Retail CRM Archive

Two opinions on retail assortment planning

Posted by: David King on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Assortment planning is a critical area of retailing, but opinions differ on how to best accomplish it. I take a quick look at two divergent opinions published in the past month.

The Art of Cross-Selling

Posted by: David King on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

We’ve written a lot about cross-selling over the years — how important it is and how to to succeed at it. Check out some of our latest thinking in today’s article on the 1to1 site.

New Consumer Insights Book from MSI

Posted by: David King on Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, it’s a good time to reflect on how pricing, branding, and other factors influence shopping and buying behavior. Coincidentally, I received an early Christmas present to myself on yesterday’s invented cyber-holiday, one that I can recommend to any marketer looking to make sense of the [...]

Cross-Channel Cross-Selling

Posted by: David King on Thursday, October 20th, 2011

Cross-selling additional products and services can be highly profitable, but getting customers to buy more can be a challenge, even more so when marketing has to flow across many channels. Gain insights on how to succeed from this recently published article.

The Price Is Right

Posted by: David King on Monday, December 6th, 2010

Understanding pricing is fundamental to understanding customer behavior. Yet many databases fail to provide marketers useful pricing data.

Those Zig-Zagging Customers

Posted by: David King on Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

We look at the phenomenon of zig-zagging, in which more valuable customers tend to spend less with our brand over time.

Rethinking Your Most Valuable Customers

Posted by: Greg Grundzinski on Monday, March 15th, 2010

Retail marketers would do well to start thinking of “Most Valuable Customer” as a state or phase that a subset of customers will pass through rather than as simply being a discrete set of shoppers.   Doing so will quickly shift the internal focus to ”how do we get more customers into this state and keep [...]

2010 Retail Outlook: Forget “The New Normal”

Posted by: Greg Grundzinski on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Let’s start 2010 by striking the phrase “the new normal” from the collective lexicon. It suggests that a predictable, steady state lies somewhere ahead for the retail industry.  That’s not going to happen anytime soon, especially not in 2010.  Having said that, here’s a quick snapshot of what we do think will be happening in [...]

Behavioral Economics and Marketing, Part II

Posted by: David King on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Love Among The Ruins As we discussed in the first installment, traditional economics postulates that we attempt to optimize gains and risks (“utility” and “risk aversion”) through a rational process. Behavioral economics proposes that this process is not rational, at least in most cases, and that we may act in ways that may not be [...]

Behavioral Economics and Marketing, Part I

Posted by: David King on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

An Introduction to Behavioral Economics How many economic decisions have you made today? As I write this during a mid-afternoon break, I can count a handful of choices I’ve already made, ranging from where to get coffee (Starbucks lost out this morning – I drank the free coffee at the office), to buying gas (I [...]

Variety and Value Rule At Retail

Posted by: David King on Monday, July 6th, 2009

Stores magazine has released its annual list of the top 100 U.S. retailers. With the difficult economy of the last two years, it is interesting to see who the winners and losers have been. The summary: discounters, particularly those carrying a broad assortment of merchandise, have fared the best. Retailers have three big levers that [...]