Naked Retailing

And a Retail Social Marketing Blog is Born....

It is a new age of marketing for retailers. One that has them caught with their chinos down as technology, digital, mobile applications and social networking has released unprecedented transparency in all areas of retailing. From customer service, pricing, store experience, merchandise origins, perspectives on executive teams and more. Naked Retailing's mission is to be a resource for all retail marketers and brands in learning and sharing insights into the evolution of retail marketing as it relates to social media, interactivity and mobility. 

uber awesome: private car service for the masses

 

There are two things I've always wanted: A personal driver and a private jet. Well, I think it is safe to say that I've achieved one of my goals, a private driver on-demand. 

This past week I was on business in San Francisco and one of my colleagues introduced me to uber. I had the chance to use it 4 times while in San Fran and it worked seamlessly, I was sold. I was in a state of awe as I learned about the service from my friend and from the drivers themselves. I must've pinged the drivers with 20 questions every time I rode in one of their cars. How do you like it? Are you making money? What is the vetting process like? All of the drivers all had very positive things to say about the company and working for them. (note: I also asked taxi drivers that I interacted with during the week and they have a animalistic hatred for the service, not surprisingly. In fact, I wonder if the taxi lobby will throw their weight around to make life harder for uber into the future.) But I digress. 

The greatness of this service goes beyond the fact that you can have a clean, luxury towncar at your doorstep in minutes (granted they are in your City).

The real power of this system is the complete transparency.  I know who the driver is and his status the second I request a car, I can track him as he is on his way with the ETA updating, I know his rating, what he looks like. The only thing I dont know at that point is what the ride will cost me, because he does not know my destination at that moment. Looks like it is about 1.5 times the cost of a taxi, but so worth it. And, the rating system keeps him honest. I rated a driver 2 stars in San Fran because he took an inefficient route and uber refunded me 20% of my fare without me asking.

And the kicker for me was that I learned from one of the drivers that they rate their passengers. Wait, what? You rate your passengers so that other drivers can make an informed decision on whether or not to pick them up? Wow. To me, amongst the brilliance of the service, this to me was the piece de resistance. Imagine in your industry if you and your competitors could rate the customer pool to determine if you will invest your time and energy in their business? Passengers are rated on the same 5-star system and can be dinged for giving inaccurate directions, leaving the car dirty, being rude to the driver or other promiscous activities in the back seat of the towncar.  

uber is a company that I plan on using frequently in the markets they serve. I also look forward to tracking their iterations and growth. In fact, they've already gone through a logo change as they released a new logo this week. And with a general name like uber, it makes me wonder if they have long-term plans to bring the on-demand concept to other services. Let's hope. 

Jeeves, gas the car. 

Update: Just announced is another $32M round for European expansion: Expansion costs money, and the company just got a lot more: $32 million in a new round of funding led by Menlo Ventures. Also participating is Bezos Expeditions, Goldman Sachs, and some earlier investors. There's an option to expand to $39 million if necessary.

Big Brands Can Learn From Billy Dec

Here at Naked Retailing and the sister blog, Branding SoapBox, I usually write about big movements, brands and efforts that have scale beyond borders. However, I want to write about a dynamo in his own right at the local level here in Chicago. While Mr. Dec has reach beyond Chicago, for sure, he is demonstrating a mastery of social & digital media to build his own personal brand and those of his restaurant empire. I am writing about this because I had my own awesome interaction with him, yesterday. In a nutshell, I was tardy in making reservations for my 8-year anniversary and my birthday dinner with my wife. While, of course, I could have a reservation at any number of restaurants, I wanted to share Sunda with her because I often eat there with clients and colleagues, but she has never been. After trying Opentable, I was stymied. Then I called my concierge at American Express Platinum who also had no luck getting me a table. So then, I decided to throw a long pass and reach out to Billy on Twitter @ bd knowing that he personally engages. An hour later he responded and told me that he'd give his dinner spot for me and my wife and that the head maitre'd (copied on the tweet with her own twitter handle @kristy_sunda) While I am sure not the first time someone asked him for a favor on twitter, he knows the power of a social influencer and responded (Left me wondering if he checked my Klout score, first ;) ) We showed up for dinner at 7:30, Kristy was waiting for us. Greeted us like old friends, bought us a drink and showed us right to our table. Awesome. Billy even bought us our desert. Dinner was amazing, I tweeted pictures of the incredible food throughout dinner to my thousands of followers and here I am writing this blog post. He gets it. 

