Tweet One evening last week, a possible vision of the future of urban transportation pulled up outside a bar in the Mission District of San Francisco. I summoned it in less than a minute, using an app on my smartphone. By the time I had got up from my stool and walked outside, my ride [...]
Tweet Many a giant creature has loomed over the streets of Manhattan, at least in celluloid form – most famously King Kong and Godzilla. And now a more benign (but equally huge) being has followed in their footsteps – a six-story metallic yellow balloon dog, which has suddenly appeared on a building on Fifth Avenue. [...]
Tweet Is there anything truly original in this world? The TED Radio Hour podcast on America’s NPR asked that question recently and answered with a definitive “No.” “As far as we know, the Big Bang is original,” observed TED speaker Kirby Ferguson. “And everything else is derivative,” chipped in host Guy Raz, completing the thought. [...]
Tweet “Clean underwear on demand.” That’s the pitch for FlyCleaners, a New York-based laundry and dry cleaning start-up, currently prowling the streets of Brooklyn with more locations coming soon. Powered by a smartphone app, you simply click, and a few minutes later a “FlyGuy” materializes in a blue FlyCleaners truck and whisks away your unmentionables. [...]
Tweet The Cannes Lions bills itself as the biggest creative communications festival in the world. Starting out as an advertising show 61 years ago, it now sprawls across numerous categories, awarding work in sectors as diverse as “Innovation” and “Promo & Activation.” Two other festivals have used the same exotic locale over the years. The [...]
Tweet One of the best shopping experiences in the world right now is anything but fancy. In fact, it is about as stripped down as retail can get – concrete floors, product on palettes, warehouse ceilings with struts and skylights. Despite the unflattering surroundings, this particular chain also charges customers just to get in the [...]
Tweet Five skywriting planes etched the phrase “Existence or Nonexistence” into the vivid blue skies above Brooklyn last Sunday. What did it all mean? While deep thinkers may get all existential about the mantra, it was actually an art project riffing on the CIA’s statement that it neither confirms nor denies “the existence or nonexistence” [...]
Tweet FMOT, SMOT, ZMOT…WTF? The first three acronyms are from the lexicon of “shopper marketing,” the last one a humble retailer’s exasperated “what the?” response. What does it all mean? And to use another truncation, is shopper marketing just so much BS from a bunch of (likely) MBA’s? I’ve been asked that question many times [...]
Tweet This is the story of Kevin Plank: who went from a dusty basement in Washington D.C. to Broadway in 18 years. It’s the tale of the then 23-year-old who started a business in his grandmother’s row house and finished up with a “Brand House” in New York City. It’s the fable of Under Armour, [...]
Tweet The golden era for brand marketers was the time of “Mad Men” ‑ when a snappy slogan or a cute commercial helped to differentiate brands, and build an emotional bond between consumers and their Lucky Strike cigarettes, Chevrolet cars, Hershey chocolate or Playtex bras. As the last season of “Mad Men” floats into the [...]
How FOMO fed the Frenzy
Posted on 27. Nov, 2012 by ideaworks.
Tweet For all the detractors of the Click Frenzy online shopping event (the Twitter hashtag #clickfail pretty much sums it up), I thought the sale provided some fascinating insights into how to motivate customers. In a world where we all have too much stuff, why did so many shoppers race to be part of the [...]
Video: Black Friday Battle – Online Vs. Offline
Posted on 26. Nov, 2012 by ideaworks.
Tweet In the lead-up to America’s biggest shopping weekend, IdeaWorks CEO Jon Bird spoke to Bloomberg’s Rishaad Salamat about Black Friday and the battle between online and offline stores. Watch video after the jump. (Source)
The Digital Divide
Posted on 04. Dec, 2012 by ideaworks.
Tweet A pair of giggling Japanese twenty-somethings pose in front of a virtual mirror in the strangely but aptly named “Humor Shop” in a Tokyo mall. They try on clothes and instantly upload the looks to social media sites, seeking comments from friends and family before purchasing. To my eyes, the scene couldn’t be more [...]
The Globalisation of Black Friday
Posted on 07. Dec, 2012 by ideaworks.
Tweet This is the year when the tipping point in the globalisation of retail has been reached. This is the year when a uniquely American shopping event has caught the imagination of the world. I’m referring to Black Friday and its online counterpart Cyber Monday. On the fourth Thursday in November, Americans stuff themselves with [...]
