The Wall Street Journal: “Across the U.S., grand openings of specialty grocery chains such as Whole Foods Market, Stew Leonard’s and Wegmans Food Markets Inc. are attracting customer hordes … By 7 a.m., roughly 2,000 people had swarmed a shopping center in Hanover, N.J., to mark the arrival one Sunday this summer of a Wegmans and its exotic cheeses and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.” Robin W. Dente, community-affairs coordinator for the township comments: “It reminded me of when the Beatles came to America.”
Category: SHOPPER FYI
BRAND X JOURNAL
CONFAB REPORT Ground Control to Major Tom
Organization: The Soul of the Customer Journey
Having a healthy organization is foundational; without a happy, communicative, and culturally aligned organization, one cannot expect to have happy, communicative and culturally aligned customers. The organization is the heart and soul of the brand and retail experience.
RESEARCH REPORT Who is succeeding and why in Shopper?
A cross-functional strategy is key
Overall, our survey respondents are positive about the success of their Shopper initiatives, with 48% rating results as “good,” 32% “very good” and 4% “excellent.” Fifteen percent evaluate results as “not so good” and two percent “poor.”
BRAND X JOURNAL Outside the Box
Walmart podcasts its values
Axios: “Amazon has gotten so good at moving merchandise that it now accounts for 43 cents of every dollar spent online in the U.S., according to eMarketer … Lost in this torrent of news are indications that Amazon’s revenue formula is fundamentally changing: from a reliance on retail and cloud services, the e-retailer appears likely to power future growth with fulfillment and shipping services to third-party sellers.”
CONFAB REPORT Shopper’s Brand New Bag
Innovation, empathy & growth in the age of commerce
It’s sometimes said that “it’s all just marketing.” Perhaps not so much anymore. Arguably, there’s marketing, and then there’s Shopper, which is better understood as a business than a marketing strategy. Shopper is much more about commercial innovation — that is, making improvements in the way consumers experience brands while shopping — than it is about marketing in a more traditional sense.