How ironic it would be if the same decisions that drove Circuit City into extinction ultimately will do the same to Best Buy? Circuit City was a poster child for customer service, until it wasn’t. They cut costs by minimalizing full-time, well-trained associates and mixed in more part-time workers (of course there were other reasons as well). When Hubert Joly took the helm of a very shaky Best Buy in 2012, he did just the opposite to turn BB around. Flanked by three fierce competitors, Walmart, Target, and Amazon, all offering convenience and …
Strategy
Real Housewives Get Rich
Recipe for confusion: changing the name of your beauty brand just as consumers were becoming aware of the fact that you even had a beauty brand to begin with. But then again, when you have aspirations of becoming a billion-dollar entity, as Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Whitney Rose has boldly proclaimed, shifting from the head-scratching, no-one-knows-what-it-means Iris + Beau to Wild Rose Beauty actually makes some semblance of sense. After all, there are only roughly a gazillion new skincare brands launched every day; better to trade …
The Marriage Between Healthcare and Retail: Divorce is Not an Option
Young couples oftentimes struggle in the early years of their marriage as they both adjust to the new life dynamics of sharing everything from bedsheets to bank accounts, and it’s a metaphor that could aptly be used to characterize a great many retail and healthcare newlyweds. Some may argue that hospitals and primary care clinics are actually sheepish retail businesses dressed in wolves’ clothing – ones that happen to be, generally speaking, really, really bad at the customer-experience side of their businesses. Nonetheless, over the last …
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‘Zon is Coming to Your Hood
Amazon is both the world’s preeminent retail disruptor and a very effective PR machine. The latest post-Bezos buzz revolves around their latest physical store foray: the Department Store. But after the feeding frenzy around that chub, I believe it’s more of a red herring. Simply put, what Amazon is planning will look, feel, and operate like no department store of our time. Numbers du Jour We can all agree that Amazon has changed the face of retailing in our time, to say nothing about consumer behavior. They’ve turned technology on its head …
Dick’s Sporting a Whole Team of Formats
Sporting goods has to be one of the most exciting sectors in the entire retail industry now. Consider this: There’s a new brand specializing in outdoor goods that just opened last month; new in-store experiential merchandise formats are introduced regularly; one big legacy operation is remodeling many of its locations to take advantage of favorable business conditions; and a national chain is opening its own free-standing outlet division rather than moving close-outs to the off-price channel. But here’s the thing: All these new retailing …
Psycho Bunny Doubles Down on Physical Stores
What can we make of a brand that’s taking a look at everything else that’s happening in the retail industry and doing the exact opposite? Psycho Bunny is a men’s and children’s retailer that’s doing just that. The company actually opened in two mall locations in the past few months, when the rest of the retail world was shuttering stores, with plans to open more than 15 new mall stores throughout the year in 2021. It’s an interesting turn of events, with so many signs pointing to the death of traditional malls. Especially from such a booming …
Bloomie’s Breathes New Life into Tired, Predictable Retail
What’s in a nickname? Nearly everyone has one or knows someone who does. Some are a shorthand version of a longer name. Others are more descriptive, but whatever form they take, nicknames are affectionately used by close friends and family. A Rose by Any Other Name Some brands are christened with a nickname, like MickeyD’s, Tarjay and Chevy. These nicknames are considered the highest form of flattery in branding circles. A recent study in the Journal of Marketing found when people use a brand nickname, it implies the individual has a “real” …
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Primark’s Now Questionable Value Proposition
When Primark, the next-gen’s fast-fashion retailer of choice, opened its first U.S. store in Boston’s Downtown Crossing in October of 2015, I said, “Primark’s value proposition sets the pricing bar so low that it will be almost impossible for competitors to crawl under it. And they’ve set the experience and trendy merchandise bar so high, relative to their pricing, that competitors will find it an enormous challenge to simply match it, much less beat it. They own this space.” And indeed, Primark’s value proposition did own its space as it …