On a lighter note, customers do appreciate creative store fronts.
Grocery Shopping Just Became Awesome
Every husband or boyfriend would gladly do the weekly food march for his woman if all grocery stores had this. I think store managers should learn from the guys that built this beautiful display. If all of them did something to this extent I’m sure they’d get more business in a heartbeat (or a Koopa stomp).
Super Pepsi Mario in a Safeway Store
Retailers Flock to Coupa Cloud Spend Management to Cut Costs
by Deepak Sharma on Tuesday, August 03, 2010
With soft consumer spending, retailers are investing in process improvements and technology to more effectively control their spending and protect their profits. They are under constant pricing pressure from incurring costs associated with operating distributed store locations, warehouses, etc. Here is where company like Coupa comes in. Coupa provides a cloud solution that combines e-procurement and expense management into one platform which offers several advantages to retailers to adopt smarter spending practices:
- Enables companies to save money because they have greater visibility into the expense pool
- Can drill down and audit problem areas of spending, curb "maverick" spending
- Because it's cloud based, all this data is accessible in real-time and provides the ability to track spending behaviors, see trends both internally and against how other companies are doing/spending and set benchmarks, and then adjust practices moving forward.
Coupa just announced a significant uptick in the number of retail and franchise businesses selecting Coupa to more effectively manage and control their indirect spending. Here’s the complete news release:
Retailers Flock to Coupa Cloud Spend Management to Cut Costs
The Container Store, Michaels and Others Protect their Bottom Line from Slowed Consumer Spending
SAN MATEO, Calif. – August 3, 2010 – Coupa Software, the leading provider of disruptive and innovative cloud spend management (CSM) solutions for squeezing savings from business operations, today announced a significant uptick in the number of retail and franchise businesses selecting Coupa to more effectively manage and control their indirect spending.
Express, Inc., The Limited, Michaels, The Container Store, Dollar General, and a prominent specialty retailer of stylish home furnishings and high quality cookware are among the retailers leveraging Coupa’s platform for their e-procurement needs.
With soft consumer spending renewing worries about a fragile economic recovery, retailers and franchise businesses are investing in process improvements and technology innovations to more effectively control their spending and protect their profits. Coupa Cloud Spend Management offers several advantages to retailers eager to adopt smarter spending practices, including:
- Centralized control over procurement processes and greater visibility into spending at the store level, without having to deploy IT resources or professional buyers in each location.
- Broad adoption with an easy-to-use solution that requires minimal change management and training to learn or adopt, perfect for workforces characterized by non-office personnel, or that have high turnover or seasonal fluctuations in their employee base.
- Ability to segregate content and streamline store-level purchasing through content groups. For example, with Coupa, retailers can segregate catalog items, how to buy policies, contracts, punchout sites and more by region, store layout, or other logical grouping to standardize ordering processes in each location.
- Full budgeting support, including budget remaining checks before requisitions are approved, and roll-up reporting for store-level, and regional (or district) spending relative to budget.
- Universal access via any web browser. As the only true multi-tenant cloud company in the e-procurement category, the software can be accessed from the Amazon cloud via any web browser. There is no hardware to buy, or software to install.
- Fast time to value. Everything you need to get started is included in a single subscription price and standard implementations are free, perfect for organizations designed to be self-sufficient at the store level, without expensive IT overhead.
“Coupa’s traction in our industry does not surprise me at all,” said Scott Jones, Purchasing Agent and Coupa Project Manager at The Container Store. “The dynamics of the retail business model demand efficient and cost-effective operations. Coupa’s cloud-based e-procurement solution fits that need perfectly. We’ve been very successful with the software.”
The Container Store, a Coupa customer since 2008, eliminated stockpiling and supply over-ordering at the store level by integrating Coupa with its warehouse management and supplier systems. By managing its requisition and purchase order processes through Coupa, The Container Store can accurately charge supply costs to individual stores based on supply usage, instead of more arbitrary measures like cost allocation based on percent of sales volume. The company reduced the number of SKUs managed in-house by 60%, and now processes 50% fewer purchase orders per week. Time savings generated by improved processes allowed the company to act on the spend intelligence gathered to negotiate new contracts for greater pricing discounts.
“Brick and mortar retailers have certain advantages over their online counterparts, but they are also under constant pricing pressure from pure online competitors who do not incur the same costs associated with operating distributed store locations,” said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa Software. “It’s absolutely critical that retailers keep a watchful eye over every dollar of spend. And industry leaders are doing so with Coupa.”
About Coupa Software
Coupa is the leading provider of disruptive and innovative cloud spend management (CSM) solutions that help companies control their indirect spending and generate savings that go direct to the bottom line. Coupa combines the best e-procurement and expense management capabilities in a single solution that is easier to use, faster to configure and deploy, and more cost-effective than anything available today. With deep domain knowledge in e-procurement and expense management, a best-in-class cloud computing platform, a fast-growing community of customers, and industry-first innovations like real-time benchmarking, intelligent expense report auditing, and crowd sourcing great deals on the Web, Coupa is leading the way in helping companies spend smarter and save more. For more information please visit, http://www.coupa.com or call 650.931.3200.
