Tag Archives: consumers

The state of retail online shopping in UK: January 2011 report

Fresh Worldwide Press, marketing, online shopping, , , , , , , , ,

Shoppers in the United Kingdom spent 5.1 billion pounds ($8.3 billion) online in January, up 21% from one year prior, according to the latest figures from consultant Capgemini and Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), a web retailing industry association.The travel sector generated some of the largest growth, as more shoppers took advantage of seasonal discounts on vacation packages. “Travel is one of the sectors of the U.K. economy that saw the earliest adoption of the Internet as an initial point of purchase and this trend shows no sign of abating,” says Phillip Rinn, director of advertising partnerships at eBay Advertising.

January travel sales were up 31% compared with the same month in 2009, and the average value of trips purchased was 886 British pounds ($1,439), the highest recorded in over two years. Many of those winter-weary travellers also bought luggage online, says Russ Carroll, U.K. managing director of comparing shopping site Shopping.com. “Shopping.com saw sales of luggage rise by over 20%,” Carroll says, “as many consumers decided they needed to get away from the miserable British weather.”

Hefty discounts offered by furniture chains also contributed to strong results for online home and garden retailers, as shoppers spent 56% more at these e-commerce sites in January than the year prior, according to IMRG results. “Home, on the back of our Clearance offer, had a very strong month with sales up over 30% on 2010,” says Jonathon Brown, head of online selling at general merchandise retailer John Lewis.

Alcohol sales dropped 67%, which IMRG attributed to shoppers’ desire to cut back after holiday excesses in December (Source: Stefany Moore for Internetretailer.com)

Multichannel customers, profits and mobile technologies

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This post is about a kind of customers that my clients know very well: multichannel customers. Since I started DESITA‘s business, I’ve always believed in multichannel marketing, and now I always advise my clients to use web and mobile as much as they can to keep customers informed and “tied up” to the brand.

It seems that this strategy will be the winning one in the future too, reading what Urban Outfitter’s CEO Glen Senk revealed during his keynot at last fall Shop.org. Urban Outfitter’s multichannel customers spend in fact two to three times more than single-channel shoppers. Additionally, consumers who engage with the company across three or more channels spend six times more than the average consumer. “Mobile may ultimately impact the in-store experience more than it impacts the online experience,” Senk said during his keynote. “We believe mobile technology will boost e-commerce, but I believe it will absolutely revolutionize the brick-and-mortar retail business.”

Josh Herman, multichannel marketing innovation leader at Acxiom, says that mobile needs to become an integral part of the in-store experience, for example offering customers personalized deals and tailored suggestions. “I think what we’ll see this year is a focus on getting the mobile marketing infrastructure more closely tied to the rest of the marketing intelligence assets. This will help fortify spending in mobile marketing,” Herman says.

Carsten Thoma, president of Hybris U.S. and COO of Hybris Group, believes that mobile is the glue that bonds online and brick-and-mortar operations, but he still sees confusion from retailers on where to start. In addition, many companies riddled with legacy systems that prevent the integration of mobile, he says. “That complete fusion of offline and online in a seamless environment is the most important thing in 2012. I’m 100 percent sure that customers are expecting this experience,” Thoma says, and I do agree with him

Green labels: are EU consumers confused about them?

Fresh Worldwide Press, sustainability, , , , , , , , , , ,

It all started with an article about green packaging, where there was a sentence regarding the the Green Guides (US Federal Trade Commission): "65 percent of Americans would prefer just one seal for green products over the hundreds that are now causing confusion. They note that it is increasingly hard to determine if a product is "truly green" or not based on available information. They are presently overwhelmed with the 350 product certifications that currently exist".

In Europe, consumers for sure know about Ecolabel and EnergyStar and…what else? I have made a very quick search on the web about the online resources available to consumers willing to understand a little bit more about "green labels". I did not find anything that is both comprehensive and easy to understand – the best resource being this PDF which is only related to UK. I think that as long as there is so much confusion about labelling, product and process certification, together with a lack of communication, consumers will have a hard time in understanding the real value of sustainable/green products and greenwashing will still be consumers first word associated to sustainability. 

