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3 Steps to Boost In Store Shopper Experience, Is Store Operations the key?

April 21, 2015 5:47 am No Comments April 21, 2015

Have you ever visited a store (obviously not the one you visit frequently) & got really confused where to find what you are looking for? I have, & I am sure most of you will agree. While these days management focuses more on product, service offering, marketing, store location & expansion, store level operations has become the forgotten cousin of retailing. Delivering a satisfying experience to your shoppers can lead to repeat visits, improved profitability & in the longer run it can create a very loyal customer base. On the other hand one negative experience can cost you a fortune in today’s connected economy, where people proactively share their experiences on social networks.

Improving store-level operations, therefore, often yields a high return on investment, driving sales growth in double digits with minimal incremental capital deployment. Consistent execution creates a sense of familiarity & positively influences brand perception in the mind of shoppers.

As a retail operations professional how will you insure that all of your stores are conforming to the set standards? Answers lie in unannounced visits to the stores & asking yourself a few basic questions

Do you have in store signage to guide customers to find the product & services they are looking for?
Is the store clean and does it conform to the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) set for housekeeping?
Are your trial rooms, service kiosks, wash rooms etc. clean?
Are your sales associates proactive in helping customers & do they have right product knowledge & soft skills?
Are the products displayed properly?
Are your aisles free for navigation?
Do you see satisfied shoppers on the floor?
Are your experiences consistent in all of your stores?

If you get a “NO” as an answer for any of the questions above, you have reasons to worry. You can take a three pronged approach to make your in store shopper experience consistent.

Identify all the activities performed in the store: Spend time in the store & list out all the activities performed by your store team from housekeeping and stock count to visual merchandising.
Check whether you already have SOPs defined for all the routine activities; if not then get it done as soon as possible.
Establish a performance measurement system for all activities with regular & defined cycles.

Keep visiting stores unannounced & make sure to rate every function in the store on agreed upon goals. Within a span of a few months, in store experience will be consistent through the stores & you will see happy shoppers all around.

Join the Retail Collaboration Network on LinkedIn, and connect with experts and users interested in Supplier Collaboration.

Part-3:The Internet of Things: Considerations for Marketers

April 15, 2015 11:39 am No Comments April 15, 2015

In my previous posts on the Internet of Things (IoT), I wrote about the importance of the customer journey and marketing analytics – prior to marketers exploring the notion jumping headfirst into the world of devices.

I anticipate that this question might be overwhelming for the average marketer: “What is the role of advertising when our refrigerators buy half and half?”

But marketers can start small in this world of IoT – with the friendly beacon.

Here’s why:

Market penetration for wearables is < 2% globally
Market penetration for smartphones is ~70% in the US (depending on the source)

Online publication Retail Touchpoints succinctly lists the value of beacon technologies for retail in five areas:

Beacons support location-based marketing by pushing notifications to a consumer based on their exact location (e.g., store)
Beacons provide additional shopper data for retailers to use to decipher customer behaviors
Beacons serve as a combat tool for showrooming and drive shoppers back to in-store purchases
Beacons allow retailers to deliver offers to loyal customers to continue fostering the retail-consumer relationship
Beacons enhance the overall customer experience by providing a conduit by which to deliver personalized offers

The benefits of beacons extend to manufacturers and CPG suppliers as well. CPG companies can affix beacons to in-store displays and leverage data to push offers to consumers lingering in front of the brand offering (in addition to a variety of other use cases). In a time when 76% of purchase decisions are made in-store (Source: 2012 POPAI Shopper Engagement Study) – the beacons serve as a useful tool to capitalize on this opportunity.

Use cases abound for beacons! For more use cases, visit here.

Don’t believe in the value of beacons? Apparently, London’s Regent Street is seeing incredible results with its 80-store beacon experiment. These stores leverage beacons to communicate product information, campaign offers and coupons. The initial results are in – Regent Street has reported a 6% click-through rate (CTR) on location-based marketing and beacon-enabled communication.

So, now I have to plug Manthan. This is possible – today. If you want to envision how you can leverage customer insights, personalization solutions and beacon technologies to enhance your customer experience and take advantage of the IoT, give us a call.