8 Ways to Charm the Snake in 2013
Posted on 07. Jan, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet The Chinese have got it right. 2013 is the Year of the Snake, and strangely enough, the characteristics of the Snake are close to the customer type that retailers are facing now and in the near future. According to chinesezodiac.com, “Snakes are extremely analytical…they are effective at getting the things they want, even if [...]
An “Only in America” Retail Experience
Posted on 05. Feb, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet More than just a “Wow” factor, Cabela’s has what Bob Thorn* once memorably termed the “O.F.F.” – the Oh F*** Factor. Walk into one of the “world’s foremost outfitter’s” 40 megastores across the US and Canada and your reaction is likely to be just that – “Oh F***” – for a number of reasons. [...]
Lessons in “Real-tail” from Warby Parker
Posted on 11. Feb, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Who or what is a Warby Parker? Those two words were all the buzz at January’s National Retail Federation “Big Show” in New York, attended by over 27,000 retail passionates from all over the globe. While the name sounds like a rare breed of goose, or an effete English art college major*, Warby Parker [...]
“Software eats retail.” Or does it?
Posted on 19. Feb, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet A fascinating argument has played out over the web in the last few days*. In the red corner, predicting the “absolute death of traditional retail”, Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley investor and founder of Netscape. In the blue corner, contending that bricks-and-mortar still has its place, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and regarded by many [...]
Great Expectations: the Customer Service Conundrum
Posted on 26. Feb, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Cosmetics king Napoleon Perdis voiced the frustration of many shoppers last week when he warned Australian department stores to increase their staffing levels and training “so that customers feel there is a reason to go into them”. Quoted in the Fairfax press, Perdis urged DJ’s and Myer to “bite the bullet” or pay the [...]
The Next Wave of International Retailers?
Posted on 05. Mar, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Six months ago or so, I made a case in “Inside Retail” to end “Island Thinking”. Our shores are under attack from global retailers, I wrote, who are arriving like gleeful pirates, both digitally and physically. And we can either ignore the invasion, or fight fire with fire and join the new, internationalised world [...]
Buying Into Brands
Posted on 18. Mar, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Great retail today is as much about selling ideas as it is selling merchandise (we all have too much stuff anyway). It’s about creating “movements” that customers can buy into, rather than just flogging them products that they may not even need. Over the last decade, Apple has been a master at this strategy [...]
Marketing to Androids
Posted on 26. Mar, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Samsung recently launched its Galaxy S4 phone, which amongst other features, allows you to automatically scroll the screen with a roll of your eyes. At the same time, the blogosphere is abuzz with news that Apple might soon release an iWatch, the next step in wearable computing. Mobile devices are becoming more and more [...]
A Mall with Balls
Posted on 09. Apr, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Eleven thousand kilometres is an awfully long way to go shopping. That’s how far I travelled recently on a trip to Santiago Chile, to see what I could find that was new and exciting in world retail. Granted, I was there to take part in the WPP* The Store Global Retail Forum. But I [...]
Where Ron Went Wrong and Russo Got It Right
Posted on 16. Apr, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet In retail, as in business generally, execution is everything. The most brilliant plan or sensational strategy is just a mirage, unless it can be brought to life in the right way, in the right order, with military-precision. That’s always been one of Woolworths’ strengths, and their ex-CEO Roger Corbett’s insistence on “exquisite execution” has [...]
Where Bricks Beat Clicks
Posted on 23. Apr, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Suddenly physical is fashionable. Where not so long ago, pundits were predicting the death of bricks and mortar retail (and some still are), now it’s de rigueur to have a physical retail presence. Many online retailers are talking about setting up shop. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said in a C-Net interview late last [...]
Trillion Dollar Shift
Posted on 07. May, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet How big is the global shift to online sales? Picture the entire annual sales for retail in Australia in 2012. Then quadruple that figure. For this year, you can quintuple it. Citi’s Global E-Commerce Retail Outlook has just come across my desk, and the figures are fascinating. Citi quotes a recent report by eMarketer, [...]
Don’t Visit the Zoo, Go to the Jungle
Posted on 14. May, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet “If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.” Sandy Thompson, the global planning chief of ad agency Y&R often uses that saying, and it’s just as relevant to the world of retail as it is the sphere of communications. At the heart of the [...]
