Retail News Update » Macy’s

Retail: Back to Marketing basics

admin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:27:59 +0000

Merchants are going back to basics—cutting prices, broadening product lines, and even teaming up
Whenever the economy slackens, America’s shopkeepers slash prices and pray for consumers to pull out the plastic. Once again, retailers are doing their part, although perhaps with more zeal than usual. Discounts are deeper than they were a year ago. Nordstrom has slashed prices, starting at 40%, vs. 33% last year. Sales have begun earlier. Saks Fifth Avenue opened its first big sale in April, rather than May. And loyalty programs are getting sweeter. Neiman Marcus just handed out $200 gift cards to those who spent $500 or more.

Of course, this is no ordinary downturn. Yes, tax rebates from the federal government pushed retail sales higher in May than many economists had expected. But consumers will be paying lofty prices at the gas pump and supermarket long after the stimulus checks stop arriving. That leaves less for discretionary buying. “Moms who used to buy every member of the family their own brand of shampoo are buying one big cheap one,” says Sheila McKusker, who notes that, in 20 years of tracking the retail industry for market researcher Information Resources, she’s never seen such a profound or sudden shift in shopping behavior. In May, consumer confidence hit its lowest level since 1992.

Cutting prices may not be enough to get people into stores. So while Lowe’s is offering low-cost versions of Shop-Vacs and air purifiers, the home-improvement chain has also launched an advertising campaign to reposition itself as something that looks a lot like the local hardware store (the very mom-and-pop shop that Lowe’s and Home Depot helped drive out of business). In one TV commercial, a father and his sons marvel as a Lowe’s employee cuts duplicate house keys.

In many cases, retailers are going after a different customer altogether. Earlier this year, Gap’s troubled Old Navy chain began pitching trendier clothing at twentysomethings. Sales continued to tank, and the retailer is refocusing its message on price. Now the ideal customer is the budget-conscious mom shopping for herself and the family. Unlike this spring’s safari- and surfer-themed clothes, the fall line will include more basics, and TV ads now emphasize price over style.

Saks Fifth Avenue, too, is focusing more on value. This fall, the upscale department store will reintroduce a private-label line for women in their 40s and 50s. Called Real Clothes, the skirts, blouses, and dresses will be priced 20% below the store’s average brand-name items. “For a high-end customer, it’s not about a trade-off between food [and] gasoline,” says Saks CEO Stephen I. Sadove, “[but] how they feel about their net worth.” He also notes that, during tough economic times, consumers expect better service, too. That’s why Saks is putting more of its sales staff on commission—the better to compete for shoppers’ affections.

As they seek to hang on to existing customers and attract new ones, retailers are teaming up. In May, Macy’s announced it would partner with FAO Schwarz to bring toys back to its stores. Over the next two years, Macy’s will put an FAO Schwarz inside 685 of its locations. “If gas prices continue to rise, being in Macy’s is a really smart move,” says FAO Schwarz CEO Edward M. Schmults. “Customers aren’t going to want to drive to five different places looking for products.” The partnership also allows Macy’s to lease excess space and gives the toy retailer access to millions of new shoppers.

J.C. Penney is using an existing partnership with Sephora USA , the cosmetics and fragrance merchant, to go after freer-spending consumers. Sephora has opened boutiques inside 72 (of 300 planned) Penney stores, catering to 18- to 35-year-old women who typically spend more per item than Penney’s traditional base of middle-aged moms. Penney CEO Myron E. Ullman III says he’s discounting to keep his regulars buying while Sephora lures those willing to pay full price for new products.

Even as stores scramble to broaden their appeal, they are minding their core customers. Rite Aid is offering a $30 gift card and a chance to win a year’s worth of free gasoline to customers who transfer their prescriptions to the chain . Target is pushing its cheaper private-label food and beverages. And Saks in April rolled out no-interest loans on top-drawer jewelry. As Saks CEO Sadove says: “The high-end consumer likes a deal like everybody else.”

by Jane Porter and Burt Helm

Stores play on politics for sales

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:25:09 +0000

Gap, Wal-Mart hope election season can jolt consumer spending

With the start of the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Monday, retailers, faced with the toughest economic environment in years, have latched onto the presidential election as a vehicle for jump-starting sales.

Among the first to step into the fray: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Gap Inc.