Part-2:The Internet of Things: Staying Focused on the Customer

April 8, 2015 10:29 am No Comments April 8, 2015

In my last post, I talked about the meaning of the Internet of Things (IoT) for marketers. As a quick recap, marketers must understand that (1) their customers are ALWAYS on and (2) they must always be ON to their customers.

In this post, I intend to cover IoT versus personalization. In an earlier post, I mentioned that marketers must remain customer-centric. Therefore, the IoT should not be a distraction, but an enabler to building better relationships with their customers.

Marketers round the world agree about the gravity of the IoT. Acccording to recent research from the Economist Intelligence Unit, marketing executives believe that IoT, compared to other trends, will have the biggest impact on marketers by the year 2020. Personalization fell just short of IoT on the ranking, by a mere 1%.

At Manthan, our point of view is that the customer comes first. The marketer should work to cultivate a meaningful relationship with the consumer using personalization technologies. These technologies should be based on critical customer insights supported by predictive analytics. To arrive at critical customer insights, relevant data sources much be aggregated and analyzed. This includes data from internal systems (e.g., CRM, transaction data, browsing data, etc.) and external systems (e.g., social media, third party data providers, consumer devices).

IoT comes into play with the data collection and the personalization pieces of the puzzle.

But here’s the danger with buzzwords and marketing phrases of the minute like IoT. Like Big Data, IoT is a concept. We see that marketers are still struggling to build effective business cases for Big Data (they are out there though!).

When you look at wearables like Google Glass and Apple Watch, it’s easy to fall into the trap that it’s all just hype. Unfortunately, it is likely to stay in the realm of hype until marketers commit to customer-centricity first, then execution second.

A recent Ad Age article warned against the hype of wearables, noting that marketers must create a vision on what the future customer experience should look like. At Manthan, we agree with this recommendation wholeheartedly.

Therefore, marketers must arrive at an understanding of the current customer journey to architect the future state journey. This involves analytics.

IoT has the capacity to provide very personal data – what I’ll call “micro-moments” for now. The customer journey is not linear, it’s a series of ups and downs and loops around points of interaction. Each interaction point results in a customer action or non-action. Today, many marketers can create assumptions as to why the customer decided to act or not act to a given trigger (e.g., ad, coupon, etc.). But IoT, with the promises of smart watches, apparels and otherwise, can start to record some very interesting data points, like heartbeat, moods, location, stress levels, calendars and more. Instead of sending a new email offer when a consumer abandons an online shopping cart – could we possibly obtain data regarding the consumer’s individual sentiment at the time of abandoning the cart? Then, instead of delivering an offer to incentivize a return to purchase – can we provide an intelligent offer that overcomes the exact customer objection to the sale? This is the “micro-moment of truth” and when the rubber meets the road, in terms of IoT.

However, the “micro-moment of truth” is still under construction. Marketers need to understand the path-to-purchase first, then layer over additional characteristics on this journey, such as customer emotion.

So, how can marketers get their proverbial feet wet with IoT and get closer to the customer – perhaps even as close as the moment of truth (note that this is not the micro-moment of truth!)?

The answer lays within the beacon – which I’ll cover in my next post. Stay tuned.

The #1 Challenge Related to Marketing Measurement

April 7, 2015 6:29 am No Comments April 7, 2015

There’s truth in the phrase “the more things change, the more things stay the same.”

Even with all the changes in the marketing landscape, with the proliferation of channels (including digital) and new technologies to support the aims of the modern marketer, the #1 metric for CMOs is no different today than it was decades ago. Yes, it’s marketing ROI.

Despite the fact that marketing ROI has been the #1 metric year over year for many years, CMOs are under more pressure than ever to prove this to the c-suite and the board. 2014 results published by The CMO Survey indicate that yes, 62% of marketers feel pressure to prove the value of marketing and 65% of these marketers feel that the pressure is on the rise. It is important to note that of the entire pool of marketers that admitted they were feeling the squeeze to justify their spend, zero noted that this pressure was on the decline.

Other CMO surveys corroborate the findings published by The CMO Survey. In general, marketers communicated the same degree of challenges and lack of confidence in marketing ROI measurements. According to the 2013 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey, 75% of marketers report challenges in calculating the ROI of their efforts.

