Retail marketers: Be on Mobile or be Left Out

For all the retail marketers, it is the mobile marketing era, in store and online shopping is no longer the only choices for customers to shop. You can now shop anytime and anywhere you want and won’t be limited into locations and devices. With my previous marketing experiences and as a student at Northwestern University studying Integrated Marketing Communications, I found some articles that talked about the mobile marketing trend is worth sharing.

The article from Marketing Land- How Marketers Can Keep Pace As Mobile Rises And Matures, by Soo Ji Oh showed the amount of mobile shopping in 2014 holiday shopping season (November to December) accounted for 45% of all online traffic. This is 25% more than the same time period in 2013. Even for online and chain retailer like Amazon and Wal-Mart said they have more than half of their customers use mobile devices to shop over holidays. Retailers are focusing more on mobile strategies now. They also enhance the payment platform and free shipping on mobile app in order to compete with larger scale e-commerce brands.

 

                                   

Sources: Social Media Impact

Another article is from Who What Wear- Why This New Credit Card Will Completely Change How You Shop, by Meaghan Blalock. According to the article, a quarter of all online sales transacted on Black Friday happened on a mobile device in 2010 and the number is still growing. Mobile shopping is definitely a growing trend and now the app developers want to create something that can combines mobile shopping and social network. This article talked about a new app called CardBlanc that can serve as a debit card for you to shop and also use as a social media tools to share your shopping experience with your friends.

Based on the two articles and with my experience and study in marketing trend, I have three recommendations for the marketers in retail industry to enhance their mobile marketing strategy.

• Build a Mobile App- It’s so easy to shop at your phone. Creating a mobile app for your customers to shop can not only engage your customers more but also have the access to their data and track their purchase behavior and learn more about your target customers’ profile.
• Be Mobile Friendly - You don’t have to create a mobile app in order to follow the trend. You can also keep in track by designing a more mobile user friendly website. The mobile user friendly website can make mobile user to read all the content easier in a different size of devices. This can increase their desire to brose or shop at your website through their smart phones even you don’t have a mobile app.
• Enhance in-store mobile interaction- Even more people use mobile to shop, they still like to stop at the store to see the actual products. This is a great opportunity to engage with them through your mobile app. A simple QR code or a promotion banner can be a good way to lead the customers back to the app.

Mobile marketing is definitely a trend and many retailers have already built their mobile app. But how to add value to the app and how to engage with the customers are more important than just have the app but customers are not willing to use it. Adding value by interact with the customers, special promotion or discount through mobile app or let them share purchase experience among friends using the app is some good ways to engage with your customers.

Cheryl Lin is currently pursuing her master degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She has four years of solid working experience in marketing and especially interest in fashion and entertainment industry.
Contact Cheryl through twitter @cheryllin2015 or LinkedIn

Today, marketing success requires data integration and experience customization

        To all data-driven marketing professionals in retail industries, we are all facing a data explosion era; you may collect a lot of data, but do you really utilize it well? Extracting insights from big data and enhancing the customer's experience will be a key challenge for all of us. As a master’s candidate of the Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University, I want to share two articles with you. 

   

        Firstly, mobile apps have changed consumer behaviors toward searching and shopping. While improving functions of apps to attract customers, retailers should also grab the chance to utilize more data from mobile devices and integrate that with data from other mediums. Smart retailers don’t just collect data; they see the big picture, transforming the data into brand stories and experience customization. A vast amount of data from mobile devices is the new gold mine. It not only enables us to improve customer service, but also helps us to improve other business problems, such as employee relations. I found an article in The Jordan Times. It showed several statistic trends of mobile device that you might find interesting: Mobile devices, dataanalytics key to businesses future growth —experts

   

        However, knowing what kind of data we can extract from multi-media is still not enough. How can retailers use that to improve customer engagement? Today, the power of word of mouth influences customer retention and acquisition, and the key factor that drives word of mouth is customers’ experiences toward the brand. In this intensive competition, only brands that utilize insights from data to customize customers’ experiences will be crowned. Here is another article on Forbes that may help you to think about that: Customer ExperienceControls Business Growth Today

  

        To summarize these two articles, we should start to do the following things:

           

•    Link data from different mediums in order to see the big picture. 

According to the second article, consumers have turned “omnichannel”. Therefore, in order to maximize the usage of different channels’ data, such as from mobile, linking data from different platforms is essential for brands. Retailers can establish a multi-dimensional customer profile about where and when customers search, shop, and give feedbacks. While merging data and linking key identifiers together, marketers can see the big picture and avoid falling into silos.

•     Utilize data to improve experience customization    

Data is dead, only storyteller can make it alive. Stop collecting data and then putting it away! Retailers should re-evaluate current datasets and extract consumer insight. By segmenting different customer groups and digging into customers’ preference and behaviors across different media platforms, we can better understand what they really want and take the chance to outshine competitors. These insights will tell customers’ stories and really help the brands to engage and customize customers’ experiences.

•     Differentiate your apps from others and deepen the customer engagement.           

Since mobile has been an important tool for marketers to collect data, how to keep engaging with customers and consistently communicate with them define the winner in the long run. By analyzing data, retailers can find niche advantages to establish their apps’ uniqueness, and also get more useful data from consumers. Two birds, one stone.

        By executing the actions above, marketers are able to extract insights from data in multiple dimensions and increase a brand’s strengths. In addition, since the mobile market hasn’t reached the mature period yet, every brand has a chance to win. Why not starts it now?

   

Contact information of the author:    

As a master’s candidate with proven data analytics and consumer insight professions, Flora Yang will graduate in December 2013. She is looking for marketing analyst positions in retail, CPG, financial and agency industries. Reach her on Twitter: @finverota or via LinkedIn. 