The New Apple?
Posted on 21. May, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet We all know that Apple is the most successful retailer on the planet; that it changed the way that retail is delivered; and that it is responsible for many innovations we are starting to take for granted, like hands-on displays and hand-held EFTPOS. But what’s the next big thing in retail? In LA this [...]
21st Century Clicks & Mortar
Posted on 28. May, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Nothing can beat the physical experience of bricks and mortar retail. And nothing can match the digital efficiency of clicking (or touching) on a screen to research and buy. It’s now clearer than ever that 21st century retail must be about blending the two – a “Clicks & Mortar” collaboration, to quote Sabrina Lin, [...]
From Burberry to the Grand Bazaar
Posted on 04. Jun, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Over the last two weeks, I’ve been drinking from the fire hose of retail on the annual Westfield World Retail Study Tour – touring five world cities, listening to dozens of retail experts, visiting hundreds of stores and taking thousands of photographs. Recovering from all that intense retail stimulation, I reflected that great retail [...]
Dumb Retail Ideas
Posted on 11. Jun, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Retail is an ideas business. Ultimately what we sell – particularly in this post-consumer era – is a notion, a concept, and a promise of fulfillment. And if we get it right, we turn something that shoppers don’t necessarily need into an absolute must-have. That’s the true magic of the merchant. Wizards like Apple’s [...]
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Charts
Posted on 18. Jun, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet I regularly receive decks-full of data about the rise of smartphone usage, and the rush to mobile devices generally. And the statistics are staggering (more on that later). But recently two sets of simple images brought it home for me. I suddenly realized just how much the world has changed in the last decade. [...]
WPP’s Morrison: Why the Tide Is Turning for Brick-and-Mortar Retail
Posted on 18. Jun, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Article by Steven Jacobs for streetfightmag.com The retail industry has seen a lot of change over the past five years. Amid a massive downturn in consumer spending and a growing e-commerce sector, some in the technology industry have forecast the complete collapse of brick-and-mortar retail. However, offline commerce still accounts for over 90% of [...]
Success, Schwarzenegger Style
Posted on 25. Jun, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Arnold Schwarzenegger as a role model for retailers? Come on, Jon. (Given the Terminator’s well-publicised infidelities, you may well question whether he is a role model for anyone.) But hear me out. Just last week, I listened intently as Arnie addressed an enthralled audience in Sydney, and it struck me that his five rules [...]
When Ugly Is Beautiful
Posted on 02. Jul, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Right in the heart of Auckland is a little oasis of innovation in retail, paradoxically housed in and around a complex of renovated industrial buildings that once serviced the Auckland City Council. Back in the 60’s, sparks flew at CityWorks Depot as buses, trucks and road-building equipment were worked on. Now in the second [...]
Brands Are People Too
Posted on 09. Jul, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet If your retail brand sidled up to you at a party, what would you do? Be entranced and engaged? Or run a mile? Like it or not, brands are people too, and the best brands are like the best party guests – charming, smart, open, interesting, but also considerate and empathetic. (They know when [...]
Offline is the new Online
Posted on 23. Jul, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet The very model of a modern e-comm business is one built not just in bits and bytes, but bricks and mortar. Increasingly, that’s a given. But what’s more interesting to me is not the trend, but what the online guys are doing with the physical space, how they are reaping rewards, and how that [...]
Shopper Marketing: Buzz or Babble?
Posted on 14. Aug, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet FMOT, SMOT, ZMOT…WTF? The first three acronyms are from the lexicon of “shopper marketing”, the last one a humble retailer’s exasperated “what the?” response. What does it all mean? And to use another truncation, is shopper marketing just so much BS from a bunch of (likely) MBA’s? I’ve spent a lot of time over [...]
The History of Retail in 100 Objects
Posted on 23. Jul, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet From “Shopper as Hunter Gatherer” in pre-history, to Holostores (holographic-enhanced environments) in the near future, the “History of Retail in 100 Objects” puts the “tale” into “retail” over the past 10,000 years. Inspired by the British Museum’s “History of the World in 100 Objects”, Editor David Roth* curated the list and associated book, website [...]
Look, Lick and Learn
Posted on 06. Aug, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet In the midst of a ‘soft’ retail environment, one store is persuading customers to queue for up to 20 minutes and pay a 220%+ premium for an item that (fundamentally) you could pick up in a supermarket. Madness or genius? I guess it depends which side of the retail counter you’re on. The Magnum [...]
