Research
The Relevant Store in the Digital Age: Benchmark 2013
8 May 2013, 17:38
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
8 April 2013, 11:01
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
6 March 2013, 08:20
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 Impact of Mobile in Retail
10 January 2013, 09:20
While consumers adopt mobile technologies at a breakneck pace, retailers tell us that mobile’s primary ability is to enhance the overall value of the brand. This is a new development for 2012, and is highly encouraging news. What is problematic, however, is that much of what retailers share in the following pages of this report [...]
WFM 2013: The Store Employee in the Customer Age
12 December 2012, 11:33
Aside from the instant gratification that comes from taking a product home after a purchase, it’s the store employee that can make the difference to the in-store experience. Most retailers agree, But most have only just tapped the surface of employee education and empowerment. A strong argument for workforce management disciplines and technology- especially for [...]
The Multi-Channel Retailer’s Reality in a Post-Amazon World: Benchmark Report 2012
14 November 2012, 11:22
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 [...]
Retail Business Intelligence: A Work in Progress
11 October 2012, 09:03
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
5 September 2012, 15:15
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 [...]
Optimizing Assortments to Invigorate Retail: Benchmark Report 2012
8 August 2012, 10:26
This year, we see a drastic difference in the perceived value of new merchandising tools and retailers’ understanding of how they can be effectively used to improve the product mix they put in front of increasingly-empowered consumers. Key Findings Include: Most merchants place a similar value on new merchandising tools — regardless of size or sales [...]
Executing on the Promise: Retail Fulfillment 2012
11 July 2012, 10:06
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 [...]