Here are 3 things that national retail/store/restaurant brands can learn from how Billy Dec leverages social media to engage and convert consumers in Chicago: 

1. Walk the Walk - He doesn't just talk about social media, he is social media. He integrates the use of various social platforms into his marketing and consumer engagement on a minute by minute basis. Billy personally engages people and thereby builds his brands. While this is hard to scale, it takes dedication and a passion for the medium. He knows that many of the people that frequent his locations are more advanced technologically and will respond. 

2. Integrate Throughout The Organization - Not just Billy, but clearly the staff is also engaged and not just superficially. Like Zappos, the staff are encouraged to be a part of the social influence. They know that check-in's, yelpers, twitpics and status updates including their brands and products creates awareness. He believes in his retail experience and his product and therefore loves when people talk about it. I am sure if there is a naysayer, that person is engaged and turned. 

3. Engage Authentically - When I told someone last night that Billy personally responded to me, they were shocked. I believe that he has an authentic passion for engaging the people and knows that creating positive content will create a longtail of positive brand sentiment and thereby increasing his influence not just here in Chicago but beyond. Chicago is a big tourism City and people do their research before coming here. Having all of this positive content will encourage people to put one his locations on their to-do list. 

If I were a restaurant investor, I would bet on Billy. The value he has created using social media combined with the incredible experiences he creates at retail is worth its weight in gold. This ongoing engagement will ensure that his places don't shutter and their legacy lives on. As we look at big, national brands; creating that engaged passionate personality and helping people make decisions on where to spend their hard-earned money is where it is going. 

How I Buy Digital Content: Music

I can remember about 10-years ago, when I was bored or just wanted to check out for a couple of hours, I would wander Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston. I would aimlessly go from listening station to listening station trying to find new music to add to my collection. This became a hobby of sorts. And, as I was cleaning out my basement the other day, I came across the voluminous CD collection that I gathered over the years and carted with me on my move to Chicago. Those CD's are now downloaded onto my iPod and are sitting on a shelf at Goodwill. 

While my passion for new music has never died, how I go about exploring, sampling and buying music has. While no one digital application works for me, I have developed a repertoire of digital applications that helps me buy music in the most transparent, naked way possible. 

Included in my music arsenal on my phone, tablet and computer, includes:

Shazam: Spontaneous Discovering

Pandora: Long-form discovery centered on a band

iTunes: Recommended artists, browsing and triangulating 

Spotify: Test listens

Back to iTunes: To Purchase

And now with iCloud, I am able to sync my music across devices, except for those iPod's that don't have WiFi connectivity. Really, the only place that a service like Spotify doesnt work for me is when I am in my car with my iPod connector into my stereo. Sure, I can listen offline to music I like, but that can be a pain to remember to sync. 

My music discovery and purchase ecosystem is a bit clunky as no one service has cracked the code on all of the above parts of the purchase path, but I would imagine in the near future through acquisitions, mergers and new advances, the ecosystem will shrink. 

 

The Vocal Minority In Social Media: Lessons Learned

Market and service transparency is at an all-time high as brands and agencies try to crack the code in engaging their customer/consumers in the social-sphere. As long as there's been an exchange of currency for products or services, there's been unsatisfied customers. The fact is, the larger the brand or transaction amount, the more opportunity for dissatisfaction. And while tens of thousands or even millions of transactions could take place and a small percentage do not go well, this could amount to what seems to be an incredible amount of negative sentiment in the social channels. This is especially true when working with a brand that has seasonal spikes during the year that can amount to a lionshare of their annual revenue. People are more intense, more is on the line and the chance for errors are higher.

Here at [wire] stone, we've been helping brands work out social service protocols to support their marketing and customer service efforts. The space is evolving rapidly for two main reasons: technology continues to improve, which allows community managers to engage better and more efficiently and consumers are getting savvier by the minute; digital natives aren't the only ones that know how to find and engage a brand when they aren't happy. 

