Lorraine Branch's Blog

Scrooge spirit continues on the high street

2005-11-10T12:26:00Z

It comes as little surprise that retailers fear the worst for this year’s Christmas trading as the Scrooge spirit continues on the high street.

With consumers becoming increasingly cautious, retailers cannot afford any slip-ups over the Christmas period. Failing to fulfil orders, deliver on time, or guarantee full shelves will cost retailers dearly in what are already difficult trading conditions.

What’s more, the retailers who take the pain out of the often onerous Christmas shop will capitalise on the festive pound. This means using the latest technology to deliver excellent customer service.

Success will hinge on offering customers as many different ways to buy as possible while maintaining a consistent retail experience.

In-store self-service kiosks, SMS ordering and user-friendly websites are just a few of the ways that retailers can go the extra service mile when combined with efficient order management systems.

Retailers who fail to provide a fully integrated channel approach will find themselves left out in the cold.

BLOTO (Buying Loads of Tat Online) Syndrome

2005-11-03T13:06:00Z

Conchango recently commissioned GfK NOP to do some research to ascertain whether consumers behave differently when shopping online to shopping offline. We found some rather disturbing results including 7% of consumers who knew somone who had admitted to shopping online whilst naked and 6% whilst drunk!

I mentioned this to a friend who's boyfriend frequently shopped online after a night out with the boys and eating a kebab. Much to her dismay she is usually the one who has to answer the door to the courier delivering items in non-descript brown papers bags and boxes.

The internet has certainly opened up a new channel for many retailers. But what's so frustrating is some retailers still just don't get it!

I don't have much time to go browsing and shopping on the high street anymore. Like most people I have my favourite brands because I know what fits my style and figure. But not all of my favourite retailers offer an online channel, nor do they offer the same experience, choice, ease of purchase and security.

When I have time and I happen to be passing my favourite high street shop on Oxford Street, I have a fantastic shopping experience (if it's not on a busy Saturday - queues are horrendous), 3 floors of fashion and accessories in every colour and size possible. But then I visit their online shop and have a totally different experience. The home page takes ages to load all because they've got a background picture of a beautiful women - bothered? Not! Then I try to navigate the site (took me ages to find the navigation bar)....which makes me feel physically sick as the images of jeans flash by me one by one. Will my bum look big in them? Haven't a clue as I can only view the front of the image, can't zoom either to check out the finer details, which everyone women wants to do!

So what I'm saying is, retailers are causing consumers to have different brand loyalties online and offline. And until they realise they have to offer the same shopping experience offline - online, they're going to continue to alienate their customers.

Intelligent Mobile Marketing - at last something useful!

2005-09-20T12:29:00Z

I'm sure you will all agree that those pikey 'money-off' coupons printed in the national newspapers, retailers' magazines and on till receipts are not only pointless, but annoying. Firstly they're totally not trendy and secondly if you do find the time to cut one out of a magazine (in the privacy of your own home of course), do you ever remember to take it with you when you go shopping and then redeem it? I for one have a plethora of handbags and purses and therefore never use the things.

Well thanks to some new funky technology by Mobile Marketing company i-movo, my street credability and purse can stay healthy. That is if retailers and manufacturers realise the true value of this technology and pass it onto their consumers. What this mean is that retailers and manufacturers can send marketing promotions via SMS direct to their consumers.

So why has this taken so long you might ask? Well, retailers such as Tesco's and Asda are reluctant to invest in any more POS (Point of Sale) systems since the launch of chip and pin in January 2005. Therefore technology companies have been forced to look at maximising retailers existing POSand payment systems to accept and redeem these vouchers.

i-movo, the mobile marketing division of Conchango, whose clients include Nectar, All-Bar-One and Cuervo, has extended its secure mobile marketing platform, which allows vouchers sent to consumers by SMS to be redeemed at retail outlets using existing payment terminal infra-structures such as stand-alone point of sale terminals and retail EPOS systems.

i-movo’s platform issues a mobile ‘voucher’, containing an individual identification number, which is delivered to a consumer’s mobile phone using SMS. Each number is checked at point-of-sale using the retailers’ existing EPOS or payment terminal devices. The electronic nature of the transaction ensures that the voucher cannot be used more times than is permitted by the issuer, and is limited to participating retailers within the duration of the promotion.

As the system is paperless, the retailer is refunded with the cost of the goods or promotion very quickly, and needless administration time and cost are greatly reduced.

The marketing professionals who run the campaign will also benefit from the new system – detailed reports and analysis are available in real time, so campaign managers can keep track of results as they happen.

What makes this a secure and stable solution is that i-movo worked with TS3 Interactive Ltd, one of the UK’s leading independent payment systems providers. With 8.3 billion card based payment transactions being processed in the UK every year through various types of electronic payment infrastructures. These networks are trusted implicitly by retailers and consumers alike.

Let just hope retailers and manufacturers embrace this new technology which can only leads to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. The next step would be to know that I've walked into a shop and the retailer/manufacturer send me an SMS coupon based on my histoical shopping patterns. e.g offer me £1 off a bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape as soon as i walk through the shop door, as I used to buy it on a regular basis but have stopped in the last month or so. Now that's what I call customer service! I would certainly be more loyal if my retailer directed marketing campaigns more intelligently.

The technology is here already...the retailers just need to understand this is what their consumers want.

From bad to worse for London Retailers

2005-09-12T07:49:00Z

Latest statistics from the BRC (British Retail Consortium) claim that Retail sales in Central London during August were 11.5% lower on a like-for-like basis, than in August 2004. But putting the panic aside for one moment, what can they do to retain profitability?

Online spending is set to increase by 35 per cent in the next year. However, as the Congestion Charge and environmental factors continue to eat away at high street footfall, it’s alarming to see that the top 100 retailers spent a mere £100m between them on web development last year.

For Retail businesses to stay successful, they must offer appealing alternatives to the branch environment. A recent Gartner survey revealed that 82% of women are willing to shop online. But if customers reach for the mouse how do retailers make this as satisfying as physically shopping? The key is to provide an overall experience that provides convenience, choice and most importantly security.

What’s more, the much-triumphed success of online-only retailers such as figleaves.com and asos.com shows that high street retailers cannot afford to be complacent - competition for the online pound continues to hot up.

High street retailers can steal a march on smaller or online-only retailers by providing an overall experience across all channels, fully integrated between the web and the high street.

Retailers must take web investment seriously if they’re to get their slice of the online pie. It’s about time that they put their money where their mouse is.

The end result is that spend per customer will increase, cancelling out the reduction in footfall.