In a direct marketing business, a customer list (i.e., housefile) is your most valuable asset. Therefore, it's important to manage your housefile and to keep it segmented and always up-to-date. To keep your housefile current, you need to merge/purge it regularly. What does this mean? Merge/purge is a process that identifies and removes unwanted or…
2020 was the beginning of a new world in retail. The pandemic took what would have been years of physical and digital commerce growth and compacted it into a matter of weeks, requiring sellers and consumers alike to adapt and innovate at an unprecedented rate. While the evolution of retail and e-commerce has been expeditious…
For decades, most retailers depended on foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores much more than the website they felt compelled to build late in the last century. Furthermore, “direct to consumer” isn’t really a new concept; thousands of prosperous companies marketed by direct mail and catalogs only, collecting orders via mail and phone before “that…
We've rounded the corner and thank goodness we feel the country is on the backside of the COVID pandemic. What a ride it has been! It's far from over, but under control. For many consumer companies, COVID caused a surge in business with more people working and shopping from home. It has put pressure on…
COVID-19 has created significant market and supply chain disruptions due to unprecedented shifts in both supply and demand. With retailers and brands cutting inventory, resulting in limited product availability, it's more important than ever that retailers and brands make fast, accurate product design, selection, and pricing decisions to lock in their share of scarce supply.…
Many of us crave the coming of Jan. 1 as a symbol of a fresh, new year dangling its promise of being oh so much better than the last. On many fronts, particularly humanitarian, we're anxious to move past the fear, upheaval and political angst of 2020. On the flip side, 2020 was an unprecedented…
The coronavirus has been a life-changing event. We've never experienced anything like this before. Baby Boomers were young when polio was nearly eradicated with the Salk vaccine in 1955. At that time, very little was known about polio, which paralyzed and often killed young children. Science has greatly advanced since then. Even so, until we…
The retail industry, like many others, is being disrupted and permanently changed by the ever-increasing capabilities and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). As I wrote in my last post, we're just beginning to see the benefits of AI and ML implementations in the retail sector, but they've already helped forward-thinking companies…
With all the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) these days, retailers are naturally asking, “Is AI for real, or is it just a passing fad?” Nearly every retail technology company is now slapping the “AI” moniker on their marketing materials, but which AI applications are really moving the needle for retailers? A Gartner report released…
Retail executives are too quick to dismiss the impact that pricing and new technologies are having on consumer purchase decisions.
