Walmart takes a page from Amazon.com's playbook
Amazon.com may be the king of online retail but the king of offline retail, Wal-Mart, may have Amazon.com's throne on its mind. Yesterday, Walmart.com added one million new items to its catalog thanks to the launch of the Walmart Marketplace.
What is the Walmart Marketplace? As the name suggests, it's the Walmart equivalent of the Amazon Marketplace, a program that enables third party merchants to hawk their wares on Amazon.com.
Q&A: Jim Stengel on purpose driven brands and the state of marketing today
Jim Stengel spent seven years as the global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble and is
largely credited for transforming P&G into one of the most admired
brand-building companies in the world. He is now president of Jim Stengel, LLC, a think tank and a consultancy that focuses on proprietary research and ways to drive business growth in the current economy. He is also a director of the Motorola Corporation and serves on the Board of Advisors for MarketShare Partners, a marketing analytics firm.
His new book 'Packaged Good', which is set to come out next year, examines the role that purpose driven marketing plays in growing market share for brands.
This week, he was appointed as an adjunct marketing professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. Starting next January, he will teach brand marketing to graduate students at the university.
Econsultancy caught up with the marketing guru to see what his plans are at UCLA and what role purpose driven marketing can play in a downturn.
Web 2.0 needs Customer Service 1.0
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. These are but a few of the services many of us have come to enjoy.
Yet there's one thing that seems anything but enjoyable about them: dealing with their customer service.
WalMart, Best Buy shun social media
It would make perfect sense for some big box retailers to curl up, lick, their wounds from the devastation of the 2008 holiday season, and plan for the next move. After all, reports Retail Forward today, anything that resembles improvement at retail will wait until the fourth quarter of this year.
It would also make perfect sense to take this opportunity to step it up online. The good questions to ask would regard web site experience, email marketing, customer engagement via social networks, and online marketing plans for the fall. But what we see lately is a focus on public relations, a lot of spending on in-store technology, and mobile commerce.
Ecommerce missing from retail reporting
The monthly ritual that encapsulates the failing retail results of everyone but WalMart were released yesterday. Retailers from Abercrombie & Fitch to Zumiez got whacked in February, which is no surprise. But one thing is sorely missing from many retail reports: the importance of online sales.
The metric known as same-store sales defines success or failure in the retail industry. They're measured year-over-year and are subject to random events and economic conditions more than they are attributable to good leadership or good strategy. But online sales rarely, if ever, take the lead in the conversation. Ecommerce for many retailers is just as indicative of their overall performance as same store sales.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
