The other day I noticed that my Tesco shopping trolley had a monitoring device on it. On the back of the basket there was a small black box with a sign on it that said, “We’re working to understand how customers shop so we can serve you better.” Yikes, I am being tracked! Digging into it deeper, being physically tracked through a store isn’t that unusual, it’s called “indoor positioning” and sophisticated retailers are using this capability. With the help of the Wi-Fi signal

Today’s buzz phrase in e-commerce is “frictionless transactions”. Why is there a heightened interest in smooth functioning e-commerce? Well, it has to do with where consumers are in the e-commerce technology adoption curve. Using Everett Rogers’s technology adoption lifecycle, we’ve moved past the “early adopters” and in fact, are hitting the plateau in the “early majority” phase. Today’s online shopper not only includes the online bargain hunter, but also the time-poor consu

Alibaba was recently named the most valuable brand in the world by BrandZ’s global annual ranking, but how did it get there? And how did it get there is such a short period of time? The answer lies in what a recent Harvard Business Review article highlighted, it’s their ability to self-tune. According to the @HarvardBiz article called The Self-Tuning Enterprise, Alibaba continually reinvents itself and continuously self-tunes in algorithmic-style thinking. As with a self-tuni

There has been a noticeable change in the way we buy. While in the past we may have flipped through the pages of a magazine or browsed the shelves of a store for inspiration, today we are getting these great ideas from places that didn’t exist a few years ago, like Pinterest or blogs. Digital plays an important role in this shopping journey and it isn’t always about finding the best price. This new paradigm isn’t really about the mundane purchases like groceries and household

I recently met with a boutique marcom agency that serves small and medium businesses and this meeting further reinforced an idea that has been stewing in my brain for the last 6 months, there is a need for a simple and cost effective in-bound marketing technology platform catering to SMBs. In effect, we need a “mini-HubSpot” that a marketing department of 1 or 2 can manage. Automated in-bound sales and marketing software at the enterprise level is sewn up, there’s Marketo, El

An interesting report about the future of mobile was developed by Forrester a few months ago and it made some very good points about the future of mobile. In the paper “Predictions 2015: Most Brands Will Underinvest in Mobile”, Forrester states that mobile is one of the most disruptive technologies for businesses since the advent of the Internet. Mobile will play a central role in a broader digital transformation that has begun and will continue to disrupt the way we engage w

In business there are a few ideas that we should be reminded of from time to time and one of them is how to improve customer loyalty and customer retention. We all know it in the back of our minds because we are all consumers, but it’s a good idea to review it periodically. After all, don’t you want to improve your customer lifetime value? Make them a loyal customer and, better yet, recommend your brand to a friend. Take a step back and think about your customers’ journey. T