new and better ways of navigating. That’s only part of the story. The most insightful industry leaders aren’t jumping at every new technology and trend that promises gold. Being more strategic, they recognize that discovering new opportunities usually requires being able to see their worlds anew, from a fresh perspective. And to do that, these top managers often need to first change the lenses they use to view their businesses. They pay attention to new and different kinds of data, and use the insights that result from this to make better decisions at every level of their organizations, from the CEO to the part-time associate. [Read more...]

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Posted October 23, 2012

Multichannel Breakthrough: Segmentation Powers Insights into the Empowered Shopper

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The Robin ReportAs with all new approaches, the best innovations in the digital marketplace occur not as a result of reinventing the wheel, but by integrating and retooling existing assets. Things become truly exciting for the merchant in the combination of insights derived from spending behavior with insights derived from transaction analysis—in time as well as virtual space. By including the insights from real-time transaction data, behavioral models of different segments of e-shoppers can help to extrapolate that a device that has clicked on these specific links is likely to make purchases in certain market sectors within a specified period of time. At MasterCard, we are creating a breakthrough for merchants in segmentation by bringing our own enormous anonymized data set to bear on the task of identifying shopper segment behaviors. By applying insights on spending behavior to our partners’ online populations using common geo-demographics, our partners are able to identify online shoppers with a high propensity to spend in a given industry in the next 30 days. [Read more...]

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Posted October 23, 2012

How Do You Give People What They Want?

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The Robin Report

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The Global Recession has left retailers with overstuffed inventories and rapidly declining margins, as cash-strapped consumers pulled back on all but the most necessary of purchases. In response, some retailers have revamped the consumer experience with a variety of strategies, from flashy celebrity endorsements and hefty back-to-school discounts, to new pricing strategies and a more holistic approach to in-store versus online.

But are any of these giving consumers what they really want?

Leveraging the power of celebrity appeal is a popular tactic that shows no signs of slowing. Ann Taylor recently announced that Kate Hudson will continue to be their spokesperson for the third year running, while H&M recently revealed its continuing partnership with David Beckham.

Despite the prevalence of star-powered promotion, 3% of consumers cite celebrities as being most likely to influence them to purchase new apparel, though 22% say clothing worn by celebrities is still influential in their own clothing choices, according to the Cotton Incorporated Lifestyle Monitor™ Survey. Most say (53%) friends are the most influential source in their purchasing decisions. [Read more...]

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Posted October 23, 2012

Measure Once, Buy Twice – Solving the Elusive Male Market

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The Robin Report - Unique SolutionsWhile it’s no secret that when it comes to the brick-and- mortar world of retail apparel, the old rule of “men buy, women shop” is as true today as it has been from the beginning of the retail experience itself. Researchers at Wharton and Toronto’s Verde Group observe that women see in-store shopping as a social opportunity and spend vast amounts of time interacting with sales associates and browsing, while men see it as a tactical chore and are in and out of the store ASAP, and see it as a kind of slow torture.

Despite every kind of marketing approach to change the purchasing habits of men and increase the time spent in-store, demographics for the male shopper have seen very little change and remain a point of frustration among retailers.

Enter “intelligent shopping”—one company’s solution to the mysterious male shopper and returning some parity back into the sales-to-the-sexes imbalance. Me-Ality by Unique Solutions has quietly and quickly moved digital size matching stations into a growing number of malls across the US and created an impressive array of nearly 100 apparel retailer partnerships. Although the brand retail partners all share a common affiliation with the company, each retailer is aggressively competing for purchase space where men have taken a surprising leadership position: online. [Read more...]

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Posted October 23, 2012

Yacobian Group

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Bd_logo_combo_PPT_blueThe Yacobian Group enables leading retailers to improve store performance and same store sales in dramatic and measurable ways. They have unparalleled expertise in what makes customers buy (or not buy), earned over 25 years while working with the world’s best known retailers to improve conversion and transaction size. The Yacobian Group scales that improvement across the enterprise through a simple, but powerful big-data platform called Blueday that makes it easier and faster to align the organization and drive individual performance. When store teams blow away their goal, it’s called a “Blueday.” When there are more Bluedays, it means customer expectations are being met and profitable sales are growing systematically.

To see how Blueday helps CEOs and CFOs see their numbers differently, enables COOs and Store Heads to run their stores more successfully and shows Store Managers and Associates how to better meet customer needs, contact Toni Yacobian and the highly experienced Yacobian team. With Blueday, there finally is light at the end of the brick and mortar tunnel.

For more information please contact Toni Yacobian at  info@yacobian.com or visit our website at www.yacobian.com

Phone: 978.461.4501 (office)


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Posted September 17, 2012

How Analytics Can Help A Stores-Within-A-Store Strategy Succeed

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The Robin Report - big boxThe past several years have been rough on most retailers across all categories and levels. Some of the savviest merchants have responded to the challenging environment with a “stores-within-the-store” strategy, in which individual brands lease space and bring their own boutiques within the walls of a larger store, helping to turn that large space into a sort of mini-mall.

There has been increasing excitement about this model, and it is starting to be deployed widely in range of stores. The model is usually a specialty brand leasing space within a department store. Though primarily seen in department stores like Macy’s and JC Penney, big-box retailers – both general, like Walmart and Target, and specialty, like Best Buy – have been using it as well.

The increasing popularity of stores-within-stores strategy isn’t hard to understand; the hope is that the outside brand will both drive traffic into the store and provide revenue through the rent they pay for the otherwise under-utilized floor space they occupy. Yet the model is not a panacea, and merchants need to approach it with a dose of caution and an even larger measure of analysis of purchase behaviors.

An effective stores-within-a-store strategy depends on synergy – both between the outside brand (or brands) and the host merchant, first of all, and also among the various boutiques collectively. The goal is for the various outlets to work together to create a compelling and unified shopping experience for the consumer, thus creating the kind of overall brand experience that results in more customers, and more purchases per customer. [Read more...]

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Posted September 9, 2012