Gap, the San Francisco-based apparel chain, is resurrecting its legacy white T-shirt with a nationwide “Vote” campaign. The rollout began Friday in Chicago at the Gap’s Midwest flagship on North Michigan Avenue, where makeshift voting booths lined the storefront.

Inside, shoppers lined up for free white T-shirts with the words “Vote for _____.” A clerk filled in the blank according to customers’ wishes using a T-shirt press. Shoppers have their pick of an array of press-on letters, markers, buttons and patches.

What are shoppers voting for? It’s not all Obama and McCain. Some are voting ice cream or lower gas prices or, simply, change.

The store had 300 T-shirts at 9 a.m. They were gone by 1:30 p.m. Gap’s seven-city tour moves to Philadelphia on Tuesday and runs through Sept. 11.

At the same time, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, is launching a series of television ads during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

The 15-second ads focus on the economy, gas prices and health-care costs, and they pitch Wal-Mart as a place to save money. The first ad airs Monday and is slated to run through Sept. 7 on cable network news and talk shows focused on election coverage.

Meanwhile, a new survey found that when asked to vote as if the election were today, shoppers that favored Wal-Mart, Kohl’s and J.C. Penney are more likely to vote for Sen. John McCain, while Macy’s and Target shoppers say they would cast their ballot for Sen. Barack Obama.

The survey, released Monday from Worthington, Ohio-based BIGresearch, also found that while Wal-Mart and Penneys shoppers favored McCain, the group was fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Kohl’s shoppers, on the other hand, tended to fall more squarely in the Republican camp. Macy’s and Target shoppers were more likely to call themselves Democrats.

“Perhaps McCain should consider a bus tour through Wal-Mart parking lots, and Obama could use Target,” said Gary Drenik, president of BIGresearch.

How bad is it? Retail guru Mickey Drexler, dubbed the “King of Cool” on the cover of Fortune magazine’s Sept. 1 luxury issue, tells the business publication that the current retail environment is the worst he’s seen during his 40 years in the business. The CEO of J. Crew and master merchant also says the days of big-name designers are over.

“Designer goods have become much too available, either through their own distribution or through logo counterfeiting,” he told the magazine. “I see the world moving away from carrying a bag around with the designer’s initials or designer’s logo. The more you see of anything, the less special it becomes.”

Why Wal-Mart Is Worried About Amazon?

admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:39:43 +0000

Five years ago, the world’s largest retail chain didn’t have to worry much about the world’s largest online mall. Only about a quarter of Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) customers shopped at Amazon.com (AMZN), according to data from researcher Kantar Retail. Today, however, half of Wal-Mart customers say they’ve shopped at both merchants. That’s leaving the mega-retailer—which long ago bested local brick-and-mortar merchandise stores and supermarkets across America—with a massive online competitor that is too tough to ignore.

Threatening Wal-Mart’s dominance are two trends: The discounter’s traditional customers—bargain hunters making less than $50,000 a year—are getting more tech-savvy, and more-affluent shoppers who began frequenting Wal-Mart during the recession are returning to Amazon as their finances improve. Amazon has moved into merchandise categories that Wal-Mart traditionally has sold, from diapers to vacuum cleaner bags. In its last fiscal year, Amazon posted 41 percent revenue growth, to $48.1 billion, vs. 8 percent at Wal-Mart. The chain’s 2011 online sales amounted to less than 2 percent of its $264 billion in U.S. revenue, says Kantar. “Amazon is always in our sights,” says Jeremy King, chief technology officer at the retailer’s @ WalmartLabs skunkworks in Silicon Valley. “My biggest issue is playing a catch-up game.”

In the last year Wal-Mart has increased its investment in its online business. The company has spent more than $300 million acquiring five tech firms since May and hired more than 300 engineers and code writers in the U.S. and India. Wal-Mart is also launching a program to allow the 20 percent of its customers without credit cards or bank accounts to make online purchases.

Wal-Mart’s acquisitions include Kosmix, a social-media firm, and iPhone app creator Small Society. The company hopes the newcomers can find a way to stop shoppers from engaging in scan and scram. That’s when would-be customers use their smartphones in stores to scan an item’s bar code and then buy it online from a rival merchant. The chain’s tech team also is working on a concept called Endless Aisle, which would let shoppers immediately order from Walmart.com via smartphone if an item is out of stock. “You can’t ask people to leave their phones at the door. So you have to give them value and an experience,” says Venky Harinarayan, @WalmartLabs’ senior vice president of global e- commerce. The former Amazon executive joined from Kosmix.

