Recently – a collegue recounted his experience selling a fully-capable product with a price less than half its competitors. “After the presentation, the customer turned to the sales representative and asked, ‘What’s wrong with it?’” This, more than 78 years after J. Walter Thompson’s research for Pond’s Cold Cream proved that price and quality are […]
Category: Retail
Shopping Goes High-Tech
Wal-Mart’s aggressive efforts to implement RFID makes the news frequently, and you’ve probably noticed an increase in the number of stores offering self-checkout (Home Depot, Rainbow Foods, K-mart, among others). A number of other stores are experimenting other technologies poised to changed the shopping experience. The Salisbury Post has an excellent article on Bloom, the […]
Hotel Room as Showroom
Hotels are now leveraging their experience comforting weary travelers and giving their guests the opportunity to take the hotel experience home. Marginal Revolution points to a Forbes article documenting the Regency in Manhattan’s addition of price tags to their bath mats, pillows, and bath robes. In a related development, Selelect Comfort recently announced a partnership […]
A Best-ter Buy. Part 2
Updating the stores to appeal to a specific customer segment is great, Best Buy goes the extra mile in this renovation and makes sales more visible to staff. Employees begin their day by reviewing the previous day’s figures, which are written on a dry-erase board and compared to the previous month. At a Westminster store […]
A Best-ter Buy
Yesterday the Strib announced Best Buy’s new customer personas. According to the article, $50 million is dog-eared for reformatting 100 stores to improve the shopping experience of these 5 archetypes. It seems to me that Ray, Barry, and Buzz already love shopping at Best Buy. Jill on the other hand, can’t stand the place. Perhaps […]
Customer in Training
While a number of supermarkets and discount stores offer “customer-in-training” shopping cart as their primary method of keeping children occupied while their parents shop, Wegmans – a Woodbridge, N.J. supermarket chain – goes one step further offering W Kids Childcare centers . The videos, toys, and playground equipment found at these centers is part of […]