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…
The trade war with China has been cited as a primary cause of much of the recent economic volatility, from the stock market dive last fall to fluctuations in oil prices. While it's clear that tariffs are creating some level of instability as companies and investors try to guess what will happen next, many retailers…
Retail executives are too quick to dismiss the impact that pricing and new technologies are having on consumer purchase decisions.
New research from Voicebot.ai reports that nearly one in five adults in the U.S. already has access to a smart speaker (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), although they might not necessarily have their own. This equates to roughly 47.3 million people, or 20 percent of the U.S. adult population. Considering that Amazon.com didn’t release its Echo speaker until…
As brands and retailers endeavor to unlock the mystery surrounding consumers’ shopping habits and behaviors, the question of product quality vs. price comes into sharper focus. According to recent research from technology company First Insight, consumers are increasingly choosing quality. In fact, 53 percent of consumers who responded to a First Insight survey said product quality was the…
Steve Jobs thrived at balancing the complexity that drives powerful computational systems with the simplicity required for utility. “Simple can be harder than complex,” Jobs said. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move…
Each day, the world seems bigger, more diverse and moves much faster. Predicting the future — always a dubious proposition — seems like a fool’s errand in this climate, given the dizzying pace of disruption. But as Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” For retailers, that…
It’s no secret that there has been a shift in shopping behavior due to growth in millennial spending power, aging of baby boomers and the growth of online shopping. These changes are impacting pricing and demand, and are creating a disconnect for retailers and brands between what they're charging and how much consumers will actually…
Supposedly, Tori Spelling once said, “bad shopping habits die hard.” The "Beverly Hills 90210" actress was probably talking about her own shopping habits, but in a larger sense, Spelling, who helped personify consumerism in the 1990s, when the mall was king and Amazon.com was merely another dot-com, pretty much nailed today’s retail business, where bad habits…
The future is now. This thought went through my head several times this week at Shop.org in Los Angeles, especially when I was sampling some of the virtual reality (VR) immersive experiences that were on display on the trade show floor. The VR experiences I've demoed in the past have been proof of concepts designed…
