Jamie Tenser
Retail Tech Innovation or Consumer Change: Which Came First?
The post Retail Tech Innovation or Consumer Change: Which Came First? appeared first on Tenser'sTirades.
Millennials: The Next ‘Pig in the Python’
FOR GRAYING BABY BOOMERS like me, the awesome power of demographics has in many ways defined our lives. There are a lot of us. We clogged our kindergartens, our universities, our workplaces, our media, our politics and our communities with sheer numerical might; and...
Flying or Dying: Whose View of Stores Rings True for The Future?
FOR THE 3,100 retail, tech and finance movers and shakers who gathered here in Las Vegas at the inaugural Shoptalk conference this week, an existential question still remains unresolved: Are stores poised to soar in the digital stratosphere or are they circling the digital...
Rise of the Retail Robots
FRUSTRATED WITH STORE EMPLOYEES? Maybe a mechanical clerk is the answer. The retail industry today is making some fascinating, promising, and perhaps troubling moves toward the routine use of autonomous robots in human environments. The efforts seem energized by technical advances, affordability gains, and increasing...
A Little Problem With Big Data
A STIMULATING DISCUSSION in RetailWire.com this morning led me to once again think deeply about how retailers are confronting so-called Big Data and applying it to their businesses. The question posed was an intriguing one, given the continuing hype and mysticism ascribed to Big Data...
The Store is Dead! Long Live the Store!
THE DISTINCTION between online and off-line retail sales grows blurrier by the minute, as shoppers meld their consideration and purchasing behaviors into an “all-line” shopping continuum that spans brick, web and mobile. “The war for store traffic will be won or lost on digital,” said...
A Framework for “Best Practice”
NOT LONG AGO I WAS ASKED to prepare a “Best Practices” document for a retail solutions company. The task stimulated a round of research, investigation and deep thinking. Best Practice is a term we invoke fairly often in the retail consumer products industry. Industry associations...
Contactless Payments — What’s Taking So Long?
IT’S BEEN A HALF-DECADE since I first got religion about the potential for “contactless payments” using NFC-enabled wallets in mobile phones. A very bright entrepreneur brought the concept to my attention and asked me to help advise his new firm. I agreed and got...
Where’s the ROI for Social Media?
AN INSTANT POLL that recently appeared on the home page of CPGmatters.com sheds some light on an important part of social media evaluation; namely, ROI. Every CPG company of consequence has a social media strategy nowadays. So do marketers think social media is a success?…
Invoking Relevance
BEST PRACTICE IN MOBILE ADVERTISING remains an oxymoron, as marketers grapple with the natural tension between intrusiveness and usefulness. There is a strong drive to justify ad spending and validate the business premise behind personalized promotions. Relevance seems to be the key, we are...
NRF Bulletin: Personalization Done Right
I'VE BEEN ON RECORD many times as a hater of shopper loyalty, but an advocate of intelligent personalization. I admit my position can be construed as mincing words, but I remain stubbornly committed to the distinction. When marketers and retailers try to ascribe loyalty to...
Do CPG Companies Get Online’s Potential?
CONSUMER SURVEYS FROM Deloitte and others consistently report strong intentions by households to purchase more of their grocery and packaged goods online. This has been true for many years. I suspect there's some response bias in play. A recent Retailwire.com discussion raised this issue in...
Authenticity: If You Can Fake That
RIGHT NOW CONTENT MARKETING is the name of the game. That's Content with a capital C, which is presently a thriving business in the ad agency domain. The idea is to influence the trends that flow through social and mobile media by inserting Content...
The End of Loyalty
IF IT EVER WAS, it's fast disappearing. I'm talking about shopper loyalty and the card-based frequent shopper programs that try to pass as loyalty builders. I've long been a skeptic about the premise of customer loyalty. Card based programs are more about behavioral modification, segmentation...
At eTail West: Pricing Transparency in an Omni-Channel World
I HAD THE PRIVILEGE on Feb. 27 of moderating an expert panel at the eTail West conference in Palm Springs, CA. I was accompanied by two of the industry's bright lights: Wes Woolbright, National Pricing Director of Safeway, and Carol Spieckerman, President and CEO...
Stalking Privacy
THE ERA OF INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY may turn out to be a mere blip in the sequence of human history, as the smothering embrace of the World Wide Web makes our every click and consumption act a new molecule in the Big Data tsunami. Marketers...
In-Store Sensing Tops Online Metrics
I POSTED THE FOLLOWING commentary this morning on RetailWire.com as part of a discussion, Can Online Shopper Metrics Be Brought to Stores? I believe online innovation has influenced expectations in the bricks and mortar world. Now stores are poised to deliver sensing that online...
Price Transparency: An Opaque Matter?
ALMOST OVERLOOKED during the Autumn business conference-slash-election season was a nicely-done bit of research about the new price transparency. Prepared by RetailWire.com and underwritten by IBM Smarter Commerce, the study "Pricing Transparency: Can Retailers Regain Control?" was released October 5. It was conducted in an...
The Incredible Dissolving Store
I WAS ASKED RECENTLY to address a group of consumer products managers about the possible future of Category Management. The request came at a time when I had been devoting serious thinking to several topics that at first seemed only tenuously related. Computer-generated ordering is...
Price Image in a Transparent World
ONE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS of the "showrooming" panic which seems to grip some of America's big box retailers has been a flood of learned and not-so-learned opinions from learned and not-so-learned analysts and observers. Showrooming anxiety emerged during the 2011 holiday selling season, when...