The following is a guest contributed post from Larry Light, a global brand revitalization expert, is the Chief Executive Officer of Arcature (www.arcature.com), a marketing consulting company that has advised a variety of marketers in packaged goods, technology, retail, hospitality, automotive, corporate and business-to-business, as well as not-for-profit organizations.

The business news is full of bleak outlooks or bankruptcies for a number of big retail stores, with iconic Toys ‘R’ Us one of the latest casualties.

The crumbling of several brick-and-mortar giants continues during the rise of e-commerce, led by Amazon. Some of those still in business are attempting to improve their online capabilities as a way to compete better in the changing landscape. Walmart, for example, plans to open fewer stores so it can focus on e-commerce while enhancing existing stores. Target has been building out its digital offerings, with same- and next-day delivery services being tested.

Such online upgrading illustrates a shifting business model for some long-time retail titans. But Larry Light, a global brand revitalization expert, says to know where they’re going, they can’t forget where they came from. Their survival, he says, will likely depend on how they blend their retail brand strengths with new online know-how.

“Retail giants are feeling the ‘Amazon effect,’ ” says Light (www.arcature.com), co-author with Joan Kiddon of The Paradox Planet – Creating Brand Experiences for The Age of I. “Struggling retailers are focusing on catching up in the online space and giving up on investing in sociability and sensory aspects of creating a special in-store experience.

“The challenge is how to provide the best combination of both online and retail. This is the big opportunity space that traditional retailers seem to be ignoring.”

Light suggest three ways that retailers can adapt and survive in the e-commerce era:

• Re-establish the emotional store connection. One reason people consistently shopped at a brand retail store, Light notes, was the way they felt connected with the brand and the store experience. “Connecting with customers’ emotions is the way to find success in the age of online shopping,” Light says. “No matter how much we appreciate the ease and speed of online shopping, we crave the joy of seeing and touching the product. A computer cannot match that human experience.” So increase the emotional rewards, Light says, by enhancing the shopping environment, making it more relevant and distinctive.
• Translate data to identify shopper behaviors. According to a Forbes article, retailers need to analyze a wide variety of metrics to better understand their customers and what impacts their purchasing decisions.  “There are many variables to the in-person shopping experience,” Light says. “Detecting these variables and how they impact customers can bring solutions on how to optimize the shopping space.”
• Don’t have an identity crisis. A brand has a distinguishing character, and Light says it’s vital to avoid losing it in the midst of change. “IKEA, Walmart and other retailers are struggling to catch up with online venues, focusing on creating a brand experience that has less to do with the legacy retail environment and more to do with virtual environments,” Light says. “You walk in a Sears and see an abandoned brand.”

“A brand is more than the promise of features and functions,” Light says. “It’s a special feeling for the customer. The retail experience and online enhancements can make it more powerful.”

The post Op-Ed: 3 Ways Retail Stores Can Survive In The Age Of Amazon & E-Commerce appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Mark Cullinane, SVP & GM Digital at Publishers Clearing House.

At first blush, it wouldn’t seem that Amazon’s business model represents much of a threat against Aetna. One is an online retailer. The other’s an insurer. Why Aetna would see Amazon as a threat at first seems like a reach.

Looking closer though, CVS’ $66 billion deal to acquire Aetna is all about commandeering consumer touchpoints. If Aetna can’t insinuate itself further into the lives of its 44.7 million customers, then it’s a sitting duck to be disintermediated by Amazon. The same could be said of CVS.

What’s true for insurers and drug store chains also applies to media and marketing. In our current climate, media properties must also elicit engagement if they want to stay vibrant. This new focus on engagement is leading to a total rethinking of how media is measured. New models eschew traditional metrics that quantified reach alone (clicks, impressions) in favor of metrics like time with content or minutes spent per unique user, which quantify the depth and quality of user engagement. To gin up engagement, especially in mobile, smart publishers will continue to dabble in interactive mediums that give consumers a reason to keep returning to their properties for quality lengths of time. Finding ways to reward and nurture existing relationships through is ultimately more efficient than focusing solely on acquiring new audiences.