Here are some take-away's from our experience and some lessons learned as you or your brand works to engage your marketplace deeper: 

- Conduct simulations for your social service methods and processes, when the bullets are flying that is not a good time to be working out protocol. In advance of the seasonal periods, try to anticipate every possible scenario, including flamers trying to bring your  brand down in all of the social channels. 

- Empower your community managers; give them everything they need to respond to the marketplace in a fast and accurate manner. This includes engaging your legal counsel long before it's needed to recieve approved responses and course of action. This is a tedious and difficult process, but makes it all worth it in the end. 

- Assign 1 point-person between your customer service team and the community managers to mediate and be the ombudsman in deciding what to do next. DO NOT make decisions by committee. 

- Expect the unexpected, consumers will do what they can to get under your skin. The more emotional your product or service, the worse it will get. 

- Use slower seasonal periods to create positive content and sentiment to insulate the inevitable vocal minority. 

- Don't fake it, if there is a concentrated period in time when consumers are posting negative content, don't pander and re-tweet or re-post people that say something positive the mad consumers will see right through that and wonder why you are wasting your time doing that and not getting to their issue. 

- Be patient and keep your cool, continue to have humility in the process and believe you are doing the right thing in helping them. We all have finite resources and things will go off the rails, continue to let people know you are working as fast as you can.

- Be generous when making it right; when a consumer has an issue use that opportunity to really make it right and they will reward you with positive sentiment subsequently to the negative sentiment they most likely created. Get this wrong and they will ping you again. 

- And last but definitely not least, keep your cool. Being difficult to work with when the social and community management team is trying their best to help people, does not make things better. 

New ground is being forged everyday in the area of Social Customer Service and SocialCRM. Nobody likes their dirty laundry aired for all to see, but that is the price of the new social web. As the social web evolves, so will the expectations of consumers. We as marketers are seeking ways to use the social web to build value for our brands and having a social customer service strategy should not be an after-thought, it should be the thought.

 

Groupon, Gilt, RueLala... Bad For Retail?

Much has been written about the difference between top-line retail revenue and gross margin. While retailers are always focused on driving "butts through the doors", there has been an ever-increasing pressure on profit. A new normal exists where the year-over-year comps might never hit the aggressive targets by retail pundits (NRF and others) but they will continue to drive billions of dollars in revenue; making money on those billions is the real focus.

There is no doubt that the latest in web technology is driving a fundamental shift in consumerism and how people are amortizing their hard earned dollars over a variety of retail entities. Areas of shopping innovation such as: Flash Sales, Penny Auctions, Group Buying, Deal of the Day, Geo-check in deals and more are slowly training the consumer to have new levels of expectation. 

The impact these new ways of shopping will have on retailers will be seen squarely in the margin they are attaining on each product they sell. Big-box retailers have always struggled with training the consumer to wait for an item to go on sale, usually advertised in their Sunday circular, and get them to buy sooner so that the product demands full margin. Some retailers are in worse positions that others as it relates to a trained consumer. These retailers price on a model called Hi-Lo. Something is always 50% off (see Kohl's) and some items will be full-price in hopes the consumer won't "cherry-pick" the item on sale and will fill their marketbasket with full-price items. 

These new ways of shopping for consumers will further train them to look for special deals, innovative methods of buying and sharing with their friends. Retailers (and brands) will need to find a better method of pricing to balance the demands of the consumer to feel like they are getting a deal with the demands of their stakeholders on profit. 

Facebook Deals and Retail Loyalty

The much talked about Facebook deals is the sequel to Facebook launching Places. It is still only available to a limited amount of businesses and you must claim your business before using Deals. But as always with Beta launches, it will be mainstream once they work the kinks out. For me, the best part of Facebook Deals is the Loyalty Check-In's. I am tired of having 7 cards on my keychain and 5 more in my wallet. I have one for every conceivable merchant - the 5 different car washes I visit, pharmacies, grocery stores, sporting good stores, book stores (which I never visit anymore because of my iPad) Starbucks etc. 

