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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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Social Media’s Impact on Customer Engagement
May 15, 2011
Social media channels offer forward-thinking retailers a true chance to engage with customers the way they live, and in return, the way they shop. Properly executed, social media offers the opportunity to become a more personalized part of current and potential customers’ lives and build genuine loyalty – the hallmark of Retail Winners throughout the [...]
The State of Personalization in Retail: Benchmark 2010
August 1, 2010
‘Personalization’ is rapidly becoming the defining experience on the web, setting customer expectations for the relevancy of their interactions with retailers and brands across all channels. But how well are retailers keeping up? This report examines the state of personalization in customer communications today, and where retailers are heading in the near future. After a brutal [...]
The Promotion Trap: Why Promotions Are Now a Critical Cross-Organizational Issue
June 1, 2010
Promotions have undergone a strategic shift in the last two years, created by the combined forces of economic pressures; a re-learning of the importance of promotions as a traffic driver as retailers move away from other, less effective price strategies; and new requirements imposed by the drive to localize assortments. However, these new drivers behind [...]
CRM and Loyalty 2009: Increasing Relevance to Drive Customer Demand
August 15, 2009
Early versions of customer relationship management were just not ready for retail prime time, but the same can no longer be said today. With consumer demand rocked by the triple-whammy of high unemployment, low housing prices, and crushed financial markets, customer programs and CRM-related initiatives have become top priorities for retailers looking to maintain relationships [...]
Loyalty and Personalization: The Next Generation of Retail CRM
August 15, 2008
Last year, RSR found loyalty programs at a crossroads. Many retailers were not getting value out of their programs, and had locked themselves into a “pay to play” catch-22, where they were essentially offering discounts to consumers in exchange for collecting purchase history. This year’s report takes a step back to look at more foundational [...]
Managing Expectations: Lessons Learned from Promotion Optimization
April 15, 2008
Given the unique challenges facing promotion optimization, along with the extremely high interest from retailers for these solutions, RSR took a look at the results of its recent benchmark report, “The Next Generation of Pricing” to see if early adopters of promotion optimization solutions had a different perspective from the rest – if there were [...]