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The Relevant Store in the Digital Age: Benchmark 2013
May 8, 2013
As stores try to find their way in a brand new digital world, we asked retailers to candidly share their experiences. Key Findings Retail Winners see stores helping to compete with the online experience and are less likely to think future growth will only come from digital channels. They expect they can reverse the erosion [...]
Tough Love: An In-Depth Look at Retail Pricing Practices
April 8, 2013
Retailers continue to escalate the number of price changes they send to stores and other channels. Their field human resource infrastructure groans under the sheer weight of the work effort involved in keeping signage and tags up to date, but pressured by perceived consumer price sensitivity and increased competitive pressures, these price changes continue. This [...]
Retail Payments: When the Future Becomes Now
March 6, 2013
In three years’ time, retailers expect mobile and digital payments to catapult from almost nothing to a major piece of their payments environment. But they aren’t looking to their traditional payment partners to lead them through this maze of payments change — they expect consumer-focused technology companies to take charge. Why would retailers look in this [...]
Retail Business Intelligence: A Work in Progress
October 11, 2012
The rapid shifts in consumer behavior and the proliferation of new channels that are forcing retailers to cope with new data sources, new ways of looking at analytics and new analytics capabilities — combined with new form factors like tablets and smart phones — are upending the well-established discipline of Business Intelligence in retail. The report is [...]
Marketing in Retail: Making the Case for the CMO
September 5, 2012
The retail marketing leader currently seems halfway through a transition — reporting in the right place, but without the span of control or influence that will help that leader succeed as retail enterprises transform themselves into customer-centric organizations. And that serves as the primary theme we found in our 2012 benchmark on the state of marketing [...]
Executing on the Promise: Retail Fulfillment 2012
July 11, 2012
In this report, we find the retail world at a decision point. Retailers have managed to isolate their supply chains from cross-channel impacts, but the volume has now grown to the point where it can no longer be ignored. But even more so than the conflicts that arose between eCommerce and stores, we find that [...]
Omni-Channel 2012: Cross-Channel Comes of Age
June 12, 2012
When RSR first started conducting cross-channel benchmarks, our going-in thesis involved testing whether retailers thought multi-channel retailing was an important priority. At the time, not all of them did. Today, we find ourselves at a new inflection point — no longer is the discussion about whether cross-channel is important. Instead, whether they view it as strategic or not, [...]
Retail Pricing in a Post-Channel World: Benchmark Report 2012
April 10, 2012
RSR Research has conducted benchmarks of retailers’ pricing strategies since 2007. During that time, we have seen retailers swing from trying to achieve Everyday Low Price (EDLP) to hyper-promotions as the bottom fell out of consumer demand, to a panicked response to consumers’ latest ability to compare prices, whether between online and store or between [...]
Retail Supply Chain 2012: Globalization, Localization, and Cross-Channel
March 7, 2012
Supply chain may well be one of the least flexible functions of the retail business. Compared to an ad that can be dropped or a product that can be marked down or recalled, if supply chain isn’t functioning well, the process to fix it can be long and painful. Unfortunately, retail supply chain’s history of [...]
eCommerce 2012: Back to the Future
January 26, 2012
While virtually all retailers expect more revenue to ultimately come from the online channel than ever before, they are more challenged than ever to keep up with evolving consumer behavior. Never before has an exciting online shopping experience that understands the customer’s lifestyle – and how the brand and products can engage and suit that lifestyle [...]