Newsletter Articles: Nikki Baird
As I sat down to write this article, I thought back to how long I’ve known JDA. I can’t attest that I’ve attended Focus, JDA’s user conference, for ten years, but I have certainly known the company as a retail analyst for that long. I haven’t always agreed with the directions JDA has taken over [...]
Last week I fielded an inquiry about the biggest questions retailers are asking in cross-channel right now, and I figured the answer was worth sharing. So here are the top questions that I hear retailers currently asking about their omni-channel strategies and/or operations. These are the “big” questions, mind you, not the tactics. What is [...]
Last week I attended the CARTES North America conference. It is an event focused more directly on credit card issuers and the technologies that support them. So what was I doing there? Well, increasingly it seems that the future these industry players are building will have direct impact on how retailers engage with customers, and [...]
A long time ago, around 2009, I wrote about killing same store sales as a comparative measure for tracking retail performance. My argument at the time was that store sales were no longer an accurate measure of a retailer’s health, thanks to the strong growth in online. I think same store sales (SSS) lingered even [...]
Last week Ceridian HCM invited out a good dozen-plus analysts to an event in Chicago to catch us all up to speed on developments at the company. As best I can tell, I was the only vertically-oriented analyst there, which speaks strongly to the company’s position in retail these days. I am admittedly not an [...]
Walmart’s woes continue as more leaked emails reveal a growing concern among company executives over a new consumer technology that promises to completely disrupt the mass merchant’s business model. While retailers like Best Buy struggle to combat showrooming and retailers like JCPenney appear to be failing miserably at redefining the future of the store, Walmart’s [...]
Pricing has been on my mind a lot lately, not least because Paula and I just wrapped up writing our 7th annual pricing benchmark (check back on our home page on 4/11 – it’ll be there). But I also came across a recent article from Stores Magazine that really cemented something for me. Two things, [...]
It’s no secret that I’ve long held that SAS’s relative strengths in both merchandising and customer intelligence uniquely position the company to both navigate and enable the customer-centric transformation that omni-channel retailers are experiencing right now. If anyone can bridge customer and merchandising in a way that drives both the marketing and merchandising organizations to [...]
I bet you’ve been in at least one conversation – if not many more – that has started from this question: “What’s the difference between multi-, cross-, and omni-channel, and which term am I supposed to use?” Often it’s presented with the caveat that the questioner doesn’t like any of the options because they all [...]
Last week, RetailWire ran a post on a new study by a professor at the University of Illinois. The gist of the study is that, in cases where “fit” is not a competitive factor in consumer decision-making, retailers should optimize retail floor space according to how much manufacturers will pay for it, even if that [...]