I think that it would be of great interest for retail companies too to contribute to a sort of global database of green seals /certifications/labels in order to better communicate with consumers. Would you, as a product manufacturer, contribute?

The 2011 trends in the Middle East Hospitality Business

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With my company DESITA I have always payed great attention to what is happening in the Middle East countries, whose retail and hospitality business are becoming very interesting because of their many nuances and the possibility they offer.  Karafirin project by DESITA

Accordingly to what recently published by the HotelierMiddleEast website, the 2011 hospitality scenario in Middle East is going to experience three different trends: back to the origins and to healthy food, casual F&B concepts and the raise of social media marketing.

Many of the expert interviewed stressed that the economic crisis has hit those country too and that consumers have become more cost and health conscious. This automatically translates to a return to the traditional, local food and beverages which are less expensive, healthier and – last but not least – more sustainable.

Green packaging: here’s some news

Fresh Worldwide Press, packaging, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In our ECOFFEE experience, Green Packaging and waste management are two of the most difficult to handle issues for a retailer who wants to approach a greener and more sustainable business. Just a couple of years ago, it was very difficult to find packaging that could be both resistant, green and easy to recycle or compost. Now life has been made easier by smart companies which are offering to retailers plenty of products to satisfy the most demanding client: from corn cups to sugar-beet takeout containers, degradable packaging is forecast to expand an impressive 13.6 percent annually to $685 million in 2014.

Now let's talk about two very different kind of packaging, coffee cups and pizza cardboard. Coffee cups are not that common in Italy, where coffee is still serverd in the traditional ceramic "tazzina", but everywhere else in the world, it is a must for those who want to sip the hot drink while driving to office. The Repurpose One Cup  is a new insulated hot cup that is 100 percent certified compostable. The design requires no sleeve, uses 65 percent less CO2 than a disposable coffee cup to produce, and can be composted in 90 days in an industrial facility. If the cups are thrown away with regular trash, they will degrade in the landfill just like food waste. Traditional insulated cups are made by adding additional layers of paper; however, the One Cup keeps coffee (and other beverages) hot by applying patented insulation material to a single wall cup made of FSC-Certified paper.

Talking about pizza, here's the "Salvapizza", a prototype developed in Italy by a pool of experts. Salvapizza is made of white cardboard printed with food ink and this prototype allows consumers to heat the pizza in the microwave. Thanks to the side slots, the pizza "breathes", ensuring the right kind of ventilation during the heating process, hence preserving the pizza fragrance. In the prototyping of Salvapizza, special attention was paid to the possibility of recycling the used container. The cardboard can be in fact easily divided in two parts: the upper part can be detached and easily recycled in the paper waste container. A simple idea, but that can help recycling a lot of waste material, thinking that each year, the Italian production of cardboards for pizza sums up to almost 620 million units. (Source: Crispgreen and Marrai A Fura)

Green Marketing 3.0: what is it about?

DESITA, ECOFFEE, fashion retail, food retail, Fresh Worldwide Press, retail, retail fashion, retail food, sustainability, , , , , ,

Marketing, as you all know, is what enables product to be seen and purchased by consumers. For those who are in the retail business, marketing is a science to master in order to reach success and profit – I add: for more than a year!

Something I always read to those retailers that are entering the world of “green”, is a very interesting article about Green Marketing written by Jeff Dubin a couple of months ago. For those who are interested in reading the full version, you can find it at Jacquie Ottman’s Greenmarketing.com blog. Here a few key sentences by Jacquie: “To really succeed on a wide scale in America, green products either need to establish their superiority on conventional, non-green product features such as effectiveness or price, or make green more relevant to people’s everyday lives….

If green marketers can build the case for how their products are healthier for baby and Mommy and Daddy and Grandma and.., then the greenness of a product becomes a primary benefit rather than a secondary one and the higher hanging fruit now becomes more attainable. That’s Green Marketing 3.0.”

