Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Businesses need to understand their customers in order to succeed. They need to know who their customers are, what kinds of products they appreciate, what they expect in a shopping experience and more. But according to a recent study, there’s one type of business that isn’t really doing this effectively.

A study conducted by Epsilon concluded that luxury brands lose up to 50 percent of their top clientele annually due to misidentified demographic and economic information, as well as failure to create a personalized shopping experience.

For luxury brands, creating an experience is especially important. Since customers have to spend a lot of money to shop there, they want the experience to be more enjoyable than what they’d find at an average store....

No one is arguing with statistics pointing to the fact that ecommerce will one day overtake other forms of shopping. The growth pace is just too staggering to think differently.An infographic put together by Gift-Library.com highlights statistics about how the trend is moving, citing how global ecommerce retail sales will reach $1,321.4 trillion by 2016. This number is a 67% increase from 2011...

...Smartphones allow us to answer our own product questions about options, specs and, of course, price while we’re out shopping. And Google is trying to figure out what that means for marketing and purchase decisions. Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners are what Google calls “smartphone shoppers,” meaning that they use their smartphones at least once a month in stores. That’s a lot of people.

If there are 130 million smartphone users in the U.S., then about 111 million Americans use their smartphones to prepare for shopping or to look things up while there. It’s not surprising that Google wants to get in all those heads and see what’s going on. There’s money there!... The most surprising finding was probably that people who consistently use their smartphones as part of their shopping spend 25% more than people who only use their smartphones for shopping occasionally....

A new report from Verdict, reported here, labels 'showrooming' as a myth, basing this on the finding that only 2% of respondents had bought an item online while at a retailer's store. I'm not convinced, having seen plenty of evidence of the growing use of mobiles when shopping offline, whether to purchase there and then or to check prices from rival retailers. So is it a myth? Let's have a look at the evidence...