RPW 7-22-08

Retail Paradox Weekly

Retail News Analysis by RSR Research

7/22/2008

Forget Personas: Behavior-based Segmentaiton Makes Retail Interesting

By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
7/22/2008

At RSR, we often talk about a new mantra for retail – a movement away from “right product, right place, right price, right time” to a much more customer-centric goal: the right interaction and the right service for that customer’s objective at that point in time. This is about identifying how your customer wants to buy from you and matching up to that process as best you can.

The problem is this is really hard... More

IBM & POS: Rapprochement, or Realization of a Long-term Strategy?

By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
7/22/2008

One can contend that IBM never got out of the POS “solution” business, but to legacy 4690 users that train left the station a long time ago. By the early ‘90’s, IBM had a commanding position in the POS market with “soup to nuts” offerings, with perhaps 70% of tier-1 retailers running one of three IBM applications (GSA: General Sales, CSA: Chain Sales, or SA: Supermarket). Companies such as Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, CVS, Macy’s, The Gap, and many others standardized their in-store technology environments around the will-not-die platform.

Then in the Lou Gerstner era... More

Organizational Inhibitors: Derailing Change

By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
7/22/2008

I‘d like to take a few minutes to talk about one of the elements of RSR’s BOOT methodology. Frequent readers will recognize “the BOOT.” It’s an acronym and a model, and the model really works.

B=Business Challenges retailers face that drive change. These are most typically external to the enterprise. A generic, common business challenge retailers face is “improving customer service while holding the line on costs.” In today’s world... More

Apple's 'Service is Marketing' Mantra

By Nikki Baird in cooperation with RetailWire
7/22/2008

RSR’s research into workforce management has found that while retailers say that employees are a strategic part of the customer service relationship, few retailers really invest in their employees as though they were assets to keep, rather than transactional-type bodies that are going to leave in few months. There are exceptions out there – Container Store, Costco, and Apple come up often in discussions about the “best” retail employers. Recently, Apple announced... More

RSR Featured FastFact: Customer Centric Merchandising

In our recent report, Customer Centric Merchandising: Driving Differentiaion through Localization, we asked our respondents what is preventing them from enabling enhanced merchandising practices.

Thirty-three precent of Winning Retailers report they are hesitant because “we are trying to simplify our business, not make it more complex.”

This number is even higher among large retailers ($1-$5 billion in annual sales), weighing in at a whopping 55%. This presents a clear-cut need - and opportunity – for technology vendors to better prove (and educate) that the new generation of merchandising systems do not require rocket scientists to run them, nor are they so hard to integrate that they add to the plate of “spaghetti” already in IT portfolios.

To read the full report, click here.