New Retail Blog | Insights and inspiration for the New Retail world

A Digital Christmas? Bah Hashtag!

Posted on 31. Oct, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Developing Digital DNA

Posted on 29. Oct, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

The New Steve Jobs?

Posted on 22. Oct, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Path 2 Plane

Posted on 15. Oct, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

A Trend to Conscious Capitalism

Posted on 09. Oct, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

The Sexiest Job in Retail

Posted on 01. Oct, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

The Changing Brandscape & Robot Retail

Posted on 24. Sep, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

A Burning Impression

Posted on 17. Sep, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 Jon Bird.

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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 Pinball Path to Purchase

Posted on 10. Sep, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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? [...]