Great presentation on customer-centric innovation. The drivers for this are that traditional innovation is broken and the nature of competition is changing. Think left-wing rather than direct. Customer Centric Retail Innovation - Bucharest May 29, 2008View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: horizon centricity) Read Full Story

As a business you still probably don't care about Social Media. Your marketing department is still churning out brochures and adverts and telling you that this is all far future stuff. Only kids mess around with the internet. If so, they're killing your business. The UK alone has 17.1 million active internet users in the 16-54 age bracket - that's your primary consumer base. Worse still, Universal McCann research shows that 1 million of them have shared an opinion about a brand or product... Read Full Story

One of the biggest problems facing most organisations is a combination of poor internal information sharing mechanisms and a lack of a collaboration culture. In my experience I've found that this is tackled one of two ways...Primarily through chucking technology at it - usually some kind of intranet with out of the box functionality, andOccasionally through culture change programmes.There is often a belief amongst those implementing culture and business change that the change is technology... Read Full Story

Let’s start with a quick look at some of the key trends in consumer behaviour and the retail industry. I’ll pick out 3 each.3 Deepening Trends in Consumer Behaviour:Customers are becoming more demanding – the Web 2.0 revolution has provided a forum for sharing opinions to the point where consumers really do call the shots. They expect choice and convenience or will go elsewhere. Social Media online is exploding – and is becoming a key vehicle for both strategic marketing and customer... Read Full Story

I attended the ARC Retail Conference this morning and gave a breakfast briefing with some of my Charteris colleagues on Cross-Channel Retailing - see slides below.It covers 3 critical challenges that retailers are facing right now and how they could start to address them by developing low cost, high benefit customer propositions through leveraging the channel assets they already have. Here's the slides. If you want to know more just drop me an email and we'll be more than happy to have a chat... Read Full Story

By merging physical and digital sales channels, retailers essentially hope that shoppers never leave without making a purchase because the experience was lacking or because items they wanted are not on the shelves. As online retail continues into its second decade, business strategies like customer relationship programmes and multichannel integration, that were once perceived as too complicated to integrate successfully, are now working in sync.Multiple channels to market are therefore fast... Read Full Story

Following on from Part 1, the principle of recognising that value-adds become basic needs in mature markets applies even if you're a big brand entering a new space. Lets use Google's new browser Chrome as an example.It's simple, fast and neat and provides all the basic browsing capability that it needs to, but I bet Google didn't do any Voice of the Customer analysis around lay users before release. If they had, they would've realised that a host of conveniences they haven't included are now... Read Full Story

Customer-centricity at its basic is about ensuring the customer gets what they need rather than simply what you want to offer. This is still an improvement on what most companies provide, because it involves at least listening to the voice of the customer. Better however is to give the customer what they want, over and above what they need. This is usually costlier to provide because we're talking about value-adds. Getting the details right. Caring about your customer. The really successful... Read Full Story

Overview: Online and offline channels have complementary but currently exclusive benefits. On the internet, consumers can access related products, accessories, comparative price options, product information, communities, social interaction, reviews, simplified purchase, and delivery, while also being able to feedback to others about the experience. Consumers are therefore becoming used to a richer, faster, and more socially interactive shopping experience. What they cannot do is try out... Read Full Story

So Google has released their new browser called Chrome (read about it in my post... Google's new browser muscles in on Microsoft) and everything I've read since then is proclaiming it as the future. Well, I'm not so sure.Beta ProblemsLet's start with the immediate stuff. The problem with releasing a beta version of course is that it doesn't yet have all the functionality of its established competitors. Chrome is in Beta and isn't functionally integrated with all the conveniences we've gotten... Read Full Story