A shift to engagement

In the print days, magazines and newspapers focused on circulation as a driver of its advertising and subscription revenue. In part, that was because it was impossible to measure whether people were actually reading stories or looking at ads, let alone which ones or for how long.

The same isn’t true for digital media. It’s feasible to gauge how much time a reader spent with a story and on the site and even how interested they were with the content. While this has been measured from the get-go, it wasn’t as impressive as impressions. In the past few years, the FT, The Guardian and The Economist began to shift their focus to “time spent.” That was a recognition that merely getting in front of readers wasn’t enough. Instead, you want to be sure that they’re paying attention.

In some quarters in fact, time-spent isn’t enough either. Rather, “attention metrics” like scroll initiation, scroll depth and scroll velocity are better indicators that there’s an engaged human being on the other end.

Games offer engagement

Where is it possible to see engagement reflected in time spent and those attention metrics? TV producers have known from the early days that games are a surefire way to keep consumers riveted, in part because the mind abhors an opened loop. In short, we fixate on unfinished business, whether it’s a cliffhanger or a half-completed Wheel of Fortune round. Games also offer a dose of real-life drama and the opportunity to test oneself in a nonconsequential arena. Things haven’t changed since then. At this writing, the hottest app out there is HQ Trivia, an online interactive game show that has been drawing 100,000 people per game. (It runs games twice a day during the week.)

Currently, about two thirds of U.S population regularly plays video games on their mobile device, according to Nielsen. Research shows that gamified ads boast engagement rates more than 7X the average for static ads and click-through rates. If those are the stats for ads, you can imagine the engagement rates for gamified content.

Established companies don’t have to shell out hundreds of millions to build a strong relationship with their customers. They can achieve the same ends by advertising within engaging media. This isn’t a new idea. Coca-Cola was able to stay current in the 2000s by embedding its brand into American Idol. Before that, “our good friends at AT&T” also became integral to Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Brands have the same opportunity today, but it’s not happening on TV. Smart brands are realizing that when it comes to Amazon’s powers of intermediation, they must advertise with the publishers that maintain the strongest and most engaged relationships with their customers.

The post Why Gamified Media is the Key to Winning in the Age of Amazon appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced Tuesday that they are partnering on ways to address healthcare for their U.S. employees, with the aim of improving employee satisfaction and reducing costs.

The three companies, which bring their scale and complementary expertise to this long-term effort, will pursue this objective through an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints.

The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.

Tackling the enormous challenges of healthcare and harnessing its full benefits are among the greatest issues facing society today. By bringing together three of the world’s leading organizations into this new and innovative construct, the group hopes to draw on its combined capabilities and resources to take a fresh approach to these critical matters.

“The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy. Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable. Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes,” said Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO, Warren Buffett.

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation.”

“Our people want transparency, knowledge and control when it comes to managing their healthcare,” said Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. “The three of our companies have extraordinary resources, and our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans,” he added.

The effort announced today is in its early planning stages, with the initial formation of the company jointly spearheaded by Todd Combs, an investment officer of Berkshire Hathaway; Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold, a Managing Director of JPMorgan Chase; and Beth Galetti, a Senior Vice President at Amazon. The longer-term management team, headquarters location and key operational details will be communicated in due course, today’s announcement concludes.

The post Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to Team on U.S. Employee Healthcare appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Per the official word from Amazon:

Customers shopped from hundreds of millions of products, including a vast selection from small businesses and entrepreneurs. More than one billion items were ordered from small businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide this season – and over just five days, from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, nearly 140 million items were ordered from small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Amazon Devices also had its best holiday yet, with tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices sold worldwide. Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote were not only the top-selling Amazon devices this holiday season, but they were also the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon.