The Extraordinary Value of a Good Story
Posted on 13. Aug, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Once upon a time…New York Times columnist Rob Walker set out to find out whether a story could add significance and value to a near-worthless object. I read about Walker’s study in a recent HBR Blog by Ty Montague and thought it was one of the most interesting retail experiments of all time. Here’s [...]
Transforming Paper with Pixels
Posted on 19. Aug, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet So the purveyor of the electronic Kindle has purchased one of the most revered newspapers in the United States – the 135 year-old Washington Post. And the blogosphere is abuzz with what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos will do with such an institution. (Home ‘Kindle Printers’ anyone?) One thing’s for sure: it won’t be news as [...]
Fired Any Good Customers Lately?
Posted on 27. Aug, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet In the midst of a dynamic retail landscape, it’s important to continually evolve your retail brand. “It’s constant reinvention, not just once, it’s constant”, as J. Crew’s Mickey Drexler told last year’s attendees on the Westfield World Retail Study Tour in New York. Part of the process of brand evolution is looking at your [...]
The Pinball Path to Purchase
Posted on 10. Sep, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet In the religion that is Shopper Marketing, one of the central beliefs is the “Path to Purchase”. For many marketers, the 5 or 6 step Path to Purchase (P2P) is writ in stone like the 10 Commandments. But is it time for non-believers to smash the P2P and come up with a new model? [...]
Less+More=CVP
Posted on 09. Sep, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet All you really need to know about the components of a compelling retail Customer Value Proposition (CVP) is contained in the headline above. So, if you are short on time, or have a short attention span, you are excused. Go forth and strategise. But for those who choose to stick around, let me explain [...]
A Burning Impression
Posted on 17. Sep, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Fascinating fact: the word “brand” comes from the ancient Norse word “brandr” meaning “to burn”. One of the earliest uses of brands was to identify the ownership of cattle, searing a distinctive mark into the flesh of an animal. Translated into the language of contemporary marketing, a great brand makes a burning impression in [...]
The 6 Second Challenge
Posted on 16. Sep, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet You have a smartphone and precisely 6 seconds to communicate a meaningful message about your brand. Mission impossible? Well, US home improvement giant Lowes took the challenge, and created a series of oddly mesmerizing and engaging 6-second stop-motion videos with DIY tips for customers. Called “Fix In Six”, the initiative is billed as “a [...]
The Changing Brandscape & Robot Retail
Posted on 24. Sep, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. That quote is from L.P. Hartley, and never a truer word was written when applied to the world of brands. Keith Newton, one of Australia’s leading authorities on brands, has just released a report comparing the leading brands of 20 years ago versus [...]
The Sexiest Job in Retail
Posted on 01. Oct, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet There’s a tug of war going on in retail between “art” and “science” and science is starting to win. The traditional intuitive skill of the merchant is being matched by the research-based deftness of the data jockey. As one marker, Harvard Business Review headlined an article last October, “Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of [...]
A Trend to Conscious Capitalism
Posted on 09. Oct, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet “We exist to feed each and every person who walks through our doors with dignity regardless of their means”. Now that’s a statement of purpose that staff-members could really get behind, in contrast to the marshmallow mission statements of many companies. In many ways, it’s an anarchic, anti-retail idea. (Serve people “regardless of their [...]
Path 2 Plane
Posted on 15. Oct, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet One of the more interesting paths to purchase is the journey from airport check-in to boarding an international flight – what I’m calling the Path 2 Plane. And one of the more amazing Path 2 Plane experiences is the $2 billion renovation of the new Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. On a recent [...]
The New Steve Jobs?
Posted on 22. Oct, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Can anyone be worth $28m in a single year? Burberry obviously thought that its CEO Angela Ahrendts was deserving of the package for her work in FY 2012, a year which saw Burberry achieve $3.3 billion in sales and $717 million in profit. The brand’s share price has trebled since Ahrendts joined Burberry in [...]
Developing Digital DNA
Posted on 29. Oct, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Imagine being first to utilise a brand new technology that allows customers to interact with your store directly, order what they need, and have the product home delivered even before they click off. US drugstore Walgreens achieved that utopian goal…over a century ago. What was the “new” technology? The telephone. How did Walgreens do [...]