Retailers are spending millions of dollars on weekly circulars and its distribution along with Newspapers through mail. Taking this spend online can help Retailers save substantial dollars as well as increase usage/reach using social media features. MSN does exactly that and comes to their rescue with their new Local Deals site. MSN unveiled a new localized deals site through an interactive online circulars experience as part of MSN Local Edition – http://deals.msn.com. So far Kohl’s, Target, Staples and RadioShack have signed up on the site. The circular page features Silverlight and DeepZoom technology, which will provide an immersive consumer experience. The users will be able to:
- Rotate through various circulars all on one screen
- Browse and ‘flip’ through pages just like with traditional circulars
- Search for products across all the circulars at once
- Zoom in on products within a circular at a high resolution
- Hover over to learn more about a specific product, including reviews on Bing shopping
- Add items to a shopping list
- Find retailer locations using Bing Maps
- Share finds with others through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live
- Link to a retailer’s site to purchase a product online
The circulars will refresh as often as retailers update information in ShopLocal (who is providing the back-end data for our circular experience) – usually weekly. Circulars that are not current will not be visible, ensuring that consumers are always browsing fresh content. Additionally, since the destination site is geo-targeted, only relevant circulars for a consumer’s location will be shown.
Read More - Microsoft Advertising Unveils Online Circulars for MSN Local Edition (U.S.)
If this is a question you are trying to seek answer to, I suggest head over to Cashier Live’s recently launched interactive microsite “Future of Retail”. New technologies like mobile advertising, in-store augmented reality, and cloud-based software are changing how retailers (big and small) sell to consumers. The microsite presents scenarios for Mobile coupons, Virtual mirrors, Welcome kiosk, Digital signage, Self-checkout, Email receipts, Store management, RFID tags and Purchase orders. For each scenario, there are Proof of Concepts which shows how the retailers are working or thinking about using these new technologies. For e.g. for Welcome Kiosk there is this cool Gap Welcome video from Minority Report.
Forbes Insights has just published a study on how large U.S. retailers are approaching the mobile channel and looking to serve the mobile consumer.
The study-"Retail's Mobility Imperative: A Measured Approach to the Emerging Channel"- is based on an exclusive survey of more than 300 executives at leading U.S. retailers. It found that nearly three out of four (73%) retailers now have some type of mobile initiative in place, and almost half (47%) said their approach to the mobile channel was being driven by a desire to capture "first-mover advantage" and help them increase their engagement with mobile customers. The study also looks at how retailers are crafting their emerging mobile strategies, and where mobile's share of the marketing budget is heading.
You can download a copy of the study at: http://www.forbes.com/forbesinsights/retailmobility/index.html
Oracle Retail has a new white paper on New Rules of Retail. These rules are derived from book by Jeff Jarvis, well-known author of What Would Google Do?, of what he calls Google Rules. The table below takes each of Jarvis’ Google Rules and applies them to retail industry examples to derive ten new rules of retail.
Retail has come full circle, local to global and now back to local as international retailers cater to individual preferences of their best customers. It’s a complex consumer market that spans borders, retail formats and media, and new rules of engagement apply. Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do? inspires ten guidelines that help retailers to thrive in today’s new consumer marketplace.
Google Rule
Industry Examples
New Retailer Rule
New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner
Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers.
1. Listen to customers. Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers.
New Architecture Join a network; be a platform
Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications.
2. Become a destination for information.
New Publicness Life is public, so is business
Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers. It’s not always pretty, but it’s genuine.
3. Be transparent. Share both your successes and failures with your customers.
New Society Elegant organization
Wet Seal helps customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other. Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub.
4. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better.
New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches
lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear. Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts.
5. Serve small markets with niche products.
New Business Reality Decide what business you’re in
When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased.
6. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy.
New Attitude Trust the people and listen
In 2008, Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers.
7. Use social networks as data points for making better merchandising decisions.
New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don’t be evil
Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day. Kohl’s has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays.
8. Being green earns customers’ respect and lowers costs too.
New Speed Life is live
H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends.
9. Be prepared to pounce on you customers’ fickle interests.
New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation
1-800-Flowers was first to sell via Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce. The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo.
10. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won’t be stifled.
Driven by technology, the web, community and the search for ever-richer experiences, the world of shopping is undergoing a sweeping transformation. This free report from PSFK seeks to understand the forces of change and provide a framework in which we can envision this new future.
Fashion brand called Forever21 has just launched a massive augmented reality billboard in Times Square. Great way to use Augmented Reality and engage with the users and what great place than Times Square.
From http://www.fastcompany.com/1663846/times-square-billboards-use-spy-tech-to-reach-out-and-grab-you
Designed by interactive agency Space150 for Forever 21, the billboard features a model walking in front of an image of the crowd below. And then it gets interesting: The model occasionally leans over, and appears to pluck someone out of the crowd. Sometimes, they stink, so she tosses them. Sometimes she kisses them, and they turn into a frog. And sometimes, she drops them in her bag and happily trots off. At one point, the model takes a Polaroid of the crowd, shakes it out, and brandishes it in front of her--showing off a zoomed-in image of the people below.
…
The billboard relies on technology that's usually used in government or security surveillance, and Space150 had to consult surveillance experts to pull it off. Above the 61-foot-high face a high definition Prosilica camera captures the crowd. But then, software picks apart the individuals in the crowd, and selects some for a digital composite built in real-time, which is then used in the interactions with the virtual model on screen.
The software even picks up the yellow of the Forever 21 bag, so that anyone holding one is more likely to get noticed by the model. (If someone actually goes into the store, there are now heat sensors that detect them, and cause a bunch of flash bulbs surrounding the threshold to go off, simulating dozens of paparazzi.)
Times Square Billboard by Space150 from Cliff Kuang on Vimeo.
A newly released study by Kantar Retail and BrandZ examines the most valuable global retail brands and reveals critical success requirements for retailers and suppliers to thrive in the new retail environment. The Top 20 Most Valuable Global Retail Brands report combines retailer and shopper insights and analyses from Kantar Retail with the definitive Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking produced annually by Millward Brown Optimor and powered by the BrandZ database. Walmart tops the list followed by Amazon, Tesco, Carrefour and Target.
