Off the Shelf: The Retail & CPG Blog

I have discussed about some important strategies that a retailer's social media plan should entail, in one of my blogs earlier. It is extremely essential that we also provide the right features in our social solution.  In this blog I have discussed some very interesting features that a social solution must include. This list is a result of an extensive research of various social features currently available in the market and being put to effective use by various online businesses. We had also presented these ideas through a PoV last year. 

We have all known of the facebook and twitter share/like button and this has been extensively talked about thus far. We also know about features such as the "Shop" tab on facebook, But there are some very interesting features that can make your social shopping solution savvy and fun..... 

Continue reading "Essential and Savvy features for your Social Solution" »

Posted by Sanjeev Kulkarni at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We do realize that social media plays an important role in the way we conduct business today. Every retailer yearns to be a part of the social revolution. In their quest to stay ahead of the competition, is very important for every online business to strategize a social media plan. How should retailers go about planning their social media strategy?

There are a few important facts that any retailer should analyze before they jump to a strategy:
- What is it that I want to achieve, through a social media strategy?
- Do I really believe this is an unearthed goldmine?
- How should I implement a successful social media plan? How easy is it to implement different social media strategies and what is the timeline I'm looking at?
- What is my budget?

Well, as we find answers to these questions, we do realize that there are two different strategies that a retailer may plan to implement:

1. Retail layer on a social layer:
This strategy aims to build a retail layer on a social layer (For eg. Building a retail layer on facebook). Very recent examples are that of J.C.Penny embedding their complete product catalogue on facebook, and Hallmark cards embedding the "Shop" tab on their facebook page to allow customers to buy cards on Facebook.
Features such as the Facebook "like" button and "share" on twitter may also be considered part of this strategy. Another very important feature would be open id or facebook/twitter login.

Amazon implemented facebook connect in order to provide product suggestions based on likes and favorites pulled from your social graph. By connecting your account, you allow Amazon to scrape the interests and favorites of your friends. You can then view suggested gift ideas based on this data. Amazon also will populate lists of items that are popular among all of your friends, as well as suggestions based on your own interests.

What can I achieve?
In simple words -
- Connectivity to customers and a more informed and a knowledgeable customer.
- Easy Viral marketing on social media.
- Personalized recommendations using interests/likes/dislikes etc of customers based on their social graph.

What about the time and budget?
Easy to achieve. The easiest parts being "Facebook like" and "Share" buttons. The overall strategy is easy to implement and requires a few months of efforts. An agile implementation model helps in interim analysis of the success of various features you implement.

2. Social layer on a retail layer:
This is a comparatively difficult and a time consuming strategy to implement. It aims at building a social network within your retail network. Mysears.com is an example of this. Department store Sears have given their website a social shopping makeover by adding a social layer that allows you to "message" and "follow" other users, see their profiles and their onsite social activity, like products (as well as dislike, want and own them), and join groups.

What can I achieve?
- Connectivity to customers and a more informed and a knowledgeable customer.
- Easy Viral marketing within the retail network.
- Personalized recommendations using interests/likes/dislikes etc of customers based on their social graph within the retail network.
- Though most of the results are same as the first strategy, the following points are worth taking a look at.

What about the time and budget?
Time required to implement this strategy is greater than leveraging an already existing social network like facebook or myspace or twitter to do your job. If you have a greater social media budget and want to own all the trends of your customers without letting a 3rd party to know what your customers like, what they dislike, what are their gift lists etc. then this is the strategy for you to implement.

Which strategy is the best for you?
The answer to this question depends on a multitude of factors, which have been considered above. But if I were to consult you, I would recommend you to go with the first strategy if your budget is not huge and you are ok to let facebook or whoever your social media partner may be, to own all of the shopping and activity trends of your customers. Also, this is the best strategy for you to implement as long as you feel you are only testing the waters and not actually swimming. You may take a plunge into the second strategy if you have a solid budget and have already tested waters for yourself. A detailed analysis of your business format, product portfolio, customer profiles, market demographics, customer preferences and your Social commerce budget will help portray a better picture of your future social strategy.

These are some thoughts that might help you as retailers, marketers, social media executives or as consultants to help align social media strategies of the future.

Posted by Sanjeev Kulkarni at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No other technology or phenomenon changed the way we work, live or play, the way internet and specifically social media did. It quite literally erased boundaries of all kinds - geographic, interpersonal, corporate...

 

People across demographic profiles took to the internet and social media for 'Instant everything' - connections, music, movies, information, shopping. The age of 'instant Gratification' has set in.