So why is marketing ROI still a challenge? What’s puzzling about this challenge is the abundance of data marketers with access to, and the availability of, a wide variety of strong reporting and analysis tools.

The reality is that the proliferation of data and digital channels has only added to the complexity involved in ROI measurement. Unfortunately, the analytical maturity of the marketing department has not kept up with the pace of the big data explosion, digital trends, data science, and analytics how-to essentials. The result is the technical and analytical skills gap.

In response to this skills gap, new and old roles have come to the forefront of the conversation. The former being the “marketing technologist” and the latter being the “data scientist”. These highly coveted roles are few and far between amongst the overall marketing population.

The worst things about this skills gap and resource shortage are that marketing departments are not investing in their current staff. The CMO Survey reports an overall decrease in spending to invest in cultivating “how to do marketing” skills. There’s a dangerous disconnect here: although CMO’s are prioritizing investments in marketing measurement and analytics technologies, they are not prioritizing the investments in their staff to effectively use these solutions for better results.

CMO’s need to make data aggregation and analytics a priority and allow their left brain to have more equal footing and approach marketing as a science as well as art. To provide ROI measurements systematically and report to the CEO with confidence, there needs to be a merging of business understanding and data science expertise, centralized data, appropriate analytical tools and capabilities and the willingness to invest in developing their staff to support data and analysis functions.

In 20 years’ working with Fortune 1000 companies in sales, marketing, and marketing technology and analytics, nothing has surprised me more than the lack of investment in training in marketing personnel responsible to use sophisticated analytical and reporting technologies, in terms of training and willingness to recruit and pay for top talent. Think of it this way: why spend $500,000 on data aggregation and powerful analytical solutions if they will not be used due to an overall lack of understanding, support, and training?

Some of this is a “tools issue”, which many analytics vendors, like Manthan, are responding to, by bringing advanced analytics and predictive technologies that are easy-to-use and intuitive to market. These solutions turn big data into digestible insights for the everyday marketer.

But CMOs still need to make the softer side of data science a priority. The market and the customer will continue to evolve – the marketer must be prepared to meet the customer on all fronts – offline and online. Marketing leaders must support staff development in the areas of CRM and analysis capabilities to overcome the digital and analytical skills gap.

Can Collaborative Category Management Drive Sustainable Like-for-Like Growth in Retail?

April 7, 2015 5:53 am No Comments April 7, 2015

If there is one reason as to why retail companies can have a healthy bottom line, it is because of their ‘like-for-like’ (LFL) growth. But sustaining growth in the LFL stores is a challenge faced across geographies and retailers. When a retailer or brand opens a new store, it creates excitement in the locality & encourages curiosity in shoppers to visit. Hence we see a big surge in walk-in traffic into the store & even if conversion rates aren’t very high, the store manages to generate a boost in revenues. But as the store ages, competition catches up, and there are new entrants into the marketplace. Shoppers get pampered with too many choices & shift their loyalties to retailers who offer special services & perks. This results in higher retailer spending for marketing & operations expenses, in order to improve the shopping experience. With top-line erosion due to competition & increase in spend to retain shopper loyalty, retailers end up in loss or decreased top and bottom lines.

There are multiple ways to overcome this challenge & remain profitable. One of them is driving healthy competition among your suppliers by providing relevant insights about category share, product attribute trends etc. A category in retail can have multiple product lines and in each product line is served by multiple suppliers.

There are suppliers who are category leaders across product lines & on the other side, there are suppliers whose presence is minuscule. Every supplier aspires to be a category leader or grab as much market/store share as they can. Retailers need to leverage this competition among suppliers to expand their reach & fill the gap in their assortment. They need to provide suppliers the opportunity to scale in existing product lines by giving access to category insights & collaborating with them to launch new products in complementary or supplementary product lines. For the retailer, these initiatives will result in better products on shelves, better-targeted promotions and lead to increased shopper engagement and loyalty. At the end suppliers will be happy to see spikes in their category share, shoppers will be happy to get new & relevant choices & ultimately as a retailer you will increase your share of the overall market pie.