“Since Day One we have obsessed over what we believe our customers care about – incredible deals and low prices, fast and free shipping, and a wide selection of top products – and we continue to provide all three, all the time. We’re excited that people continued to join Prime this holiday, to take advantage of more fast and free shipping options plus new convenient delivery like Amazon Key, as well as early access to Lightning Deals and unlimited streaming of TV shows and movies, including Prime Originals and more,” stated Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer. “Thank you to the millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees all around the world who made this holiday better than ever before. We look forward to another great year ahead.”

The post Prime Time: Amazon Celebrates Biggest Holiday appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The event, we’re told, offers “the biggest savings of the year on digital content across Amazon,” the company says.

According to the official word, customers will be able to access more than 5,000 deals over eight categories including movies, TV shows, mobile games, apps, eBooks, and more at amazon.com/digitalday.

Last year on Digital Day, Amazon customers ordered hundreds of thousands of items with record-breaking sales across digital apps, games, and comics.

“Amazon Digital Day is an amazing time to shop for deals on digital content,” said Aaron Rubenson, VP, Amazon Appstore. “The customer response was incredibly positive last year, and we’re excited to help customers find great discounts again this year—whether they just received a new Amazon Fire TV, Fire Tablet, or Fire Kids Edition Tablet over the holidays or are looking to add new content to their current device.”

Customers can visit amazon.com/digitalday to sign up to receive notifications when the deals begin, or follow #DigitalDay for updates.

The post Amazon Announces Second Annual Digital Day appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Based on AWS Elemental video solutions, these five new cloud services let customers build end-to-end workflows for both live and on-demand video with the professional features, image quality, and reliability needed to deliver premium video experiences to viewers across a multitude of devices.

With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can build customized video applications and pay only for the technology resources they use, without upfront capital investment.

From the official announcement:

Whether for entertainment, sports, news, education, community engagement, or corporate alignment, consumers today expect great video experiences delivered securely and reliably to any device including tablets, smart phones, connected TVs, or set-top boxes. Previously, to meet these high expectations, video providers had to procure very expensive, specialized broadcast equipment that was inflexible, slow to adapt to new device platforms, hard to scale to meet times of peak demand, and often lacked support for the latest video formats, resolutions, and streaming techniques. What’s more, if the video provider wanted to adopt new revenue-generating business models, such as personalized advertising to a global customer base, they needed to spend considerable time and effort making that work seamlessly across all devices.

“For the better part of six decades, professional-grade video workflows were limited to a few major industry players who could afford to build and maintain customized infrastructure that would be updated only once or twice each decade,” said Alex Dunlap, General Manager at AWS Elemental. “These companies spent a great deal of time, money, and focus operating infrastructure with resources that could have been better spent creating great content and viewer experiences. We built AWS Elemental Media Services to let customers focus on delivering top-quality video reliably to any device, everywhere, without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure. This not only helps traditional video providers innovate faster, but it also opens up new opportunities for startups, government agencies, schools, and multinational enterprises that, before today, had limited access to premium-quality video technology.”

To get started with AWS Elemental Media Services, click here.

The post Amazon AWS Upgrades Elemental Video Services appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Much of this evolving retail landscape is attributed to the enormous impact of Amazon, which has more than 310 million active shoppers worldwide and $136 billion in U.S. sales.

However, a new report from SmarterHQ, the leading multichannel behavioral marketing platform, shows cracks in Amazon’s armor that retail brands can exploit to start stealing market share back from the e-commerce behemoth.

SmarterHQ’s survey of more than 1,200 people ages 18 to 65+ shows that without free two-day shipping, 82 percent of Amazon Prime users said they would cancel their membership.

