Jon Stine at the CISCO Retail Blog, in his recent post - seems to have hit the nail on the head. He writes: "When e-commerce entered retail life in the mid-1990s, it was understandably regarded as just another channel of distribution – indeed, as just one more store. With this perspective, the key performance metric was (and generally remains to this day) site revenue. Conversion, another key metric, was defined as site transactions as a percent of site visits.
This still makes sense – but at a narrow, misleading level, because e-commerce no longer defines the connected world for retail.
In this age of Google and Facebook, the primary value today of the Internet to the shopper – and to your brand – is less about transactions, and more about search. On the PC, on the tablet, on the mobile devices, amidst the aisles.
The Internet – and the search function of the ever-mobile Internet – is now the front door of the entire brand."
Online retailing of Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) / Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) has not been caught up so far, not just in India, but also across the world. It is probably the last big segment / sector that is still largely out of the online commerce ambit and represents the next big challenge.
FMCG’s (grocery / household essentials) share of wallet is not only very high, but it is also very consistent and is rapidly growing over time, and therefore there is a lot of interest in wanting to address this market.
Live events are inherently social, buying tickets should be, too.
I am smart because of wikipedia and wikipedia is smart because of me (and people like me) - welcome to the smart world of collective wisdom.Re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto after ages and realized that it has been bang-on over all these years and now more relevant to marketeers and brand owners than ever before as the networks have got much better organized over time.
Image via Wikipedia"57 per cent of organisations either do not have, or are in early stage development, of a mobile strategy; 10 per cent have had a fully operational mobile strategy for less than a year; a third of firms have had a mobile strategy for more than a year."
"The ad business became an assembly line as predictable as Henry Ford's. The client (whose goal was to get the word out about a product) paid an agency's account executive (whose job was to lure the client and then keep him happy), who briefed the brand planner (whose research uncovered the big consumer insight), who briefed the media planner (who decided which channel -- radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, or TV -- to advertise in). Then the copywriter/art director team would pass on its work (a big idea typically represented by storyboards for a 30-second TV commercial) to the producer (who worked with a director and editors to film and edit the commercial). Thanks to the media buyer (whose job was to wine-and-dine media companies to lower the price of TV spots, print pages, or radio slots), the ad would get funneled, like relatively fresh sausage, into some combination of those five mass media, which were anything but equal. TV ruled the world. After all, it not only reached a mass audience but was also the most expensive medium -- and the more the client spent, the more money the ad agency made."
