Retail Dive: “With so many digitally-enabled processes in place, Sephora’s members-only social platform, dubbed the Beauty Insider Community, fits right in with the brand’s tech-focused image … The first of Sephora’s experiential concepts, the Beauty TIP workshops are focused on three core concepts: teach, inspire and play … A customer conversion isn’t front-and-center in these stores and that’s probably for good reason. Sephora needs sales like anyone else, but the focus of these workshops is on customer interaction and experience.”
Author: T M
BRAND X JOURNAL
CONFAB REPORT Real-time retail & stranger things
Execution: The "demogorgon" of the shopper journey
The brand/retail experience is all in the delivery, which of course is all in the execution. This is more complicated than ever in today’s “omnichannel” world. This is not a relatively simple matter of just delivering brand messages, be they ads or promotions, at every touch point.
Ominchannel is not the same thing as omnimedia. The word “channel” not only connotes media channels; more important, it encompasses transactional channels — that is, retail in all its multi-tentacled iterations.
PLANNING & BUDGET What is your Shopper situation?
Five analytical steps are keys to success
Situation Assessment involves analysis of five areas: socioeconomic trends; brand understanding; consumer understanding; retailer understanding; and shopper understanding.
RESEARCH REPORT Is there a career path in Shopper?
Apparently, there is not
An overwhelming majority of 78% says Shopper has no established career path within their organizations. A plurality of 44% rate their Shopper training as only “average,” with 30% evaluating it as “very good” and just 5% as “excellent.” Twenty percent rate their training as “not so good” or “poor.”
BRAND X JOURNAL The 3 C’s of retail revival
Community, curation and convening
Quartz: Ryan Raffaelli of Harvard “studies how mature organizations and industries faced with technological change reinvent themselves. Raffaelli has termed this line of research ‘technology reemergence.’ It began with his study of the Swiss watch industry, which collectively reinvented itself (and thus survived) in the wake of digital watches. Five years ago, he set out to discover how independent bookstores managed to survive and even thrive in spite of Amazon and other online retailers.”