 

And the march of Social has only begun...

With 500 million people using Facebook and Twitter seeing more than two billion tweets per month, social media usage is skyrocketing.  This trend is clearly visible not only among users accessing the internet through PCs but also amongst mobile users, who spend 1.4 times as many hours using social networking sites than reading and responding to e-mail, according to a recent study by research company TNS.

 

The study, which tracked the online activities and behaviors of nearly 50,000 subjects between 16 and 60 years of age in 46 countries, cited "the increased need for instant gratification" as well as "the ability to offer multiple messaging formats, including the instant message or update function," for the popularity of social networking platforms on mobile devices. More consumers, both in the U.S. and abroad, expect to spend even more time accessing social media on their mobile devices in the future, rather than their PCs.

Consumers are spending more time on social media than on television. Facebook, linkedin, Orkut, hi5, blogs, youtube, twitter...you name it. Consumers just can't seem to get enough of Social Media.

 

How to Measure the Index of Instant Gratification

All this hoopla is attracting marketers' attention and they are loosening the purse strings. A February 2010 survey by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business found that survey respondents were devoting 5.6 percent of their marketing budget to social media -- up from 3.5 percent six months prior.

While all this buzz social media in general is creating a lot of interest that has led to a slew of campaign/application launches by brands across verticals, the measurement of the resulting impact and consumer engagement has, so-far, been hazy at best.

 

This might just be about to change as some innovative analytics solutions enter the seen. The leader among the pack so far is the social media analytics service Klout. Well-known for its Twitter influence measurement scores, Klout, has finally launched a version of its platform that determines your influence on Facebook.

 

Klout currently uses various data points from Twitter to figure out your "Klout Score," a representation of your influence and ability to compel action by others online. Its Twitter analytics platform takes into account metrics such as re-tweets, follower counts, list memberships and unique mentioners to calculate everything from who influences you to your "true reach" on Twitter.

Klout's now trying to do the same thing on Facebook. Once connected to a Facebook account, Klout will pull in data such as likes, comments and your friendship network in order to determine your influence on Facebook. Moreover, instead of representing Facebook and Twitter with different scores, Klout has decided to integrate them into a single Klout Score.

This opens a whole new chapter in online analytics and consumer engagement as marketers (or anyone using Klout) begin to get a broader view of the consumer response and engagement on social media.

It's Social Listening on steroids!

 

 

Posted by Amit Handa at 6:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in June I came across an ingenious online shopping experience that Zugara had developed to allow customers to ‘try on’ clothes online before committing to a purchase. By using an Augmented Reality interface between their site and a customer’s computer and webcam, Zugara provide a service whereby customers can see an augmented reality version of the clothes they’re interested in, projected onto their image on screen. Sounds pretty cool huh?

Continue reading "Augmented Reality Arrives for the Fashion Industry" »

Posted by Gaurav Dhir at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The power of the web has always enthralled me. It truly has changed our lives in so many multiple ways. My consulting assignments on retail and ecommerce have taken me through various personas that have been created and reached out to by most of the web companies. But at times I have wondered how much of an effect would the web world have on a differently abled person. Has ecommerce companies of the world thought of a differently-abled persona? A population size to the tune of almost 10% (650 million) of the world’s total population and a great potential for revenue generation? Has the power of the web changed their world too?

Continue reading "Website Accessibility – a potential Revenue generator" »

Posted by Rrituraj Sharma at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I am sure that most of you would have a large number of online user ids and passwords – each uniquely identifying you, as a user. While some of those identities have just your name and an email address associated with it (for example, a Gmail® or yahoo® id), some others contain large amounts of information (name, date of birth, addresses, payment information, etc) about you contained within them. Examples are your google checkout® account, PayPal® account or an account that you have created with your favorite online merchant. In effect, you are left with a ton of user ids and passwords, each one of them meant to uniquely identify you – the single and unique you. So aren’t we creating too many identities?

 

One obvious problem with having so many identities is that you have to remember their passwords and other credentials (unless you have the habit of using the same user ids and passwords everywhere – which is another problem altogether). The next ‘not so obvious’ problem is that of keeping your information current. When you move, or when you start using a new email address, would you like to log on to each of these accounts and update information? The third aspect is the time that you have to spend to register on every new website with which you have some business to do with – may be to buy something, may be to join on a discussion about a product that you have or may be to network with people. Not sure if you would share the same experience – I have decided not to interact with some sites only because of the pain of creating a new user profile. Having thought about the problems of having so many profiles for a person, I begin to wonder – doesn’t this problem exist in the real, physical world? Certainly it does. You fill out a different form to join each of the loyalty programs, to open each bank account and so on. But then everything online should be slightly better (at least) than the physical world –that is what I believe in. From the way things are evolving, looks like we are getting better at this.