A Digital Christmas? Bah Hashtag!
Posted on 31. Oct, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet While Target in the US gears up for its “most digitally enabled (holiday) campaign in history”, many Australian merchants are saying “bah hashtag” and playing down the importance of online. According to the just-released Deloitte Christmas Retailers’ Survey, over half of retailers researched expect online sales this festive season to be 2% or less [...]
A Remote Control for the Retail Store
Posted on 12. Nov, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet In the hands of shoppers, the smartphone is fast becoming a remote control for bricks and mortar retail. It allows customers to interact with a retail environment on their terms, in a more relevant and personal way than ever before. And customers (if they are not already) will start to favour retailers (and manufacturers) [...]
Connecting the Data Dots
Posted on 19. Nov, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet I’ve spent my last week with a Retail Futurist, a Retail Historian, and a Retail Anthropologist; listening, learning and debating about where retail is going, where it’s been and how we need to relate to different generations of customers now and tomorrow. The occasion was the annual Westfield Breakfast Seminar Series across Australia and [...]
Shift Gear with Sharp Ideas
Posted on 26. Nov, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet Round about the time of the Global Financial Crisis, “stores ran out of ideas just as consumers ran out of money”, according to David Roth from WPP The Store in London. The effect? Growth came to a grinding halt. Roth was speaking at the final Westfield Breakfast Seminar in Auckland this week (sponsored by [...]
“The Death of Discounting” and Other Dumb Predictions
Posted on 10. Dec, 2013 by ideaworks.
Tweet “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” So wrote Bill Gates in his 1996 book “The Road Ahead”. Looking back over the last (almost) six years of columns that I [...]
What’s Next: Retail Five Years in the Future
Posted on 07. Jan, 2014 by ideaworks.
Tweet “My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare, I had to cram so many things, to store everything in there.” The lyrics in David Bowie’s song “Five Years” capture what life is like for many consumers in the fading light of the year 2013. This is the age of overload [...]
Removing the Seams from Retail
Posted on 28. Jan, 2014 by ideaworks.
Tweet “Great technology…allows the mechanical parts of what we do everyday to disappear.” So said Jack Dorsey, Chairman of Twitter and CEO of Square at the National Retail Federation annual conference in New York last week. What they call the “NRF Big Show” really is big – 30,000 delegates, and a multitude of speakers including [...]
Retail Rocked the Super Bowl
Posted on 04. Feb, 2014 by ideaworks.
Tweet One of the highlights of yesterday’s Super Bowl was off the field – the advertisers who paid an average of US$4 million for a 30 second spot to showcase their messages in front of over 100 million US viewers. And out of all the ads, two that stood out were for retailers. As part [...]
Will Aussie Retail be “Rooned”?
Posted on 24. Feb, 2014 by ideaworks.
Tweet “We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan, “Before the year is out.” That line is from a famous 1921 Australian bush poem. Hanrahan’s view was that ruin was a certainty, no matter the conditions. No rain meant drought; too much rain signaled either flood, or worse – grass growth and bushfire. Fast-forward to 2014, and [...]
Retail Reinvention: From Lion Hunters to Cool Hunters
Posted on 22. Apr, 2014 by ideaworks.
Tweet For over eight decades at the corner of 82nd and Lexington on the Upper East Side of New York City stood a local institution by the name of Lascoff Drugs. The founder, J.L. Lascoff, a Russian-Polish immigrant to the US, opened the very first pharmacy in New York State in 1899. J.L’s son Frederick [...]
A Grocery Experience That’s Better than Sex?
Posted on 28. Apr, 2014 by Jon Bird.
Tweet Ever since Piggly Wiggly (true name) launched the world’s first “self-service grocery store” in Memphis in 1916, the game for supermarkets has been about increasing speed and efficiency. The hermetically sealed outcome, however, has been that a trip to the supermarket for many shoppers is not a want-to, but a have-to…not something to look [...]
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The Wheels of Change
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A Remote Control for the Retail Store
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“The Death of Discounting” and Other Dumb Predictions
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Retail Reinvention: From Lion Hunters to Cool Hunters
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Giant Balloon Dogs & Retail Tensity
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Jon Bird: Thanks for your note James. It was certainly very ...
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Damian: I respectfully put it to you (and in particular li...
