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Showing posts from August, 2015

How Do Mobile Experts Use Mobility and What Does it Mean for Retailers?

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One hundred percent of mobile experts in our recent survey of 108 mobile experts purchase products online.  Ninety percent have purchased products and services using mobile devices, but only 13% use mobile devices exclusively for purchasing products. Forty-five percent typically use only desktops/laptops, and 40% use both equally.  These are some of the findings from the survey we conducted in May of 2015. How often do mobile experts purchase products and services using their mobile devices?  Only 1% purchase products using mobile devices daily, 30% weekly, 43% monthly and 20% once every three months. Wow!  I am a one-percenter!!!  I use my Starbuck's app and Apple Pay often multiple times in a day. In another recent survey of 5,000 people in North America that I was involved in titled Cognizant's 2015 Shopper's Survey, we found 73% still prefer using desktops/laptops for online purchases. This does not mean mobile devices were not used in the path-to-purchase jo

Mobile Commerce Strategies - Contextually Relevant Opportunities, Moments and Environments

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In the early 1990s major retailers began investing in data analytics to better manage their stores and warehouses by analyzing individual store sales.  This insight gave them a perspective on the needs of the local market. Retailers soon advanced in their use of analytics and added external factors for consideration and planning like demographics, weather, geography, local events and competitor's promotions and campaigns. When customer loyalty programs tied to POS (point of sale) systems were implemented, retailers were able to start understanding individual customers through their transaction histories - at least what individuals bought from their stores.  The limitation, however, was this data was known and analyzed post-sales. There were no mechanisms in place to alert retailers to help customers during their path-to-purchase journeys. Mobile computing technologies and wireless internet access introduced the age of mobile commerce. Mobile commerce enables retailers unprece

Retail Evolution and Mobility

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Farmers once sold their harvest bounty directly to their customers from beneath the branches of their fruit trees.  Customers had a direct face-to-face relationship with the farmer and could express their preferences and demonstrate their buying patterns to the farmer.  Over time farmers developed means to preserve and package their products, and to sell them through retail stores with large customer bases.  Sales expanded, but the personal relationship between the farmers and their customers, and an intimate understanding of each of their customers’ preferences was lost behind the retail shelves of big box stores. Over time retail stores seeking market expansion and competitive differentiators developed mobile commerce apps that enabled them to sell products across a much wider geographic area, and to larger markets at any time of the day or night. This expanded sales potential, but in the process disconnected customers from the retailer’s physical store and location. Mass marke