“Amazon’s dominance in retail has been the primary focus of retail executives, investors, and board members – yet, the solution to steal back both market share and consumers’ loyalty have evaded most traditional retail brands,” said Michael Osborne, CEO of SmarterHQ. “But our report tells a surprisingly upbeat story for retail brands – consumers can be persuaded to ditch Amazon and shop in their store or on their web site. We found that people aren’t going to Amazon to browse; rather, they have very specific items in mind. Free two-day shipping is very important to Amazon Prime members – so much, in fact, that they would cancel their membership if it wasn’t offered. And consumers have a price threshold of $200 they’re not willing to cross when shopping on Amazon, a good sign for luxury brands. While Amazon is viewed as Goliath by the industry, there are certainly weaknesses that retail brands can exploit to help drive their bottom line.”

To review all of the survey findings and additional tips that retail brands should consider to better compete with Amazon, you can download the report, “The Amazon Report: Consumers Share How Brands Can Win Them Back,” here.

The post SmarterHQ Survey Reveals ‘Cracks’ in Amazon’s Armor appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

To understand how consumers are going to shop during this year’s holiday season, Astound Commerce Insights surveyed 1000 consumers from the United States and 1000 consumers from Europe who own a smartphone and shop online at least four times per year spending $250 or more.

“Competing For Customers During the Holidays and Beyond” found that the customer experience coupled with strong service will be important factors in retailer selection this season, but savings trumps all of the above, reads a report summary emailed to MMW.

“Our study revealed that every channel has a role to play this season. Brands and retailers have to make sure they can get products to consumers when they want them and how they want them, as efficiency is top of mind for shoppers,” says Lauren Freedman, SVP of Digital Strategy, Astound Commerce. “They also need to figure out how to keep people coming back and away from Amazon, as not surprisingly our research found that the company will play a huge role this year in holiday shopping.”

According to the data collected, price and free Shipping are the top purchase drivers.

Price is the top consideration for consumers when selecting a retailer. In projecting behavior for the holidays relative to current patterns, over 50 percent will increase their behavior when it comes to shopping early for price promotions, looking for coupons and discounts, and gravitating towards free shipping, as they focus squarely on price.

For additional insights, click here.

The post Astound Commerce Study Reveals Amazon’s Holiday Dominance appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Conor Ryan, StitcherAds Co-Founder

Amazon continues to dominate online sales during the holiday season. Last year, Amazon’s online sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday totaled 37 percent of all online sales during the five-day period. Amazon has proven highly effective at converting in-store buyers, all without spending marketing budget on increasingly ineffective channels like print and without leveraging any first party data on in-store buying behavior.

Traditional omnichannel retailers are behind on embracing online advertising innovations and are therefore struggling to compete, leading many to wonder if they’re in for another brutal sales hit for the 2017 holiday season. However, there is one crucial piece of the market the online super giant has only just started to penetrate — brick-and-mortar stores. While online shopping is on the rise, brick-and-mortar stores comprise 81 percent of total holiday shopping. Despite the recent Whole Foods acquisition and rollout of limited Amazon Go and Books locations, Amazon is still a primarily online-only experience. In the race for holiday season sales, either Amazon is going to win by taking their online expertise and bringing it to brick-and-mortars, or retailers are going to defend their differentiating asset by embracing omnichannel strategies.

A recent report from Market Track shows that, in spite of the growing number of products available online, U.S. shoppers still prefer to make in-store purchases. Are people buying online because pure play ecommerce players like Amazon are better at targeting shoppers where they are? Actually yes—the research suggests that they would buy similar products in store if brick-and-mortar retailers were better at advertising to them. While Amazon strives to perfect the online shopping experience, this preference is an opportunity for retailers to drive shoppers in store by presenting them with geo-targeted ads for items relevant to their interest. Retailers need an effective way to analyze their online and in-store customer profiles to fully exploit their in-store assets. Google has delivered several such solutions to power their ad offerings and more recently Facebook has started to deliver similar offerings.

