Saïd Business School Resources Blogs

Here is an interesting article by Michael Jary, who heads up OC&C Strategy Consultants. His closing comments “…retailers need to consider whether they can become ecosystem partners as well as competitors. As Apple, Amazon and Google race towards their end …

Jonathan mentioned new CEO Ron Johnson’s new pricing policy in our Week 3 lecture. Yesterday’s Lex column suggests it is proving to be a difficult journey. In my experience it’s very hard, once your customers have been hooked on regular …

In Week 1 we talked about the media focus on the ethical credentials of Primark, the value fashion retailer, and contrasted that with the embedded corporate responsibility programmes of M&S and H&M. Against that background, the hiring of the M&S …

We mentioned in Wednesday’s class Target’s reaction to “showrooming” by Amazon’s customers, and here’s the latest escalation in this. No evidence of Target “working backwards from the customer” here! To be fair, Amazon don’t hesitate to take action to protect …

Following this week’s case study Retail Week has an interesting article summarising Phil Clarke’s initiatives to revitalise the UK business. Like the analysts, I am not convinced 1.1% like-for-like sales increase can possibly produce a payback on the investment in …

Here is an interesting interview with Steve Sharp, Marketing Director of M&S. It’s prompted by the relaunch of the Oxfam clothes recycling project we talked about in this week’s class, under the ghastly new name of “shwopping”. But where his …

Our guest in Week 8 is Sara Weller, Managing Director of Argos. This is an interesting development in the relatively humdrum world of TV retailing, which leverages their other channels to good effect.

Here’s a great article from Retail Week. Those of you who did the practical work assignment comparing Next with Asos will already be familiar with the latter, but this is a very good summary of the drivers of continuing …

Here’s some news of Anthony Hucker’s latest initiative. Apart from the presence of general merchandise, this seems to have quite a lot in common with Fresh & Easy. If you think Gentry (population 3,000) is small, we opened a Fat …

We talked in class on Wednesday about the problem of coping with online returns, and this article reveals some interesting UK trends. The comment “every store return was processed without hesitation by store staff” seems odd at first, but I …