A few questions that retailers need to find answers to & share with suppliers to help them grow their business:

Attribute analysis (like flavor, color, pack size, cuisine, gluten free etc) :
- Which are your top selling products, & which the product attributes make items fly off the shelves?
- What’s the right packaging size for your retail format? For e.g- smaller pack sizes sell more in convenience stores than hypermarkets.
- Which attributes of your products directly impact customer purchasing decisions in various categories?
- Is there a marked difference in product attribute preferences across geographies & demographic profiles?
- Does the channel of sale determine the attributes of potential top selling products? For e.g. products where touch & feel does not play an important decision making factor sell more on e-Commerce channels.
Price band analysis (>$5, $5-$10, $10>$15 etc) :
- Are your shoppers price-sensitive?
- Do they behave uniformly while purchasing across categories?
- Do you have gaps at different price band levels?
Seasonal trends (Halloween, party supplies, decorations etc)
- Do you have seasonal spikes in sales of specific categories?
- Do you forecast for these seasonal items & collaborate with suppliers to get these on time in full?
- Do you stock up in the store before the sale season?
EDLP(Everyday Low Pricing) product analysis (list of products & volume share)
- Do you have product offerings in the ELDP category?
- Do you forecast volume of these products & share insights with your suppliers?
- Do you optimize prices for ELDP products?
Product affinity analysis (which products are bought together)
- Do you share insights on shopper basket with your suppliers?
- Do you encourage bundling & cross selling across suppliers?
Shoppers’ unfulfilled needs (New product opportunity)
- Do you have a system to identify unfulfilled needs of shoppers in your stores?
- How fast can you collaborate with suppliers & bring these new products onto the shop floor?

These actionable category insights will equip suppliers to cater to the unfulfilled need of your shoppers. New product launches to fill price gaps etc will recruit new customers in the category. Bundling & cross-promotion of products will increase shopper basket sizes. Last but not least, these insights will also help suppliers to channel their marketing budget into targeted campaigns which will give them better ROI.

Join the Retail Collaboration Network on LinkedIn, and connect with experts and users interested in Supplier Collaboration.

Part-1:The Internet of Things: Considerations for Marketers

April 1, 2015 1:32 pm No Comments April 1, 2015

In the tech industry, especially us marketing technology providers, have a tendency to overuse buzz words and phraseology. And, as we all know, leopards don’t change their spots. So, when I was asked to draft a post on The Internet of Things (IoT), I contemplated using the following for a post title: Death to the Smartphone.

But does IoT mean that the smartphone is going away? Do a quick Google search and many bloggers say yes. But we haven’t even perfected our use of the smartphone yet, especially in terms of connecting with the consumer. In addition, consider this data:

Nearly 3/4’s of all people in the US that access the Internet also use a smartphone
Depending on your source, estimates show that 70-90% of the US population access the Internet

Talk about mass market!

On the other hand, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech surveys, approximately 1% of people worldwide are using wearables. Of course, this dismal market penetration is only expected to grow. But is it possible that it grow so quickly that IoT is a main driver of how marketers communicate with the consumer in 2020? Keep in mind, 2020 is only five years away.

For those of you that are new to the Internet of Things, let’s look to research giant Gartner for a quick overview. Per Gartner, IoT is “the network of dedicated physical objects (things) that contain embedded technology to sense or interact with their internal state or external environment … comprises an ecosystem that includes things, communication, applications and data analysis.”

In short, IoT encompasses devices that talk to one another. Of course, there are already successful use cases of the effectiveness of IoT in many industries, including energy and healthcare. For instance, IoT drives effective energy useage with sensors that monitor levels and adjust for peak versus downtime. In healthcare, IoT can fundamentally change the way the medical industry delivers care, especially for chronic disease management, such as continuous health monitoring (as opposed to periodic) for patients with congestive heart failure.

But for other industries, like we’re seeing with Big Data, the use cases might not be as clear. Here’s the most fundamental “truth” when marketers and other digital professionals consider IoT:

Your customer is always online.

Today, your customer is online much of the time via their smartphone. And marketers are just beginning to scratch the surface here and leverage mobile devices to employ location-based marketing tactics and mobile offers. With any sort of digital interaction, the marketer has the ability to collect behavioral information, analyze and take action. Now that we recognize that customers are always online, let’s consider the ramification:

Marketers should always be ON to their customers.

