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

Fired Any Good Customers Lately?

Posted on 27. Aug, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Transforming Paper with Pixels

Posted on 19. Aug, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Shopper Marketing: Buzz or Babble?

Posted on 14. Aug, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 Extraordinary Value of a Good Story

Posted on 13. Aug, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Look, Lick and Learn

Posted on 06. Aug, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 History of Retail in 100 Objects

Posted on 23. Jul, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Offline is the new Online

Posted on 23. Jul, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Brands Are People Too

Posted on 09. Jul, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

When Ugly Is Beautiful

Posted on 02. Jul, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]

Success, Schwarzenegger Style

Posted on 25. Jun, 2013 by Jon Bird.

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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 [...]