The simple fact that merchants can streamline that process of loyalty for me through Facebook is compelling. I would much rather check-in and have it automated through my most-visited personal website. For brands, the service is still basic, but the ability to segment and target offers to various regions, types of customers and be more adaptive to a very fluid and fickle marketplace. 

Retail Marketing Habits Die Hard: Target & iPad

Perusing the Sunday paper and came across the Target preprint that announced the big news that the Apple iPad is now available on the shelves at Target. The irony that this massively digital communications platform that is starting the tidal wave of mobile digital content consumption was being advertising in the birdcage liner that is the preprint of retail. Furthermore, I couldn't believe that a great, clever marketer like Target did not capitalize on this chance to do something different, unique and integrated. First, the fact that the NY Times was the advertised application on the cover of the ad was the lowest hanging fruit for me. Why not launch a new Target mobility app at the same time optimized for the iPad and advertise that on the iPad within the cover of the ad? Also, no where to be found in this Target preprint was one iota of digital content integration, social media integration or a way for the iPad user to get excited about keeping the link between Target and the iPad long after they've made the purchase. Part of the passion about owning an Apple product is staying engaged with Apple between product cycles. Target must find a way to capture this same passion. It reminds me of when Sears bought Lands End and tried to integrate that experience, #fail. 

It almost seems to me that Target has three different marketing teams. One that does the preprint and one that does the TV & Print and one that does the social and digital. I would expect more from this much-lauded retail marketer. Don't worry, Target, we will still be in your store this weekend with 2 filled carts. ;) 

Big-Box Retail Location Mapping

Came across a location mapping service for the inside of structures aimed at helping visitors navigate a large footprint. The service and applications is called PointInside and their mission is to map the indoor world. Very interesting, especially for a component based retailer like a Home Depot or an A.C. Moore Arts & Crafts.

There are two types of shoppers in these environments. The mission-based shopper and the wanderer. Some Saturday's in Home Depot, I am the MBS and others I am the Wanderer. It depends on my frame of mind and what is happening that day in my life. For mission-based shopping excursions, an application like this would come in handy to help me navigate an environment I am not used to shopping or for a unique item.

While I am sure this app is still in early phase development, I like the mapping feature, but I would love to see a product/part based search feature to tell me exactly where I can find a widget inside of a big-box environment. The department level mapping is ok for a first or second time visitor to a retail location, but once you get to know the store, that is old news. Also, having the app tied into a service-call environment inside a of a big-box location would be cool, as well. How many times have you been in a Home Depot or other big-box and needed some help with nobody to be found?

I was intrigued enough to write about this application and think it has some great utilitarian value. May even recommend it to a few clients.

 

Stickybits Creates More Transparency, Anywhere.

Stickybits is a fairly new mobile application that allows the user to attach multi-media content to a barcode. That barcode can be generated by the user from the website and attached to something or using a product barcode from a package. The part about people attaching content to barcodes on packaging is the part that retailers and brand marketers should think about. People could attach video reviews of a product that a user could check out in the aisle, in real-time. Or, they could simply write what they think of the product and attach. People could attach their favorite recipes to the barcode on food packaging. 

A proactive brand manager could pre-populate content that extends the aisles and acts as a silent salesperson with a how-to video or content for complementary products the consumer can buy. 

One more way mobile applications are lowering the veil for the consumer. Scan my barcode and see what I left for you. 

No Sign Of Social Media In Today's Retail Preprints

For all the talk about how retailers are getting better at integrating the social platforms into their marketing mix, I still am perplexed as to why there hasn't been deeper integration into the usual #1 budget line item for retail activation, the preprints. Even the early adopters like Best Buy nary a sign of social influencer strategy permeating their preprint grids and copy. Hmmm, I wonder why? I suspect a couple of things. First, the preprint advertising and creative team is often different than the above-the-line team and that permeates out through the agencies. There are a few 'preprint' experts out there that have made a living off making this specialized marketing device (also called bird cage liner in some circles) which is almost always separate from the brand and digital agencies. I'd love to pitch a retailer on how the tens of millions of dollars spent on preprints could go further and create bigger value if the retail calendar and social strategy were aligned.