According to Facebook’s Global Creative Director Andrew Keller, “The average person scrolls through 300 feet of mobile content every day.” Facebook clearly has a captive audience for retailers to tap into to drive more online users in store. Facebook has rolled out advertising tools for businesses in an effort to link offline customer purchasing activity with geo-targeted online ads. Facebook’s Offline Conversion API lets retailers use real customer identities to accurately measure in-store purchases after being exposed to Facebook ads. Recently, Facebook made that data more actionable through custom audience building and retargeting. These and other related capabilities allow businesses to match in-store customers to online users. Once a customer is identified, Facebook’s rich profile (including data from partners such as DataLogix, Acxiom, Experian, etc.) can be leveraged to build audiences for retargeting or prospecting, and to optimize and measure campaigns that are focused on increasing foot traffic. Facebook’s highly targeted ads not only allow customers to purchase online, but also include directions to the nearest store, empowering customers to buy wherever they want. The choice for a virtual or tangible buying experience is not yet something Amazon can support.

While these revamped Facebook Business tools open up new avenues for retailers to edge out Amazon this holiday season through opportunities to increase online and offline revenue, effective and efficient strategies are needed to reach their full potential. What can you as a retailer do to revamp your Facebook ad campaign strategies to deliver more personalized ads? We’ve pulled together our top expertise-based tips.

Build an online-to-offline audience

In today’s plugged-in world, there is more customer data available than ever before and not just for online customers. This data can be used to draw online users into your stores based on their current and historic buying behaviors. Having the ability to pass offline purchase data through Facebook opens new avenues for you to build broader, more hyper-targeted audiences than ever before. With comprehensive data for in-store buying behavior to leverage, retailers must find the right strategy to reach the right customers at the right time with the right products to draw them in store. 

Create full-funnel omnichannel campaigns

Prospecting, retargeting, cross-selling, and upselling – the standard online marketing funnel also applies to driving customers in store. By now being able to plug in offline customer data, you can use Facebook’s audience capabilities to exploit strategies that were previously only possible for online activity. Enhance your prospecting strategy by building Lookalike Audiences online based on customers’ brick-and-mortar buying behavior. Retarget customers that recently made an in-store purchase by targeting them online with a coupon code or discount ad for a new season product. Cross-sell and upsell products by targeting customers that recently bought related items in-store or online. And, make sure to also utilize combined offline and online product data – what products are selling best online versus in-store, what items are being bought together, etc. – to optimize your prospecting_, retargeting, cross-selling and upselling campaigns.

Make compelling omnichannel ad creative

Drawing online users in store, like all online campaigns, requires compelling, informative narratives. While many imagine ad creative as an exercise in branding, “compelling” narratives are built with data-focused personalization. When creating an ad, leverage previous buying behaviors, nearest store locations, and previous purchases to create a more customized experience.

When determining ad format, consider the customer’s place in the conversion funnel. Canvas and Collection ad formats provide advanced in-ad browsing experiences, similar to a mobile website or app, making them best for engaging new, lookalike audiences. Use ads with map cards when targeting areas with brick-and-mortar locations to encourage a visit. Finally, dynamic carousel ads are best for creating evergreen campaigns, allowing you to promote your entire product catalog, highlighted by top-level category images or videos. These ads work full-funnel, pulling in the products most relevant to the Facebook user served the ad. To take dynamic ad customization a step further, set up a dynamic image or video template that can be automatically overlaid to product feed assets to add details like categories, sale status, stock levels, branding, and other product data fields.

Lastly, make sure your campaigns include both online and in-store calls to action. Campaigns with in-store objectives could include location-specific specials, sales prices, stock levels, and other information to help customers make an informed choice on how they’d like to buy.

To gear up for the online shopping frenzy this holiday season and compete with Amazon’s notorious monopoly of online sales this time of year, having the right ad campaigns in place will make all the difference. This year, balance the foot traffic on top shopping days, like Black Friday when everyone is in store looking for deals in a craze, by leveraging Facebook’s new offline tools to draw current and new customers in store ahead of time this holiday season.