Cutting edge retailers are using BIG DATA analytics to outperform others for more revenues and profits. ARE YOU?

Retailers, do you feel overwhelmed by recent trends of using big data in the industry? Or, you get a sale but you are not sure where sale came from? Depending on whom you ask, you may have different answers. But no need to panic, it may be your chance to excel in the industry. Growth of big data usage has led the renaissance of retail IT happening, empowering retailers to utilize data and establish engaging customer relationship. As a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program, I aim for helping retailers to be disruptors by embracing the technology in changing landscape.

Retail Renaissance written by Lewis Gersh: talks about there are many retailers still fear and unwillingly spend on technology. However, they are many players in traditional retail are taking a step forward to embrace e-commerce and further to integrate big data with monetization plan. And the article also presents the report of US Census that justify the fear for e-commerce’s threat to physical retail. “In the retail industry, the transformative potential of technology will not displace physical retail, but rather, will transform and augment the traditional experience and displace legacy systems.”

Online Retail Sales Are Down, And Why Some Retailers Don’t Care written by Steve Olenski justifies the questions most people who might have ”How can online retail sales be “small”? The story of Amazon shows that it was leading the way in terms of online sales that was higher than their next 12 competitors combined. The articles points out the problem of retailers always have ”How to attribute its sale to online vs. offline?” But does it really matter?

From my analysis of these two articles and my studies at Northwestern University, here are three points I recommend you to think and take action.

1.   Embrace technology: These two articles imply that technology will be seamlessly important to personal shopping experience while consumers expect to have tailored experiences and brand engagement in their own way. Therefore, improvement of functionality and accessibility to product specifications and deals will be critical to boost the sales, further to carve bigger share of market while other retailer don’t understand how to utilize it.

2.   Engage: The power of e-commerce not only offers the platform where shoppers can buy, but how shoppers make the decision through purchase funnel. Retailers should integrate technology with its offline service that will enhance the tailored shopping experience. Make your customers feel important and special. Eventually, e-commerce will enhance the quality of customer retention.

3.   Integration: Perhaps you do not have organized system to track online sales and might have misplaced online sales to offline sales. However, online and offline activities should be seemed as a whole, what shoppers research online can affect their offline activities, vice versa. The key is to integrate all these resources throughout multi-channel platforms, further to generate tailored shopping experience and personal brand engagement.

Jenny Chang is a master’s student in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, and she will soon graduate in December 2013. With 3+ years’ multinational working experiences in Apparel & Textile industry, her specialties are planning, sourcing, and buying. She anticipates that she can utilize her ability in Apparel and CPG industry. Please reach her by following her @Jennyfer0304.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2013/10/02/online-retail-sales-are-down-and-why-some-retailers-dont-care/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lewisgersh/2013/08/27/retail-renaissance/

photo:

http://sandinourstilettos.blogspot.com/2010/09/burberrys-retail-theatre-concept.html

3 Simple Steps to Save Your Money and Become a Rational Shopper

           Shopping is one of the major parts that consist of our lives. Especially for housewives, grocery shopping is one of their daily chores. Moms need to go to a grocery shop--Trader Joe's, Safeway, Walmart, etc...-- almost everyday, and even to big retailers--Target, Home Depot, Bestbuy-- occasionally to buy household neccessities. However, these frequent shopping trips don't always leads to satisfactory shopping. Recall how many times you regretted after impulsive or unnecessary purchases.

Is there a way to avoid those regrets? Yes, by becoming a rational shopper! Then how do we become one? As a Northwestern student majoring in psychology, I've taken several courses on cognitive psychology and decision making, and below I listed three main cognitive biases that I learned to be keeping us from making rational choices. Understanding these three biases is the first step to become a rational shopper.
1. Sunk cost bias
2. Anchoring effect
3. Barnum effect

            Sunk cost is the cost that has already been paid and is not refundable, and thus should not be considered when making decisions. However, we tend to “honor” the sunk cost and therefore it usually plays a huge role in making decisions. “I’ve already spent money on stocking up five razor blades for Gillette, so I will stick with it in order not to waste those five razor blades that I already bought, although I found a much cheaper razor that I like better.” is a common rationale of shoppers who fell into the trap of suck cost bias.

            Anchoring effect is a human tendency to focus too heavily on limited piece of information. We are often “anchored” by initially given information, even if it is only small portion of entire information. Big retailers such as Costco or Sam’s Club utilize this concept to design their product shelving. They place their value products, which are produced from their own factories and therefore cheaper than brand products, right next to brand products, which are placed closer to the entrance so shoppers get to see the price of brand products first. Therefore shoppers who first see the price of brand products are likely to be anchored by that high price and perceive the next price of value item to be much cheaper.

Barnum effect is a human tendency to regard very general characterizations or arguments to be accurate and tailored specifically for him/herself, although those characterizations are vague enough to be applicable to everyone. Informercial or home shopping programs that sell vitamins are typical example of Barnum effect. If you take a close look at their description of vitamin products, you will notice that all the benefits of the vitamin are very vague—alleviating fatigue, boosting up concentration, etc—that they are applicable to everyone. However, still we tend to think that this vitamin just fits our needs and buy it.

            Are there any solutions for these biases? For many of human cognitive biases, simple but strong prescription is to take at least few seconds to think “why” you want to make certain decision, before blindly putting stuffs into your cart. So next time when you go for a shopping and saw a deal or product that you think is really good, why don’t you take a few seconds to contemplate over why you think it is a good deal, and reason your logics step by step? 


Jake Kim, Undergraduate Northwestern IMC, @JakeKim4