According to Reuters last week, HBC (and its governor, CEO and executive chairman, Richard Baker) is prepping to make a bid to acquire Kohl’s. Will they succeed? Probably. Should Kohl’s do all they can to repel such a deal? Absolutely! The Unlocking Value Engineer Why? Because Richard Baker, real estate mogul extraordinaire is just that. As he reviews the totality of Kohl’s, its problems and opportunities, he is assessing its potential new revenue streams and strategic and structural changes, including economies of scale, consolidating …
Macy’s and Kohl’s: A Replay of Target’s Growth Strategy
Spoiler alert: This is a strategic perspective, not a financial review – on purpose. The current three-front perfect storm for Macy’s and Kohl’s could arguably be described as a pursuit of a post-Covid higher level of positive “normal,” managing through inflation and supply chain impediments, and the threat of greedy activists. And the major stories coming out of their recent investor presentations were their focused repositioning strategies, aligning merchandising and distribution with young consumers’ preferred products, and enhancing …
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Amazon Fiddles Around While Losing on the Ground
The quasi-metaphor, “Nero fiddles while Rome burns,” refers to Amazon fiddling around with test stores while two of their fiercest competitors, Walmart and Target, continue to gain both on the ground and in the digital air, so to speak. And while Amazon has declared the necessity to expand into physical retailing (understanding the omnichannel advantage), and specifically in grocery and apparel, they are moving too slowly in this flywheel-tech era. This is astounding to me given Jeff Bezos’s mantra from day-one that Amazon must “get big fast.” …
Can Walmart Connect Threaten Amazon’s Lead in the Advertising Business?
Just as Amazon and the internet in general continue to disrupt and transform the legacy publishing and broadcast industries, we are in the early stages of a major disruption of the legacy world of advertising. Amazon and Walmart are two leading forces that are fundamentally changing retail marketing communications. Ad Agency Reset Amazon was among the first, and now the largest mover, among retailers to launch its own advertising agency business logging in at over $31 billion in 2021, up from $21 billion in 2020, with a 77 percent share …
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Amazon’s Gift to Shopify
For the record: Amazon, based in Seattle, WA, is a global, primarily online marketplace which sells vendors’ and their own goods to consumers. Shopify, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, is a worldwide technology platform that primarily provides the tools, (software) and instructions for small businesses to quickly and easily create their own online shops. Ranging from $30 to $2000 a month, Shopify offers sellers over a dozen services to run an online store: the website domain name; inventory and content management; payment processing and …
Is Amazon a Kohl’s Suitor?
Is Amazon a suitor for Kohl’s? If not yet, perhaps it should be. And maybe Kohl’s is entertaining the possibility. Back in 2017, I stated that Kohl’s was launching its first few Amazon in-store shops as tests to drive younger customer store traffic to make a few Kohl’s sales across the aisle when they were visiting Amazon. Five years later it is still a win/win for both brands. At the time, I suggested that the partnership could very well be viewed as a much larger, long-term, first-stage strategy of Amazon to acquire Kohl’s. In the …
Get Tough, or Get Out
As I have often said to many of my friendly colleagues, many of whom are C-suite leaders in the retail industry, I’m fortunate that I only must observe, strategize, and write about the industry for The Robin Report. And indeed, some former CEO’s who are in retirement yet want to remain relevant are saying the same thing. They are obviously more attuned to the toughness required of the current C-leaders. Like aging Woodstock attendees can say, “I was there” (and my generation knows what they are referring to), so too will current C-suite leaders …
REI: A Radical Co-op
Like all strategic transformations, it requires enlightened leadership, major capital commitment, dedicated resources, innovative initiatives, and extreme focus matched with a high level of strategic agility to meet the demands of a very complex market and massive shift in consumer demand. REI, a Robin Report 2021 Retail Radical, in partnership with SAP, has these hallmarks in spades. From nothing more than a shelf in the Puget Sound Cooperative Store, a 1938 farmer's co-op near Pike Place Market in Seattle, Mary and Lloyd Anderson …