GRMA Blog

Mobile Commerce Daily and Mobile Marketer.com

September 1st, 2010

Jones Apparel Group-owned Nine West has invested in 2D bar codes for the launch of its Fall 2010 Vintage America Collection featuring Joss Stone.

Nine West tapped Jagtag and has incorporated 2D bar codes on in-store signage, online, print and product packaging. Nine West’s Vintage America Collection campaign with Jagtag allows consumers to interact with singer-songwriter and style icon Joss Stone, who helped design the new product line, through email messages, free music downloads and digital videos.

“They asked us to help with a multifaceted campaign that includes Jagtags as part of in-store, online, microsite and on-packaging,” said Ed Jordan, CEO of Jagtag, Princeton, NJ. “This marks the first time that a Jagtag appears on product packaging, which in this case is the shoe box.

“The custom branded Jagtag acts as a means of starting a conversation with consumers, which is initiated when they take a picture of the tag and text it in,” Mr. Jordan said. “Consumers receive video content back, which is a really unique utilization of the tag.”

The collection
Joss Stone has been a hands-on partner with Nine West on all aspects of the design process for key looks in the fall 2010 Vintage America collection.

Together, they have created a series of looks that showcase the laid back confidence and Bohemian style of the Nine West Vintage America Collection.

There was a lot of inspiration from the singer’s personal tattoos and this influence is evident throughout the collection–from the footwear designs to the logo and packaging.

Jagtag
Users will also have the chance to enter a sweepstakes to win products from the Nine West Vintage America Collection.

The specially branded Jagtag features Joss Stone’s signature flower tattoo design.

To use the Jagtag, consumers can take and send a photo of it with any camera phone and will receive multimedia content and automatically be entered into a sweepstakes to win Joss Stone’s Vintage America look, including shoes, clothing, jewelry and other accessories.

Those who participate in the sweepstakes will receive several text and video messages directly from Joss Stone including performance clips, behind the scenes footage from the Lucky photo shoot and how-to style tips.

Jagtag works on all camera phones and across all major wireless carriers in the United States without requiring users to download an application.

The Nine West campaign with Jagtag will run from Aug.16 – Oct. 31.

“The beauty of what’s going on here is Nine West has used existing physical assets and is making them digital,” Mr. Jordan said. “They are able to provide multimedia content and also use it as a CRM acquisition tool.”

To read the full article, click here.

August 30, 2010

According to recent research:

Several retail sub-categories ranked among the top gaining categories for the month, including toys, mall, tickets and consumer goods. Toys sites rose 11% in July 2010 to 18.4 million visitors. Toysrus Sites ranked first in the category with 6.6 million visitors during the month (up 4%), followed by The Lego Group with 2.9 million (up 24%), Disney Shopping with 1.7 million (up 7%) and AmericanGirl.com with 1.3 million (up 75%).

Mall sites also flourished during the month, growing 11% to 18.1 million visitors. Sam?s Club ranked first in the category with 4.7 million visitors (up 6%). HSN.com followed in second with 3.6 million visitors (up 18%), while FingerHut.com had 2 million visitors (up 24%) and MyDealMatch.com had 1.8 million visitors (up 9%).

Gambling and travel sites have seen more American visitors as well, see full story here

By Dan Butcher (MobileCommerceDaily.com)

August 25, 2010

Apparel retailer American Eagle Outfitters Inc. is taking advantage of various channels within the mobile medium to enhance its multichannel consumer engagement efforts, ultimately leading to increased sales.

The retailer, which has bricks-and-mortar stores at malls nationwide, uses a number of mobile initiatives to engage its target demographic of consumers ages 15-25, with a bull’s eye at 20. Its mobile tactics include an SMS mobile marketing program, its own mobile commerce site and a partnership with the shopkick mobile retail application.

“For us, our customers use the mobile channel for everything from entertainment to peer-to-peer communication to shopping, and a leading lifestyle brand like American Eagle is in a constant pursuit of relevance to our customers,” said Mike Dupuis, vice president of marketing and operations at American Eagle Outfitters Direct, Pittsburgh, PA.

“That led us to decide that we needed to take and maintain a leadership position in the mobile channel, where consumers are looking to access our brand,” he said. “We have been very happy with the traffic to our mobile site and also conversion and sales within the mobile channel—we’re very pleased.”