Wal-Mart is trying to improve links between its store inventory, website, and mobile phone apps so that more customers can order online and pick up their purchases at stores, which half of Web customers do already. Wal-Mart is trying Web-based shopping tactics, like its Pay With Cash program for Wal-Mart customers who don’t have credit cards. The new program allows them to reserve products online and pay cash at their nearest store. To cater to its affluent customers, Wal-Mart is selling more expensive items—for example, high-end televisions from Sony (SNE) and Samsung—only online.

Harinarayan’s team is also trying to tackle a new problem for Wal-Mart. Last year the chain was the No. 1 destination for holiday shoppers, with 53 percent of U.S. customers visiting its stores. That was down from 59 percent the year before. To lure gift shoppers, the techies have developed a Shopycat feature that scans the social media preferences of a consumer’s Facebook friends and suggests gift ideas sold on Walmart.com. About 150,000 users have installed the app.

To roll out more such innovations, Wal-Mart must improve its in-house e-commerce technology, so King will hire 87 engineers and coders to bolster the links between the stores and the website. “We’re starting from scratch to build a foundation,” says the EBay (EBAY) veteran. “Ideally, we’d have this platform built a couple of years ago.”

The bottom line: Wal-Mart, which gets less than 2 percent of its U.S. sales online, aims to bolster its technical capabilities to compete with Amazon.

Barcode Scanners Make Gift Registry A Snap: 5 Mobile Apps

admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:15:02 +0000

Before the days of bar code scanners, wedding and gift registries could be onerous to create, much less buy from. However, with smartphones and camera bar code scanners, gone are the days of big registry guns and lengthy printouts of potentially unfulfilled items.

Here are some of the latest, and best, registry mobile apps:

Target

Target was an early adopter in terms of mobile commerce. Target’s apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android allow customers to go beyond bar code scanning to gift registries, although that feature is included.

The app also allows users to view weekly ads, check out featured products, shop online, and create lists. Lists can of course be registries, but also shopping lists, wish lists, or decorating ideas. The bar code scanner allows you to add any item in-store to any list.

The app is simple, well designed, and in line with the Target branding. It’s also free. The iPhone version has over 1,000 reviews with an average 4.5 out of 5 stars. Download here for iOS, or here for Android.

Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel, the international home furnishings, décor, and accessories retailer, has added a wedding and gift registry app for the iPhone. A simple and attractive interface gives users the option of creating and editing gift registries within the app. An app user can browse items for sale, get registry ideas from the online store, or visit a retail location and scan product bar codes to add items directly to the registry.

The app also allows users to search products using voice commands and view registry purchases in real time.

User reviews indicated that there was a bug in the login process; however, Crate and Barrel updated the app to version 1.0.1 in June with the intent of addressing login errors. The mobile app itself is free to download, get it here for iOS.

Macy’s

Macy’s has also introduced a mobile commerce app for iPhone and Android. Like the Target app, users have access to special offers and the entire Macy’s online assortment. There is a bar code scanning feature that allows users to add items to a Macy’s registry. The mobile app also gives account holders access to their accounts and the ability to pay bills from within the app.

Both versions are free and received above average reviews, however multiple reviewers mentioned the app runs a little slow. Click here to download the iOS version or here for Android.

Universal Registry Apps

The following mobile apps are universal registries, allowing users to scan barcodes from any store and add them to an online registry, expanding gift opportunities far beyond one or two stores.

Wedding Registry

Wedding Registry is a $0.99 cloud-based registry app for the iPhone and Android. From its bar code scanner, any item from any store is added to a users registry and automatically categorized into groups such as cookware, cutlery, bedding and bath.

Registries can easily be shared by using a group ID, and users can add comments to items to indicate color or size preferences, for example. The mobile app automatically synchs with the online registry, making it easy to keep up with gifted items. The interface is clean and even customizable. Download here for iOS or here for Android.

Wedding Scan

Wedding Scan is an iPhone app that allows users to add any item from any store to a wedding registry using a bar code scanner. This app uses geolocation to show family and friends where each item was scanned, and has the ability to integrate with social media and email. Wedding Scan is working to send push notification to a users phone when a registry item has been purchased.

The list of apps for universal registries continues to grow, as do the apps for big name retailers like Target, Macy’s and Crate and Barrel. Cheers to a more manageable wedding season. Download the mobile app for iOS here.