Life After The Credit Crunch

Here's a presentation with some great observations on life after the credit crunch, collated by Ines Seidel.

Life After the Crunch

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In summary, there's the things we already know like there are more fears, and people are cutting down and shopping more frugally, but what I really like is that she has drawn out some personal things like the fact that people are discovering family as they look for more free things to do, and kids are learning to accept no for an answer.

For fashion retailers however, there's a great point in here about the need for clothing that will survive trends and frequent use over the next couple of years.

Customer-centric Innovation

Great presentation on customer-centric innovation. The drivers for this are that traditional innovation is broken and the nature of competition is changing. Think left-wing rather than direct.

Customer Centric Retail Innovation - Bucharest May 29, 2008

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Your Essential Guide To Social Media

As a business you still probably don't care about Social Media. Your marketing department is still churning out brochures and adverts and telling you that this is all far future stuff. Only kids mess around with the internet. If so, they're killing your business. The UK alone has 17.1 million active internet users in the 16-54 age bracket - that's your primary consumer base. Worse still, Universal McCann research shows that 1 million of them have shared an opinion about a brand or product within their social networks. Trusted opinions are the number 1 factor in the purchasing decision-making process. Do you have any idea what they're saying about you, let alone any clue about how to manage that conversation?

Well for starters, you really need some idea about what Social Media is, and while I put together something simple that's specific to businesses, here's a decent guide.

The Essential Guide to Social Media - Upload a Document to Scribd

Developing Knowledge Sharing Communities For Businesses

One of the biggest problems facing most organisations is a combination of poor internal information sharing mechanisms and a lack of a collaboration culture. Since both are key foundations of innovation, this issue has serious consequences for organisational growth and success.

In my experience I've found that this problem is tackled one of two ways...

1. Primarily through chucking technology at it - usually some kind of intranet with out of the box functionality, and
2. Occasionally through culture change programmes.

There is often a belief amongst those implementing culture and business change that the change is technology independent. Conversely a lot of user experience professionals believe that behavioural issues can simply be addressed by making sure the interface and functionality of systems are compelling. Fact is that in this context, neither works without the other.

Driving highly collaborative and social sharing behaviours is pointless if the mechanisms for capturing and disseminating collective knowledge do not exist satisfactorily; and it is similarly pointless providing document sharing capability without a culture that encourages and rewards participating and interaction.

My advice is to develop and evolve your technology and culture together, with technology just preceding culture change activity in order to facilitate the human journey from hoarding documents and content, to sharing, to evolving it, to interacting socially around it.

I've created a 3 step Knowledge Management maturity model to show you how you might set this up for your business by increasing the richness of technological and social interaction over time.

1. Information Management - The journey starts with Information Management through using fixed and free tags along with decent search capability to surface content. Fixed tagging helps structure content. Encouraging free tagging begins to make people feel they can interact with the content, which sets them up nicely for the next stage.
2. Knowledge Management - Adding rating and commenting begins to allow qualitative evolution of information, which is essentially the core of knowledge management and also embeds the rudiments of inter-personal interaction around knowledge that facilitates off-line niche or special interest interaction.
3. Social Interaction - Finally adding presence information and real time discussion (chat) capability combined with offline community days begins to drive widespread and cross-functional social interaction around information and knowledge sharing, which is really where you want to be as an organisation.

Hope it helps!

6 Deepening Consumer and Retail Industry Trends For 2008 into 2009

Let’s start with a quick look at some of the key trends in consumer behaviour and the retail industry. I’ll pick out 3 each.

3 Deepening Trends in Consumer Behaviour:

1. Customers are becoming more demanding – the Web 2.0 revolution has provided a forum for sharing opinions to the point where consumers really do call the shots. They expect choice and convenience or will go elsewhere.
2. Social Media online is exploding – and is becoming a key vehicle for both strategic marketing and customer engagement.
3. Premium products and services still sell well and Green is becoming iconic – many of the less price sensitive consumers are still highly style and status conscious, and consumers are going to increasingly great lengths to boycott brands that have poor eco-credentials

Ok, so that’s 3 consumer trends. How about the Retail Industry in general?

3 Deepening Trends in the Retail Industry:

1. The credit crunch is getting worse – and negatively impacting retailer profits
2. The e-channel is still growing fast – online spending in July for example reached £4.8 billion, up 80% on last year to a new all-time high. Retailers are expecting a major shift to online this Christmas.
3. The leaders are merging channels – and providing seamless brand and customer experiences across them all. Consumers in return are becoming rapidly less tolerant of pricing, availability or service differentials online and offline.

(Originally posted by me on the Charteris Business Blog)

Cross-Channel Retailing - ARC Retail Presentation 2008

I attended the ARC Retail Conference this morning and gave a breakfast briefing with some of my Charteris colleagues on Cross-Channel Retailing - see slides below.

It covers 3 critical challenges that retailers are facing right now and how they could start to address them by developing low cost, high benefit customer propositions through leveraging the channel assets they already have. Here's the slides. If you want to know more just drop me an email and we'll be more than happy to have a chat.

Cross-Channel Retailing: Leveraging Multi-Channel Assets V1

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Successful Cross-Channel Retailing Is All About The Experience

By merging physical and digital sales channels, retailers essentially hope that shoppers never leave without making a purchase because the experience was lacking or because items they wanted are not on the shelves. As online retail continues into its second decade, business strategies like customer relationship programmes and multichannel integration, that were once perceived as too complicated to integrate successfully, are now working in sync.

Multiple channels to market are therefore fast becoming the norm and the lines between these channels are blurring – particularly in terms of consumer expectation. Forward thinking retailers are moving towards a seamless customer experience across all channels. It is becoming less and less acceptable to have differential pricing, branding or experience across different channels, and successful retailers are rethinking both their organisational design and also their customer engagement strategies to ensure that their routes to market are cohesive.

The common perception is that the major driver for cross-channel retailing is cost saving through efficiency and effectiveness. Managing channels separately results in cost increases resulting from running separate order-management and customer service operations, multiple warehouses and fulfilment systems, and buyers and merchandisers duplicating effort across the different channels.

However, although emerging integration technology allowing cross-channel integration has been a key enabler, multi-channel growth is essentially driven by consumers. According to Shop.org, 34% of consumers today use at least three channels when shopping. Research has also found cross-channel shoppers to spend up to 10 times more, to generate 25 to 50% more profit and demonstrate greater loyalty than their single-channel counterparts.

The core driver behind channel convergence then is customer demand.

So where do you start?

Well, Recent McKinsey research shows that only 15% of loyalty is gained from perceived product quality and promotional strategies, leaving 85% to the actual purchasing and post-sales experiences of customers. Point being that whilst establishing clear and consistent products and services is essential, the experience is what makes all the difference.

So one good place to start is to get your people culturally ready to make the most of all the channels your business takes to market. Whilst optimizing content, applications, pricing and product selection across all channels is important, the basic human experience at least should be seamless across channels. The person who answers the phone at your call centre should be equally as knowledgeable about your products and services as your store staff, consumers should be able to find out when and where items are in stock, and have you deliver or let them pick up their purchases as per their convenience. The returns processes, checkout processes, and customer journeys through your store, should be synchronised with and as easy as they are on the web. All this can be successfully done through human facilitation.

In summary, we’re talking about developing a cross-channel customer-facing culture that ensures your staff are making your customer’s journey as enjoyable as possible, with a view to building loyalty through experience and thus competitive advantage.