What I mean by this is that marketers should take every viable opportunity to leverage customer data in order to enhance the shopper relationship. Since the consumer is always online, there are many data points that one can glean. With wearables, the data point volume rises exponentially. I recently ran across a research report from RSR, which noted that retail marketers are moving from emphasizing information distribution to their customers (i.e., store location, inventory availability, etc.) to emphasizing understanding the customer. The latter allowing the retail marketer to give the consumer the right information at the right place and the right time, via the right channel.

So, here’s the thing. IoT is big. It WILL change the way B2C businesses interact with the consumer (which I will explore in my next post).

But, marketers and IT professionals shouldn’t be distracted by IoT. Yes, it’s important. But it’s more important to keep your eye on the prize, that is, keeping the customer at the center of your customer marketing and marketing technology strategy.

The New 4 A’s of Marketing: Analytics is the Glue

March 31, 2015 1:25 pm No Comments March 31, 2015

During my last post, I talked about the third new A of marketing, i.e., Appropriate. This week, I want to talk about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: Analytic.

To recap, I believe the new four A’s of marketing is an approach that every marketer needs to adopt in order to overcome big-bang disruptions associated with new models, new technologies, and the new mindset of customers (see my previous posts on the New 4 A’s of Marketing).

In an article from HBR, entitled “The Ultimate Marketing Machine”, after ten thousand CMOs interviews, researchers discovered the following: 52% of high performing marketers leverage analytics for marketing effectiveness.

I can only assume they are also part of the 13% – that is, the 13% of marketers that are prepared to face big-bang disruption (see previous post). Perhaps unsurprising, Analytics is the quintessential glue that ties together the other A’s of new marketing.

Analytics is essential for Agility – how else can you make smart – indeed BETTER decisions?

It’s also critical for Accountability. In fact, analytics provide the very foundation for marketing attribution and measurement.

Appropriate (i.e., personalization and relevance) at scale is only possible with predictive analytics (propensity could be understood to be the likelihood for this message to be appropriate).

And yet, and YET Analytics seems hard. Scary. Expensive. Data-driven marketing is moving out of the back office into the boardroom. It is driving the best marketing – period. And it need not be expensive – start with specific business opportunities (or use analytics to identify where there is opportunity). Then plan, execute, measure and repeat.

At a recent Argyle conference, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion on how data is aiding marketers navigate the omni-channel landscape. Many of the marketers in the room were talking about how much time they spend rehashing data. What was concerning is that a large contingent expressed lack of clarity regarding what is important (analysis paralysis). The successful CMOs and other marketing executives were pointing to a need to clearly define measurement objectives and subsequently, marketing metrics and arrive at a decision quickly. Being Analytic is not just discovering, but it is deciding and doing too.

To sum it up: Be Analytic. Be a Hero.

Related Solution: Transform your Customer Marketing with Manthan's Customer Analytics Solution

New Guide: Building Marketing Campaigns to Reduce Customer Churn

March 27, 2015 12:31 pm No Comments March 27, 2015

Most marketers know it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. However, executing an effective retention campaign is not as straightforward. Marketers who want to engage at-risk customers may ask the following questions:

Who are my customers who have already defected to a competitor?
Who are my customers that are currently exploring other options?
What should I offer to each of these segments to regain their shopper loyalty?
When should I send out these promotional offers? What channel should I use?
How do I know if my marketing campaigns were effective?

In this Hyper-targeted Customer Retention product brief, we explore how marketers can leverage predictive analytics, real-time interaction management and data-driven marketing to find out which customers are at risk of churn and how to engage them at the moment that matters.

Download this new Hyper-Targeted Customer Retention solution brief to learn more about driving customer loyalty and data-driven marketing.

The New 4 A’s of Marketing: Personalization

March 26, 2015 12:16 pm No Comments March 26, 2015

Mass Marketing is So Over

Moving on to the third new A of marketing, namely, Appropriate. Last week we covered Accountability, including marketing measurement and attribution.