 

Today, there exists a movement called openID (http://www.openid.net) which aims to clean up online identity management. Before explaining the concept, let me tell you who all has signed up. Google®, Yahoo!®, Facebook®, AOL®, Microsoft®, Verisign® and Sun® are some of the prominent members –this list should tell you a bit about the acceptability of this idea. This movement started as early as 2005, but it is only now that the big players are taking notice. Let me explain the idea - openID is an online identity which will have an associated password. There will be a set of websites called as openID providers who will be issuing these identities. Google® and Yahoo® are good examples. There will be a set of websites which allows users to use their existing openIDs without having to register and create profiles separately. Such websites are known as openID accepting sites. An important aspect is that the accepting websites never get to see the openID credentials that are used. They would want to know the user id (so that they can use the same to identify the customer in the future as well). They can also request for other information – like name, address, etc to be shared by the openID provider. There is no standard set of information (yet) that you can expect from an open id provider that is still evolving. For example, Google would only share name and email while AOL shares date of birth in addition. So the single openID ends up being your unique online identifier.

Want to see this working? That is easy to do. I will show what happens when an openID holder (most of you would be one) visits an openID accepting website. I will be using my Gmail id as the openID and the accepting site is the MySears community website. I start by visiting the login page - https://www.mysears.com/login

 

In the login page, you have the usual login form. In addition you can see some options on the right side. Shown there are some of the most popular id providers. If you have a user id at any of these sites, you do not have to register! You can just click on any of them. In our example, I choose to click on the Google® icon.

I am taken to the Google website and the familiar Google login form is displayed. However, there is a message on the page which tells that MySears is asking to share some information. Since I did this on purpose, I provide gmail credentials. Please note that MySears does not get to see my password.

Once I sign in, Google tells me that MySears is asking for my email and Name. I chose to allow and also checks the ‘remember this approval’ box (so that I do not have to approve the next time). Once I do that, I am transferred back to the MySears website and I am logged in! Please note that during the first time that you use an openID to sign in, MySears asks for some additional information like zip code (which is specific to MySears since that site requires some additional information to work than what Google has).

This was a very trivial and simple example and the only attribute shared is my email. Still I would never have to remember a user id and password for this site. Isn’t that a good starting point? I am excited to say that we already have created working openID integrations with some of the leading ecommerce products. This would mean that an online business which is using one of these products will be able to become an openID accepting site. Other than solving some of the problems described earlier, there is much more to gain for an online business which can act as an openID acceptor. Let us discuss that a later point in time or maybe you can start listing the obvious ones by commenting…

 

 

 

Posted by Mohan Kumar Krishnan at 6:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Best Buy recently came out with an augmented reality advert in the Sunday weekly supplement which included a 3-D notebook computer image which if held in front of a webcam would present a  a 3-D image of the Toshiba laptop.

Continue reading "Augmented Reality Advertising - creative digital marketing or a passing fad?" »

Posted by Ashish Jandial at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Rockey Nebhwani at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shorter life cycles, time to market, product proliferations are some of the terms one associates with any product development across industries. A lot has been said, written and discussed and yet it leaves a room for further discussions. The basic question one asks is WHY?

Continue reading "The "Re" Factor in Green Product Development" »

Posted by Jagmeet Singh at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I am just flying back from attending the CGT (Consumer Goods Technology) Sales & Marketing Conference 2009. Overall the conference was surprisingly well attended and even more surprisingly upbeat. Infact I haven’t seen sales & marketing executives more upbeat about innovation and investments even in the boom times. Granted there was tacit acknowledgement about the economy but there was a certainty of the fact that recovery had begun. Coming from sales & marketing folks in the consumer products industry who handle some of the largest retail accounts all over the world, this is a great sign.

Continue reading "Thumbing it to the Recession - CGT Sales & Marketing Conference 2009" »

Posted by Sandeep Dadlani at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past year, online travel industry faced a lot of challenges globally but amidst all this the best thing that has happened to the Indian online travel industry was the opening of railways reservation APIs by Indian Railways. Currently, OTA (online travel agency) business in India is expected to be approx. $800 million and depends largely on air travel related transactions. Till now, Indian Rail Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) was the only provider for online train ticket bookings in India but with the Railways opening its inventory for private players this space is ripe for some huge changes this year.

