See it, snap it, buy it: the new way to shop online...

"We shop with our eyes, so why not search with a photo?" asks Jenny Griffiths, founder and CEO of Snap Fashion, the fashion search engine that uses pictures instead of words.

Her idea was born out of her frustration at trying and failing to find affordable equivalents to the designer clothes she found in fashion magazines. When regular search engines failed to quench her affordable fashion thirst - there are after all only so many ways you can describe an item of clothing to Google - the 26-year-old realised that her quest would be markedly easier if she could just submit a photo of the item she was searching for.

Snap Fashion obviously meets a shopper-need, but savvy NAMs will appreciate that there is a much bigger idea lurking here…

In other words, this is all about pattern and shape recognition. So anytime you see an ornament, poster, piece of furniture, hairstyle, gadget, or even a foreign-language version pack of a ‘well-known’ brand and ‘you don’t like to ask’, a simple pic will help you to find an affordable source..

In fact, all it would take is for a company called Amazon to adapt the software to their site to flesh out the real potential….

"clicks to bricks" - Online retailers move into the High Street

Rapha Cycle Club on Brewer Street, near Piccadilly Circus

"Retail observers have been significantly overestimating our use of online and digital technology for shopping - we like shopping in stores," says Nicole Flasch-Mihalko of LIM College, which carried out a survey with the National Retail Federation in the US.

A number of online retailers have taken the survey findings to heart....
For instance, Rapha, which started as an online business in 2004 selling high-performance cyclewear, opened its first store or Cycle Club in San Francisco in 2011. Now it also has branches in London, Osaka, New York and Sydney.

Rapha says its stores have been a big hit with customers, offering a showcase for its clothing but also acting as a place to absorb cycle culture - to drink coffee, join in organised cycle rides and watch major races on big screens.

For High Street landlords with vacant space to rent as well as online start-ups this trend is good news, says Ross Bailey, founder and chief executive of Appear Here. His firm brings together shop landlords and mainly e-commerce entrepreneurs, with the aim of making renting a pop-up or permanent physical shop easier and more flexible.

The key idea is online retailers - Ronliners -, with no baggage or no preconceived notion of what works in classic retailing, but especially with little to fear from the emergence of online, can focus on the shopper's experiential interaction with the product, secure in the knowledge that they have already secured the ongoing deal...

...while their traditional competitors focus on restricting access to the instore wifi... 

Perks of an MP include free snuff...

MPs are being supplied with snuff at taxpayers’ expense, according to an official guide to life in Parliament.

“No, no, Minister, just one pinch per nostril”

The Customer's P&L - A road-map for your business?

Despite the fact that using a customer's latest P&L for guidance can be a little like driving via the rear-view mirror, five years after the global financial crisis, the effects are now truly evident in most retailer's Annual Accounts.

For instance, where retailers were producing ROCEs of 15+%, Net Margins of 5+% and Stockturns of 20 times per annum, latest results are showing performances of half these levels, or worse...

With one exception: Walmart, the retail elephant in the room.

This global player, on a low-price platform, continues to generate an ROCE of 19.6%, a Net Margin of 5.5% and a Stockturn of 10.7 times/annum, thereby demonstrating that it is still possible to achieve these results in retail... 

(incidentally, for those with an eye for detail, Walmart's 'low' stockturn reflects their mix of categories and the geographical scale of the US. When and if Walmart ever comes under ROCE pressure, they can simply insist on smaller, more frequent deliveries from 'eager-to-jump' suppliers...)

In turn, Walmart's performance puts pressure on other retailer's to revert at least to their pre-crisis performance levels in order to support their share prices.

...and as you know, a low share price encourages takeover bids, even in well-ordered, 'growing' economies...

In other words, retailers need suppliers, more than ever before.

In turn, NAMs need to be able to cost out each element of the remuneration package - margin, terms, trade-investment and deductions - and demonstrate each element's impact on the retailer's P&L and Balance Sheet, using the supplier's own P&L to measure progress...

Hopefully a little more engaging than making endless excuses ref inadequate trade investment funds...? 

(For a focused discussion on how this can work in your case, pls give me a call +44 (0)7977 273409)

UK shoppers replace loyalty cards with phones

A new survey from CloudZync via a poll of 2,000 consumers shows that while the average leather wallet now contains four loyalty cards, people have access to six schemes on their handsets.

Supermarkets are falling behind in the digital race - 92% of respondents have a physical card for Tesco, Sainsbury's or one of their rivals yet only 36% have a mobile scheme.

Furthermore, loyalty card users have on average £83 worth of redeemable points across their schemes at any point in time, and UK shoppers have cashed in on over £4 billion worth of points over the past year.

However, around £150 million in points remain unclaimed. Explaining why, 27% say that it takes too long to start earning benefits, 18% say they don't carry their cards in their wallets, and 14% don't remember to add on their points even when paying in-store.

In other words, traditional retailers are operating in ‘inertia-land’, on the assumption that low redemption rates will continue…

However, as with the infamous Hoover air-miles fiasco, if consumers are presented with more effective ways of managing their loyalty point redemption, current levels of inertia could disappear and be replaced by soaring redemption-levels, well beyond retailer expectations…

An app-nightmare in the making? 

Cocktails with aspirations - something special for the weekend?

NB. Large detailed version here

Circular outsourcing?

Source: Kevin Kelly http://kk.org/kk/ Scott Adams was ahead by a whole decade. From Dilbert, August 3, 2003

Sainsbury's taking Tesco to court over Price Promise – a definition of like-with-like?

Sainsbury’s move to obtain a judicial review is good in that it is an attempt to distinguish a legal ‘letter-and-spirit’ issue from a true like-with-like comparison of what a consumer gets for the money.

In other words, when Tesco and the watchdog's independent reviewer Sir Hayden Philips focus on function of the product, bottled water in terms of say quenching thirst, they are adhering to the letter of the law ref like-with-like comparability.

In doing so, they are not taking into account the ‘spirit-of-the law’ issues such as provenance or ethics.

However, the consumer places some value on ‘source’ and is prepared to factor some of this value into the offering when deciding that a price is acceptable, compared with available alternatives.

Consumers live by what they take to be the spirit of the law and feelings of being misled arise when a ‘letter-of-the-law’ claim is found to be wanting in practice, as any true marketer will appreciate.

The problem for the judiciary will be in trying to establish a universal value for provenance or ethics….

However, in the meantime, the media coverage will hopefully cause consumers - and retailers - to think a little more deeply about making a like-with-like comparison that goes a little closer to the spirit rather than simply the letter of the law in deciding that a given Product-Price-Presentation-Place combination is better value for money…