About Conor Ryan

Conor Ryan, co-founder of StitcherAds, has spent 18 years innovating in media tech, designing and launching product to exploit emerging media channels. Launched in 2009, StitcherAds is an official Facebook & Instagram Marketing Partner helping advertisers and agencies scale full-funnel performance marketing campaigns on Facebook & Instagram. Since conception, StitcherAds has empowered some of Facebook’s largest advertisers for eCommerce, retail, travel, and real estate businesses worldwide, using data-fueled automation to increase the revenue impact of their ad spend. As the first partner to launch dynamic ads and dynamic ads for travel on Facebook, StitcherAds has been a leader in both speed and achievement in direct response innovation. For more information about StitcherAds, please go to www.stitcherads.com.

The post How to Leverage In-Store Data on Facebook to Beat Amazon this Holiday Season appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Danielle Levitas, Senior Vice President, Research at App Annie

The massive transition to mobile has stretched across virtually all corners of retail with one exception — grocery. Despite the rapid increase in demand for mobile options by shoppers across all sectors, grocery has remained staunchly traditional, with in-store purchasing continuing to be the clear favorite for ease and product selection.

With Amazon’s recently announced plans to acquire Whole Foods, the mcommerce giant is setting itself up to, once again, challenge the status quo by converting one of the last remaining sectors of retail to its ultimate destination: mobile.

Data Points to Promising Growth

Amazon has already seen incredible growth in mobile across nearly all areas of its business. In May 2017, the company saw 80 million monthly active users for iPhone and Android combined in the United States, according to App Annie data. Whole Foods Market is no amateur in mobile either, with its app growing 750% in monthly active users over the last two years. This trajectory demonstrates that grocery shoppers — specifically Whole Foods consumers — are increasingly turning to mobile apps to aid their grocery shopping experience.

The grocery sector has experienced its share of consolidation and increased competition from big box retailers over the past decade, so to some, this acquisition may seem too risky. Yet, if there is one thing Amazon has successfully demonstrated, it’s that there is no other digital behemoth more fit to vertically integrate the entire grocery store experience. The company already has a headstart, with iPhone users of the Whole Foods Market app more than 3x more likely to use Amazon Prime in comparison with the general population in the US.

Going All In

Amazon clearly has been going after grocery in recent years, but this move dramatically accelerates this segment and allows Amazon to have hundreds of stores in prime locations throughout the US. Furthermore, retail and specifically mcommerce, is outpacing all other channels and is expected to grow nearly 6-fold globally from 2016 to 2021. In fact, App Annie estimates 2016 mcommerce spend per user in the US was $613 and it’s projected to grow to $2,012 per user in 2021. Groceries are one of the key segments driving this growth in the later years of the forecast.

This acquisition allows Amazon to capitalize on mcommerce growth through a hybrid retail strategy of mobile ordering and payments. Users can make shopping lists, browse products, research prices, find the best deals, make a purchase and more, all within the app (admittedly most recently, Whole Foods removed some key functions of the app, but given customer feedback, we expect these features to make a comeback).

A Mobile-First Future

Americans spend more than 2 hours and 15 minutes per day in apps, which equates to more than one month out of every year. This is the power of apps — meeting your customers whenever, wherever they need you. Shopping and mcommerce have been key growth factors in apps with time spent in shopping apps nearly doubling over the past two years and smartphone users engaging in these apps nearly twice per day on average.

The move to integrate mobile more predominantly into the grocery market will not happen overnight. However, with the value of the global app economy expected to increase to $6.3 trillion in 2021, mobile is only continuing to pick up speed. From banking to pharmaceuticals, globally, the app market has seen new franchises emerge in almost every sector of mobile. Our mobile-first society is exercising its desire for convenience, value and willingness to accept the new. By bringing its firepower to the grocery industry, Amazon is sending an enormous signal to consumers and brands alike that mobile is here to stay and they are at the forefront of this movement.

The post The Future of Grocery Shopping Is Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.