I do agree with that, and you?

Here's a new breed of consumers: the CITYSUMERS

Fresh Worldwide Press, retail, , , , , , , , , , ,

Retailers be aware of this growing segment of consumers which will become each and every day more and more important: the CITYSUMERS. According to Trendwatching.com, Citysumers are "The hundreds of millions (and growing!) of experienced and sophisticated urbanites*, from San Francisco to Shanghai to São Paulo, who are ever more demanding and more open-minded, but also more proud, more connected, more spontaneous and more try-out-prone, eagerly snapping up a whole host of new urban goods, services, experiences, campaigns and conversations".

The Trendwatching February brief describes this trend with all its social and cultural implications, together with an interesting showcase of companies whose products have been designed specifically to satisfy CITISUMERS' tastes and needs. Very interesting. (Photo courtesy of Workerman)

Does sustainability pays? Yes

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Whenever I talk with a client about sustainability, a question arises “Does sustainability pay?”. The answer is with no doubt YES! There are researches available online showing that when customers are offered a choice, they do prefer eco-friendly products and “punish” not so sustainable brands asking a much lower price. Obviously, what companies willing to invest in sustainability must understand is that a sustainable strategy goes hand in hand with a communication strategy – otherwise consumers will not perceive the added value during the purchasing process.

A recent survey conducted by the Uk consumer organisation “Which?” showed that between 74% and 96% of the people surveyed were unaware of the big names behind 10 popular ethical brands. And, once they found out, of those whose opinion changed, more had a negative reaction than a positive one. “Consumers are being misled,” said one respondent while another commented: “I feel conned.” One reason behind this negative reaction is that interviewed were worried about large companies being more concerned with profits than ethics.

What manufacturers must really understand is that consumers are willing to buy sustainable products but at the same time are going to punish any non-ethical behaviour by asking for a very reduced price. The future of retail and of sustainability lies in the ability of producers to understand this and to act accordingly.

7-Eleven embraces sustainability

Fresh Worldwide Press, retail food, , , , , , , , , ,

As we at ECOFFEE are always saying, sustainability in the retail business is not a trend but it is a must if you want to be sucessful in the future. And when we read that giants such as Wal-Mart, Whole Foods Market, Castorama and Tesco, are actually changing their policies and store design to follow a more sustainable business we wonder when this will happen in Italy.

Today, our attention was caught by a very interesting article on the NYTimes about 7-Eleven convenience stores in Japan where fluorescent light bulbs have been replaced by the soft glow of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, that consume half the energy and last much longer.

The 7-Eleven Japan program also includes photovoltaic panels on the store roof, and light-reflecting floor and sensors that automatically adjust the lighting.

The article also points out that this is going to be a very expensive program, being a green 7-Eleven store as much as 30 percent more expensive to build than a more traditional one. But Japanese customers are now more eco-conscious and shopping in a greener store can be more appealing to them. (Photo courtesy of Voice)

What do consumers are searching for is the old, fashionable..quality!

Fresh Worldwide Press, retail food, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Two days agoNRF 100th Annual Convention, at the NRF 100th Annual Convention in NYC, Claudio Del Vecchio has been asked whether he agreed with statements by Micheal Porter that consumers have become more savvy, demanding, and difficult to satisfy. Del Vecchio disagreed, stating firmly that customers are not more difficult to satisfy. In his role as Chairman and CEO of Brooks Brothers, Del Vecchio observed that consumers are simply much more aware.  They are no longer looking for a fast buy. They take their time, look for quality and see their purchases as investments. Consumers are just more focused on what the real value is.

The next step to better understanding their consumers, Del Vecchio explained, is integration between customer data and social media. He even went so far as to say that social media is becoming more important than having information about your customer.  When your business is being discussed on social networks, Del Vecchio said, it’s the friend of a friend that is going to grow your business. The key though, is giving your customers the tools they need to be able to sell your brand to their friends. He advised retailers to become better publishers so that their customers have what they need to become  your sales force. (Courtesy of NRF blog)