Monthly Archives: April 2018

April 23, 2018 · 12:04 pm

Touch Me, Feel Me

I was cleaning out some old stuff on my computer this morning when I came across a receipt for something I had purchased online in 2005. I knew I had been an online shopper for a long time. I can’t recall the last holiday season during which I stepped foot into a retail store. I mean, I don’t like to so shop for anything on the weekend due to crowds and lines so I’m rarely in a physical store between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Given the explosive growth of online commerce, apparently many other folks prefer not to hit the stores either. I mean, the share online represents of global retail sales has almost doubled from 2015 to 2018, and is projected nearly to triple by 2021. It’s booming! That said, online is still less than 15% of retail and will be less than 20% even 5 years from now. There’s a reason for that and it’s not just shipping costs or the difficulty in finding a product.

Most people – almost 75% according to a recent study – visit stores to touch and feel products. If you’re browsing and come across an unfamiliar brand of shoe or clothing, how comfortable are you buying it without examining it for quality and fit? I’m certainly not, and I share that feeling with the vast majority, apparently. Sure, the return process isn’t as difficult as it used to be with many online stores, but who wants to deal with it? I want to see the product, which I can do on or offline, but I also want to feel it, touch it, and check it for quality.

That’s a significant advantage that brick and mortar stores have, one that they should exploit to keep market share. They can merchandise product in a way that online stores can’t. They can use in-store displays. More importantly, as we’ve said many times here on the screed, they can offer a level of personalized customer service that no online store can offer.

Try it yourself. Before you go on a shopping trip, hit the store’s online presence first. See if the two experiences are equal. If the retailer’s physical presence is doing things right, there won’t be a comparison. Shopping for a golf club or a bat or a racquet online at Dick’s Sporting Goods is nothing like going to my local Dick’s store and swinging it. I can browse through a lot more books in a shorter time at my local Barnes and Noble vs. their online store. I’m on my own online. There are pros in golf and tennis to help me in-store.

I don’t think brick and mortar is dead, not by a long shot. I do think stores will fail if they don’t take advantage of the built-in advantages they have. Cutting staff, not investing in merchandising, and simply becoming warehouses where people pick up their online purchases won’t cut it. Does that align with your thinking?.

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April 20, 2018 · 12:22 pm

NECCO Wafers, Sky Bars, And Misplaced Effort

Sky Bar

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our topic this Foodie Friday is the plight of The New England Confectionary Company, makers of NECCO wafers (did you know the name was an acronym?), Sky Bars, and Sweethearts, among other well-known candy brands. There is a fair chance that the 120-year-old company will soon be out of business. Their factory was sold and the company is actively looking for a buyer. The company has notified the city and state that layoffs may soon be coming. The situation is pretty dire.

Even though most of their brands are not really great candies (Sky Bar being the exception in my book), panic has ensued among fans of NECCO wafers. An article on Grubstreet highlights how fans have responded to  one candy-selling website:

The site says that during the month of March, after the panic began, it received 253 emails and 167 phone calls from customers looking for Necco-brand candies. Twenty-nine people offered to pay at least double the going bulk rate, and three reportedly said they’d perform free labor in exchange for priority treatment. One woman wanted 100 pounds of Necco’s glorified Tums, which she planned to vacuum-seal to keep her prepper stash fresh “for years.” (A standard 24-wafer roll weighs 2.02 ounces, so she was requesting about 800 packs.) Another woman said she’d trade her late-model Honda Accord for all of CandyStore.com’s remaining Necco candy.

There is a lesson in this for any business since these hard-core fans seem to be preparing for a funeral rather than figuring out how to cure the disease. All of their panic buying is misplaced effort since what they should be doing is trying to get the company the capital it needs to continue operations. While 420 people may have asked how to buy candy, only 73 people have donated to a GoFundMe campaign the CEO has organized. He, by the way, is apparently clueless about the difference between donation crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding since he had to amend his campaign to say he can’t offer stock:

We have been informed by several people that we cannot offer shares in the company in return for your donations. We are sorry, we do not know if they are right or wrong but we can’t take the chance . If you would like us to return your donation just let us know.

He is apparently in panic mode too and hasn’t sought advice from anyone who is familiar with equity crowdfunding or maybe even an initial coin offering.  Running scared will do that to you, although I know $20 million isn’t just laying around the street anyplace. I’d rather find customers than investors.

Worrying about the symptoms instead of the disease is generally a futile exercise in the long-term. I recognize that when someone is bleeding out you have to staunch the flow before you can worry about what caused it, but in this case, the efforts that have been made by fans of the company (buying up all the product) won’t be as effective as sending the money directly to the company. The company, for its part, hasn’t been very proactive. The factory was sold a year ago and this situation has been coming ever since. I don’t know how they involved their supply chain and their customers in stabilizing the situation, but the fact that they’re down to asking for money on GoFundMe (and it would be among the largest non-blockchain crowdfunding projects if it works) tells me that a lot of time was wasted.

Stay tuned!

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April 18, 2018 · 12:11 pm

Flying Blind

I almost called this post “Nobody Knows Anything” but that might have been overkill. I’ll say what I have to say and let you be the judge. Let’s say that you buy a friend’s newborn a gift. You have it shipped to your house. The data says, correctly, that you bought an infant gift. That might also lead to an inferred piece of data that places your household into the “presence of infant” bin, leading to you seeing lots of ads for diapers. If you’re the one placing the ads for those diapers, you’re wasting money.

Lots of the data marketers routinely use is of that sort. It’s inferred. You can see that some thinking at work if you’re a Netflix user: the recommendation engine infers what you might like based on your past viewing. Of course, if your kids or someone else in the house watch something in which you have no interest, the accuracy of those recommendations is diminished (which is part of why there are separate profiles available when you log in). Inaccurate data is, sadly, more the norm than an aberration. Since this data is really what’s behind personalization and targeting, that inaccuracy is a big problem. Any business that buys data from third parties – and an awful lot do so – may be putting garbage into their system. Unfortunately, most don’t know that because there is little transparency in the data business and it’s impossible to verify what’s good and what’s not.

What should you do? Invest in collecting your own, first-person data. You can also demand transparency in any other data you use (good luck with that) with respect to how it was gathered and what it really represents. Is it inferred or does it come directly from consumers (did someone tell you they had a baby in the house or did you guess they did because they bought one infant item?). Who owns the data and was it gathered with the consumer’s permission?

When Facebook tells its customers (marketers) that they have data on 41 million adults aged 18-49 in the US and there are only 31 million of those adults living in the US, you know much of the data is inferred and also that we have a problem. A recent study that found that 70% of marketers believe that the customer data their organizations are using for marketing is low quality or inconsistent. Why bother to market at all when you’re just flying blind?

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