Why this move by Indian Railways is noteworthy?

Continue reading "Indian Railways - Epicenter of Indian Online Travel Industry Revolution" »

Posted by Rockey Nebhwani at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who is employed with one of the leading web portals in the world. Besides discussing other things, our chat ventured into the realm of customers, how to work with them better and what has changed in requirement extraction in the recent days, etc. One thing lead to another and not long into the conversation, my friend threw in an interesting statement – “Its relatively easier for us, we have got just one customer – our own company”. There was something odd about this statement that was making it hard to digest but I could not pin point it for a few minutes. When my thoughts caught up with me, I replied –“Hmmm, instead of just one customer, shouldn’t the whole world be the customer for you? After all, your apps are used by the whole world and I am sure a lot of people out there have ideas of about how to make them better. How can a bunch of business analyst think on behalf of the whole world and draw requirements for you?”

Continue reading "User-Generated Requirements - Part I" »

Posted by Amit Jnagal at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Why do people shop online? Because it is easier to compare prices online (and so find a good bargain), search for information, convenient and quicker. That’s why search engine and comparators are so popular. Considering that - it is always with surprise that I notice how little e-tailers are investing in search technologies. Try to search for a blue shirt size 15 on a website and it is a safe bet to say that most results won’t meet your expectations. Most e-tailers will blame their search engine for this but it is likely that they do not even have people looking after their search engine on a daily basis. That’s a shame as search is probably the most used feature on a website therefore a good search engine is a quick way to stand out from the crowd! How? The first thing to do is obviously to get the basics right in indexing your attributes and make sure they are normalised, the second thing will be to start playing with the relevancy algorithm and look after your search reports (I won’t detail that here) and the third one will be to innovate. How? Visual search!

 

Continue reading "E-commerce: is that time to invest in visual search?" »

Posted by Guillaume Vingtier at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine a world where more than a third of the visitors of a store would start their shopping and fill their trolley and then, all of a sudden, leave the store with all these baskets lying on the floor. It looks more like science-fiction that anything else, but unfortunately for online retailers this is still the daily routine: according to a recent report from Jupiter Research only 64% of shopping carts filled on a site will result in a purchase!

Continue reading "One page check-out and perpetual shopping cart: an opportunity not to be missed!" »

Posted by Guillaume Vingtier at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Virtual worlds, like Second Life, have carved a niche in the hobbyist world. In these worlds participants earn “Linden Dollars” by creating and selling clothes, furniture, cars, land, etc. to each other. All of this is very nice for those who share this hobby, but of little use to the rest of the world. However, there are some features of that world that make it interesting to those of us who specialize in more traditional eCommerce models. First, there is a floating, but fairly stable exchange rate between the Linden Dollar and the US Dollar. Second, there is no restriction on what type of commerce takes place in the virtual world. You could, for instance, sell music downloads there, collect money for the transaction in Linden dollars and exchange them for US Dollars. The question that arises is why would someone sell in that world when the tradition eCommerce sites already do a good job of selling many products. Several reasons come to mind. First: Browsing. Traditional eCommerce is essentially like going to the hardware store. You sign in, search for an item, pay for it and leave. In the brick and mortar world, you can do that too, or you can “hang out” in a store to see what’s new. Many stores like American Eagle and Target are laid out and merchandised to appeal to this type of shopping. (Their sales numbers speak for the appeal of this strategy.) Second: Not all products are easy to sell in a traditional eCommerce site. Furniture, clothing and office furnishings sell better when the user can “experience” the products, not just look at a picture of them. Perhaps the ability to configure a room, an office, or a mannequin in a 3D world would be superior because it allows a customer to “walk around” the choices and modify them until they get it right. Third: Youngsters. The rising generation of shoppers is not like us. They are a wired group who prefer texting to talking on the phone, and playing Internet video games against their friends to having them over to the house. Will 3D Commerce have more appeal to them than the current user experience once they become young adults?

Posted by Stephen Alan Potts at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Increasingly, companies that have a B2B business model are realizing that their current websites are not designed to provide a rich, interactive and user friendly shopping experience.

Continue reading "Are B2B websites facing an identity crisis?" »

Posted by Ashish Jandial at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Ecommerce implementations programs are complex and challenging. Not all retailers have the internal capabilities or scale to execute on them successfully. Interestingly, a leading research analyst confronted me with the question - "So what are the challenges that we need to be aware of before embarking on ecommerce implementation programs?"

Continue reading "Ecommerce Implementation Pitfalls" »

Posted by Ashish Jandial at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)