After a couple of posts, you might get the feeling that I’m a Harvard Business Review junkie. I am. So multiple marketing offers for Martha Stewart Living magazine – do you think that would go over well?

OK, back to Appropriate. In a previous post, I referenced an HBR article entitled ”Ultimate Marketing Machine”. This article invoked Share of Experience as the new Share of Wallet. This is very fitting, especially in a world where Chief Customer Experience Officers are proliferating.

But what does this mean? How do you get Share of Experience? Being appropriate to your customer, segment, stage of purchase and channel are all critical pieces to solve the personalization puzzle. And unfortunately, these are moving pieces, which makes it a very complicated puzzle.

Pizza and Personalization

Is the ‘next best offer’ sufficient for personalizing an experience? Probably not. As marketers, we may think of getting to the next revenue-generating conversion, but we need to acknowledge that customers view their interactions with a company as a complete brand experience. This extends beyond purchase and next best offer.

But let’s not boil the ocean. Marketers, you need to take the first step: start by personalizing an OFFER (and we have a personalization engine that does that!). Once you have personalized messages and offers running smoothly, move towards personalization of the EXPERIENCE. This includes a determination of what is appropriate for this individual customer. Some days it MAY be an offer and some days it might not be, it might be a new service or as (eye glasses maker who just sent a bar voucher to someone having a bad day) just did it might be an act of kindness. It might be a new way to wear something a customer already purchased. Think Zappos and Tony Tsieh’s pizza story.

Everyday, my inbox is full of “personalized offers” but some are very clear that the marketers behind a brand don’t really know me. Today (really today) I received an offer from Hilton to check-in online and pick out my room when I get to Seattle tomorrow (awesome! I like quiet rooms far from the elevator) and an offer from a salad company that I LOVE to go to an event they are hosting in a state far away from me (now I feel sad that I cannot go).

Now, I’ll be ‘Captain Obvious’: Technology is technology. Without technology, doing personalized offers at any scale is hard (or impossible). Yet, good technology does not guarantee that you will be Appropriate. A clear understanding of your customer and her (or his) needs is essential to success.

Be Appropriate. Be a Hero.

Next post, I’ll review the fourth and final new A of marketing: Analytic.

Why Marketers Should Care about Jingle the Dog

March 25, 2015 9:36 am No Comments March 25, 2015

Jingle the Dog was a fun gift from Hallmark. At least, it was for a little while. Much like new marketing solutions out there. As marketers, we are dazzled by the bells and whistles. The furry toy barked along when parents read a special holiday story about doggy adventures to their little one. With every woof from the fuzzy stuffed animal, the story came to life. The child, captivated, clapped his hands in delight.

Until Jingle stopped barking. Bewildered parents tried to console their wailing children and pored over every aspect of the puppy to determine the point of failure. Initial composure turns into rage. The parent turned to her current social media channel of choice and unleashed a battery of wildly negative comments or posted videos that documented their young child mid-tantrum, banging the floor with their fists and whimpering, “Why is Jingle dead?”.

As a last resort, the parent stomped to her local Hallmark store and demanded a replacement. Much to the parent’s dismay, a befuddled store manager offered a meager refund (Jingle is no longer in stock!). The parent fumed, uttered a few expletives intertwined with remarks regarding poor product quality and stormed out of the store.

The above scenario could happen at any business. As marketers, we were so enthralled with the beautiful campaign reports pitched to us during the analytics solutions sales process. Using these reports, we patted ourselves on the proverbial backs when sales for our recently launched “Jingle” (insert your hot product here) in our “mommy” segment (insert most profitable customer segment here) was off the charts. But we failed to notice that we only had a part of the story. And that our brand story extended well beyond the point of purchase.

What can Jingle the Dog teach us? Campaign data visualizations may paint a pretty picture, but often don’t relay a complete understanding of the customer experience. Analytics that only address the magic moment (i.e., purchase or conversion) is no longer sufficient. To effectively build a better relationship with the customer, analytical solutions must provide marketers with the whole story. To truly understand the customer, the marketer must keep tabs on the entire lifecycle, from awareness to consideration to purchase through use. This requires the incorporation of multiple data streams into customer insights analysis, including offline, digital and social.

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Mass Marketing is So Over

Pizza and Personalization