Industry Articles

TORONTO — Best Buy Canada is opening small stores and getting into non-core categories online such as clothing and kitchenware in an attempt to guard its top market share from Web-only electronics sellers.
Showrooming, the consumer practice of doing touch-and-feel research of products with a salesclerk’s help in a retail store before going online to buy from whomever is selling it at the cheapest available Web price, will be rendered “obsolete” under the large scale integration of Best Buy’s Web and retail operations, says company president Mike Pratt.

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/10/best-buy-canada-to-shrink-s...

By Hollie Shaw; Financial Post 07/10/12

Search leads consumers to new branded content
Search helps build strong brands by bettering brand-health metrics. But creating long-term relationships is usually foremost for brands, and, according to eMarketer, in a new report, “Search for Branding: Tools for Better Campaigns,” “even though a majority of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers now believe that search affects brand-building, digital executives sometimes still find it tough to prove that search is a critical ingredient in branding.”

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009241&ecid=a6506033675d47f8816...

eMarketer Digital Intelligence

Compensation for employees is a challenge. You want to stay within market and, if you value employees, try to pay compensation above market. At the same time, you want to keep part of your investment in compensation for people who go above and beyond so they feel thanked and rewarded for going the extra mile.
But, bonuses, commissions, and incentive payments can be tricky.

http://humanresources.about.com/b/2012/08/01/challenges-with-incentive-c...

Susan M. Heathfield, About.com Guide

Can you afford to only consider sales in you KPI? So many companys only focus on number of sales per week, per quarter, per year, $ amount of the sale and how many leads resulted from that sale. Read this article to really understand how influential metrics beyond sales can be. 15% boost in revenue for a $1 Billion company...not too shabby. 

How big-box retailers are combating online-only retailers. Great tactics and strategies for embracing the shifting behaviors of shoppers. How have your marketing and POS strategies changed?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/business/retailers-lure-online-shopper...

Stephanie Clifford "Luring Online Shoppers Offline"  The New York Times

Presient Micahel Francis stepped down from his position after a short 8 months at J.C. Penny. Attempting an ambitious turnaround and brand make-over, the company decided to have fewer promotions and an easier pricing scheme. They underestimated how important discounts were to their customer's shopping experience and now their stocks are showing the pain from shoppers backlash. The moral of the story - take time to understand your customers! They're the boss.

A study released in June by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania was provocatively titled, "Open to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline." It concluded that American consumers are "vulnerable to subtle forms of exploitation" by marketers.

...such pricing -- also called targeted pricing, flexible pricing, tailored pricing or, to use the phrase employed in the Annenberg study, discriminatory pricing -- is customary, an essential tool for companies, and often beneficial to individual customers and society as a whole.

"The bottom line," says Bolton, "is there is a general perception that prices are unfair. Researchers don't understand well enough how consumers perceive the marketplace, what we call 'marketplace metacognition.' People live in a capitalistic society and believe in the free-market system, and yet they don't seem to be knowledgeable about it."

Published by Knowledge@Wharton - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1245 

Big retailers have used the promise of higher volumes to negotiate better deals since the early days of the supermarket and the Sears catalog. However, over the past decade, this practice has been taken to an entirely new level of sophistication. The goal is to find the most viable, profitable strategy for your brand within a world of bigger customers who can control more volume. Here are several examples of how others have made that choice and still maintained profitability.

Research with 500 global executives shows that 16% already processed applications in cloud and 35% intend to adopt this model in three years to promote innovation and become more efficient.

http://cio.uol.com.br/noticias/2012/05/18/adocao-de-cloud-computing-dobr...