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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 [...]
The Multi-Channel Retailer’s Reality in a Post-Amazon World: Benchmark Report 2012
November 14, 2012
Customers have become channel agnostic, and as a result, retailers know they must be as well. But this year, the challenges typically associated with operating a successful eChannel — all are overcome by cross-channel coordination and inventory deployment. Key Findings Include: 50% of those with top-performing sales (Retail Winners) are operating more than 4 brands or [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Customer Centricity 2.0: The Rise of the Chief Marketing Officer
December 14, 2011
Retailers are currently struggling with something beyond a proliferation of channels – it’s more like an explosion – both for selling to and communicating with consumers. This disruption is hitting the marketing department, as retailers rush to provide a single customer experience across digital and traditional channels. It is also felt within the retail executive [...]
The Local Approach: The State of Localized Advertising in Retail
September 15, 2011
By Nikki Baird & Steve Rowen As retailers struggle to create relevant, “local” experiences in digital channels, they are also challenged to maintain their stores’ relevancy – retailers must rethink the store’s role in a shopping process that increasingly relies on digital experiences. RSR undertook an evaluation of how well retailers are using digital experiences to [...]
Keeping Up with the Mobile Consumer
September 1, 2011
By Nikki Baird & Steve Rowen While much has been made of consumer adoption of smart phones and the havoc it is wreaking on the retail enterprise, very little data exists as to how, exactly, retailers are responding. What are the biggest priorities – apps, mobile sites, mobile marketing campaigns? What about the platforms for devices [...]