Category Archives: Social Media And Online Retail

Find Out How A Retail Winner Increased Customers By 35% In Three Months! (IBM White Paper).

Winners Losers Leaders Laggards. This might be a good name for a John le Carre novel, but it’s analyst-speak for identifying leading (or lagging) retailers.  What are the differences between retail leaders and retail laggards, and what are the vital statistics that set leading marketers apart from the crowd? According to a recent white paper from ...
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5 Trends Every Retailer Knows Regarding The Online Boom (Infographic)

In order to compete and participate effectively in today’s marketplace, you’ve got to look at the trends in web influence, technology usage, and customer behavior that are now supported by business intelligence and hard data as opposed to instinct. And even though Infographics are meant to give the picture at a glance, it helps to put down in words...
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3 Ways Retailers Who Tweet A Lot Get 5% More Of The Online Money Pie

In addition to competitive pricing and assortment intelligence, it’s very important for retailers to know what’s going on in peripheral fields to their business. Today, thousands of retailers — from small businesses to global brands — use Twitter to connect with customers. A Compete Study for Twitter last November that analyzed over 7,600 Twitter ...
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The Online Retailers’ Guide To Monetizing Social Media

I decided to use a cartoon (below) called, “Social Media Explained,” a humorous take on the specific function of each kind of social medium.  The cartoon has apparently appeared in a variety of other media. The cartoon’s subject matter, in turn, led me to consider how retailers could make effective use of social media channels, in general, and, mo...
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How The “Tech Titans” Use Mobile Technology To Be Bigger & Stronger In The Retail Competitive Market

My last post was 5 Must-Know Technology Trends That Will Drive Retail Business In 2013. Today’s piece, which was part of the original article about Technology Trends for 2013, in Retail Touchpoints, takes a look at how the “Tech Titans” – Amazon, Apple, eBay, Facebook and Google – have grown – using mobile technology – to eclipse retail competiton...
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How Retailers Are Using Smartphone Data & Social Analytics To Lure More Customers & Make More Profit

According to the infographic cited below: Online and web-based American retail sales will become over half of all sales by 2013; the Internet will influence 53% of all retail sales, both online and offline, by 2014; and this year, 167 million people will shop online spending an average of $1800 per person.  Utilizing data obtained from social medi...
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How Consumers And Competitors Might React To Location Marketing (Fishburne Cartoon)

This week, by coincidence, the Wall Street JournalMarketoonist Tom Fishburne, (and I) chose to talk about geofencing. Geofencing, also called “location marketing,” (a clearer description, I think), is the newish marketing technique of sending targeted messages to a consumer when they are in, or come within a certain distance of, a store. What do...
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How Local Retailers Are Using Geofencing To Entice Smartphone Users Into Their Stores (VIDEO)

“Keep your friends close — and your enemies closer.” Whether said by Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, or Michael Corleone, that’s the reason we constantly exhort online retailers to use pricing intelligence to know about the competitions’ pricing and product assortment, thus to make the best, most-informed and most-timely decisions for themselves. So awarenes...
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8 Mobile, Global & Social Trends Online Retailers Need To Know To Maximize 2012 Holiday Sales

“By 2012, global mobile commerce will reach $171.5 billion; by 2014, $352.7 billion… and US mobile commerce is expected to reach $11.6 billion in 2012, according to Forrester Research. We did a blog post a number of months ago: In 2016 Consumers Will Spend $327 Billion Online.  Here are some projections, predictions, trends, demographics, advi...
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7 Smart Ways Retailers Can Turn “Shoppers” Into “Buyers”

In his article, Create “Choosing” (Not “Shopping”) Experiences in the Harvard Business Review: The Future of Retail, Former Harvard Marketing Professor, John Sviokla tells retailers how they can greatly increase their competitive advantage by examining their sales process and find out if they are encouraging “choosing” behavior, i.e. “buying...
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The Future Of Retail: 20 Key Retailing Trends, With Dr. Patrick Dixon (Video)

The key premise by Futurist, Patrick Dixon, speaking to a UK audience on The Future of Retail, is that it’s not about science or data; i.e. what changes is not the facts, but how people feel. The future is more than consumer research, Dixon says. What’s important for the future is how to get into the emotions of our customers, how to understand how ...
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10 Reasons Retailers Should Be Very Scared About Pricing: Jon Manning Video

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Pricing is getting scary, says Jon Manning, founder & managing director of Pricing Prophets and resident pricing expert for Upstream Commerce in this dynamite video about ten things retailers should worry about with regard to competitive pricing today. If you can get past the occasional expressive language, you’ll f...
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Why “Going Digital” Shouldn’t Be A Market Campaign Strategy for Retailers

Retailers have a tantalizing array of digital media to consider — and it’s, oh so tempting to jump on board Facebook, YouTube, Mobile Apps, Pinterest, and Google to name a few — but the question wryly posed by marketer extraordinaire, Tom Fishburne (The Marketoonist), in the cartoon below, is, “Should campaigns be media-driven or idea-driven? W...
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