Off the Shelf: The Retail & CPG Blog

This Thanksgiving Day and day following often referred to as Black Friday witnessed blockbuster results for online retailers.  Thanksgiving sales ended up 39.3% over the holiday last year. Mobile traffic on Black Friday was 14.3 percent of all retail traffic compared to 5.6 percent in 2010. This season will definitely be an interesting time for marketers.  The National Retail Federation (NRF) projects that 36% of holiday shopping will be done online (leveraging the Web for researching, comparison shopping before making a purchase). 

Continue reading "This holiday season, what will make shoppers click?" »

Posted by Tanveer Singh Khanuja at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Are Brick and Mortar companies facing extinction?" »

Posted by Tanveer Singh Khanuja at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy New Year to everyone and let’s hope we are moving towards a more positive economy and upswing in consumer sentiment. On that note, continuing from previous posts (Part 1 & Part 2)wherein we talked about ideas driven around the value theme, online retailers will have to additionally provide customers a richer shopping experience and engage them deeply, particularly around community interaction.

Also, the previous post is now part of a white paper. You can download the paper here to get more details.

Continue reading "Online Grocers: Accelerating out of the turn-3" »

Posted by Kunal Puri at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Customer Service:

The local grocery store that my mom goes to in Bangalore, India provides a full-service option of maintaining a grocery list on her behalf and auto-replenishing directly to the residence. They also check the inventory levels of some of the products at home!!

Product Innovation:

In response to the H1N1 scare, masks were in short supply. Some entrepreneurs went with the creative option of cutting a bra in the middle and making masks out of them

Continue reading "Best Practices from the developing world for the US Retail Market" »

Posted by Sudhir Holla at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this age of discerning and value chasing shoppers, Customer Loyalties can change in a single moment and gaining or retaining loyalty is a marketing warfare. Store is the final frontier where products are given equal opportunities to see, evaluate and choose the brand. Brands can be made or broken in these last few minutes of life span a shopper will give to your brand. It is then highly imperative for the brands to make best use of these last few minutes and ensure that the customers stay loyal. Here are 3 basic strategies, Retailers and CPG companies can look at to enhance customer loyalty.

Continue reading "Enhance Customer Loyalty at the Final moment of truth" »

Posted by Kirthi S Subramanian at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When a consolidation happens  in any industry, the market takes the news in awe. The market reacts swiftly initially with lot of news-spread, followed by strong analysis, view points and the market settles down accepting the new order and moves on. I’m sure the same will happen with the JDA i2 acquisition. JDA historically has been a great aggregator and have done acquisitions at strategic moments in its growth phase. Acquisition of Intactix, E3 and Manugistics all helped JDA solidify its position in the market, expand its footprint and establish itself as the leader.

Continue reading "JDA i2 acquisition: 3 point view" »

Posted by Kirthi S Subramanian at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a 7 year old and a 4 year old; who like most of the children their age love their television time. Seems like you can almost predict the age of a child by the TV shows that they like. You can also figure out the age of the kids by the tunes their parents can hum!!

The TV show "graduation" path seems to go from Baby Einstein to Elmo to Barney to Dora/ Diego to Caillou......will map the rest of it as my kids grow.

Seems to me that Retailers can pick up a few tips from these shows on customer segmentation and lifestyle driven merchandising.

Continue reading "What Retailers can learn from Elmo, Barney and Dora" »

Posted by Sudhir Holla at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This blog post is inspired in part by Rahul's blog on "Can the grocery store provide an Amazon experience?". Set me thinking; seems like there are quite a few concepts that can be leveraged from the online world to provide consumers with a better shopping experience and in some cases make some money for the retailer as well.

This post is about the possibility of using a "Google Adwords" kind of concept to target consumers at a retail store at the "moment of truth"

Continue reading "Why can't "Google Adwords" be used in the brick & mortar world?" »

Posted by Sudhir Holla at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Can the grocery store provide an Amazon experience?" »

Posted by Rahul Bindlish at 5:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)