Continue reading full article HERE

August 16, 2010 (Forbes.com)

Would you buy a life vest or an expensive watch from a retailer that cooks its books? Probably not if you could help it.

The fact is, companies that play it fast-and-loose with one area of their operations–like financial reporting–are probably inclined to do the same in areas near and dear to shoppers’ hearts–like product quality, truth in advertising and merchandise returns policies.

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With this in mind, Forbes compiled a list of the 10 Most Trustworthy Retailers. To crunch the numbers, we turned to Audit Integrity, an independent financial analytics company in Los Angeles. Audit Integrity looks beyond the raw data that companies report in their income statements and balance sheets to more than 100 factors that help it assess the true quality of accounting and management practices. Its aim is to identify the measures most highly associated with fraud and to quantify the risks that companies’ stock prices will tank, that their managers will be forced to restate their financials and that outsiders will hit them with securities lawsuits.

Continue reading article here

Download the July Report

July comp store sales do not appear to be indicative of any trend. The numbers are all over the board.  Gordman President, Bob Gordman, studied stores in two major markets. With few exceptions, many of the major retailers are not providing a compelling reason for customers to spend money in their stores. This is due to a combination of lackluster assortments and dramatically different quantities of summer (and in some cases last winter’s) clearance.  Attempting to compare July 2010 comp store sales to very depressed 2009 numbers offers nothing of substance.

For the sake of many key retailers’ second half results, let’s hope that upcoming merchandise assortments are better than what the consumers are seeing now.

Robert Gordman is President of The Gordman Group, and the author of Do You Know What You Don’t Know? and What it Costs You, Secrets of the $uper $weet $pot: Building Sustained, Profitable Growth and The Must-Have Customer: 7 Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven’t Got. As a consultant for almost 20 years, Bob has helped executives think creatively to develop well-thought-out, executable strategic plans for their companies.

Interesting when compared to the same type of map in 2007:

From a comp store sales perspective, it appears that May and June 2010 were generally weaker than the first quarter of 2010. What is difficult to figure out is how much of the weakness is due to consumers cutting back, retailers deliberately giving up sales with tight inventories that protect margins, or a shift in the way holidays (Memorial Day and July 4th) fell in the calendar and how this impacted related promotional activity. Regardless of the contributing factors, most retailers did not do as well in May and June as they did in the previous quarter.

View the Gordman June Trending Report

View Fiscal 2009 Retail Financial Data

The Gordman Group (www.gordmangroup.com)

The 2010 Global Retail Marketing Leadership Forum was intrigued this year to hear from Jen Drexler, co-founder of Just Ask A Woman, and her comical detailing of women’s habits, expectations, behaviors and trends, specifically how these characteristics relate to marketing and selling to the powerful demographic.   One of our 2010 sponsors, Vertis Communications, compiled a beautiful white paper highlighting women’s shopping trends as a recap to the GRMA roundtable discussion they hosted this past April.

Click here to download the report: Vertis Communications-Women Shopping White Paper

Feel free to comment and provide your insights on marketing to women, enjoy!

BOSTON, June 29, 2010—

A newly released study by Kantar Retail and BrandZ examines the most valuable global retail brands and reveals critical success requirements for retailers and suppliers to thrive in the new retail environment.

The Top 20 Most Valuable Global Retail Brands report combines retailer and shopper insights and analyses from Kantar Retail with the definitive Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking produced annually by Millward Brown Optimor and powered by the BrandZ database.

click here to download the full report released 6/29/2010 by Kantar Retail and BrandZ.

The 2010 GRMA Leadership Forum heard positive news this year from Tom Seclow, head of Spencer Stuart’s CMO Practice. Due to increased interaction with c-suite executives, short employment tenures may be a thing of the past for CMO’s.

This year’s CMO panel was titled, “Leadership Alignment and Marketing Strategy: What CEO’s Expect of the Future CMO.”

Members included: Mike MacDonald, CEO, DSW Inc.; Lee Applbaum, CMO, RadioShack Corporation; and Tom Seclow, Head of Chief Marketing Officer Practice, Spencer Stuart; moderated by Dave Walker, CEO, Geomentum

read full article here: Q&A: Spencer Stuart’s Seclow on Longer CMO Tenures

View Complete 2010 GRMA Leadership Forum Agenda  HERE