Monthly Archives: September 2011

The Voice Of The Customer: Can You Hear It Through The Screaming?

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Listening to the “voice of the customer” has been the hallmark of successful retailers, restaurants, and service businesses for years.  Technology has greatly increased our ability to capture and analyze customer data.  With the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, and other networks, social media are becoming the loudest, clearest, most current voice of the customer yet!

The challenge today is finding the “signal” in the data so that we can reduce the voice of the customer to actions such as real estate planning, site selection, marketing campaigns, and assortment planning.  With data warehouses full of customer transactions, household files with demographics, and feeds from social media, it’s harder to understand what the customer is saying than to guess the Dow Jones average by walking onto the trading floor of the New York Stock exchange! Continue reading →

Will “Big Data” lead to “Big Answers” for Chain Store Operators?

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One of the hottest topics in business analytics today is “big data,” defined by Wikipedia as “a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time.”

How big is “big data?”

Last year, consumers and businesses around the world are estimated to have stored more than 13 exabytes of information on PCs, laptops and other devices — the equivalent of more than 52,000 times the information housed in the Library of Congress. An exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeros, or a billion gigabytes.  And the amount of data stored in such “technological memories” is growing 25 percent a year, said Martin Hilbert, a researcher at the University of Southern California.  These were some of the estimates shared at the The Economist Big Data Conference last June in Santa Clara, CA. (for complete story see http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_745039.html). Continue reading →

What Women Want

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I don’t watch many movies, but I just saw “What Women Want” with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt.  It may sound strange, but it made me think of the changes in the chain store real estate business in the last couple of decades and consider the changes that are still ahead.

Twenty years ago, most of the dealmakers in the chain store industry were men.  Business was conducted on golf courses, in restaurants and bars, at sporting events, and other venues of the “good ol’ boy network.”  Cambridge Dictionaries Online defines a good ol’ boy  as “a man from the southern US who enjoys having fun with his friends, and disapproves of ideas or ways of behaving that are different from his own (see  also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_ol’_boy_network). Continue reading →

At Least We Don’t Have To Worry About Cannibalization…Or Do We?

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Tens of thousands of chain stores and restaurants have closed in the last three years.  Few chains are expanding at all and many aren’t done shrinking their fleets (Collective Brands is closing 475 shoe stores as we speak).  Maybe the only good news about all this downsizing is that we don’t have to think as much about cannibalization, which is a big part of the problem that got us into this mess.

If the chain store business was simply fighting through another recession and waiting for the economy to turn around, this might be the case.  Unfortunately, we are also going through a fundamental change in the way customers shop and dine.

On the shopping front, e-commerce now captures about 6% of all retail sales.  But that’s only part of the story.  Analysts are now tracking “Web-Influenced” retail sales which account for more than a trillion dollars, or 40% of total retail sales.  Both of these numbers are expected to rise in coming years which clearly demonstrates the need for retailers to approach marketing and store planning with an integrated plan that utilizes stores, websites, and social media to create a powerful brand and a rich customer experience.

Continue reading →