Marketing Trends For Retailers in 2009
January 13th, 2009 by Chris HerrickI have to admit that it’s been a while since I’ve written on this Istobe blog, but for good reason. My wife and I welcomed a little girl into the world (Vivian June) on December 28th and have been battling sleep deprivation and dirty diapers ever since (and yes, she’s definitely worth it). The bad news is that I just haven’t had much time to read all of the news feeds and blog posts that I would have liked to over the course of the last few weeks. So, as I looked blurry eyed through my blog posts and news items this morning, I noticed a few articles that point out some important marketing trends for retailers in 2009:
- Chad Berndtson over at ChannelWeb.com has been following the discussion at the National Retail Federation convention this week and interviewed Stacy Janiak and Carl Steidtmann from Deloitte about the retail business. Their thoughts: staying the marketing course is not an option for retailers. Specifically, they say retailers can expect to face increased competition while losing their “big spenders”. They suggest that the companies that want to survive this economic downturn need to better embrace web and mobile while also investing more in IT initiatives that provide better insight into their customers (i.e. analytics).
- Also at NRF, Tom Davenport, author of the book Competing on Analytics and professor of IT and Management at Babson College (just down the road a jaunt from MIT), gave a talk about his new research releasing in early February. The new report is purported to show that analytics clearly improve bottom lines and drive market differentiation for retailers. Additionally, it forecasts that the epicenter of analytical capabilities will shift from manufacturers to retailers. The full report should be available soon from SAS.
- In the “wait and see” category, a user advocacy group is filing a complaint with the FCC over concerns it has with mobile marketing firms ChaCha, Velti, Cellfire, Bango, and AdMob. The complaint sites data privacy issues as the main concern by also pushes for stricter regulations for the mobile marketing industry going forward. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I’m a strong believer that all companies should strictly adhere to a fair, clear, and straight-forward opt-in/opt-out policy, but wonder what kind wrench regulation may throw into the mobile marketing mix, especially as more retailers move over to the mobile marketing space.
- A recent marketing trends report by Marketing Executives Networking Group shows that marketing execs across the board (not just in retail) are facing increasing scrutiny and cutbacks on their marketing budgets this year. We’ve blogged about this before, but the past has shown that those companies that actually increase marketing dollars during an economic downturn have done significantly better than competitors that decide to cut their marketing budgets.
Tags: Customer Analytics, Economic Downturn, mobile marketing
Add Personalized Product Recommendations to Your eCommerce Site
Istobe is a powerful recommendation engine that makes it easy to add recommendations to your eCommerce site. How powerful? Shoppers who click on Istobe recommendations spend 20-50% more than the average visitor.
