Saïd Business School Resources Blogs

Where do retailers fit in the new eco-system?

Alan Giles — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:46:28 +0000

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 game, each needs to attract and align the best constellation of ecosystem participants. Finding ways to join the ecosystem may be much more important than trying to defend the status quo.” seem particularly pertinent given this morning’s news about Waterstones’ tie-up with Amazon.

J C Penney

Alan Giles — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:35:23 +0000

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 price promotions to wean them off promotions on to an Everyday Low Pricing Policy (even though, as described in class) Penney’s policy is really EDLP-Lite. Logically EDLP is compelling, but in practice it’s boring for consumers and lacks flexibility for the retailer.

Walmart and Wumart

Jonathan Reynolds — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:20:56 +0000

We discussed the remarkable success of domestic Chinese retailer Wumart in class this week. For those of you wanting to read more, there is a good summary of the firm’s development in an Economist blog entry from May 2011 here.

For those of you interested in the cultural dimensions of retail marketing and strategy, I also mentioned a book by Jean-Claude Usunier. Reference here. There are several copies in the Sainsbury library.

Primark

Alan Giles — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:40:25 +0000

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 Head of Sourcing by Primark seems significant. However, he will still have to find the T-shirts that can be sold for £2….

Target and Amazon

Alan Giles — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:34:52 +0000

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 their commercial interests, such as removing the “buy” button from products when they are in terms dispute with that supplier. When i quizzed Doug on this, he said “when we do that, we are taking a long term view of the customer’s interests”.

Tesco

Alan Giles — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:11:32 +0000

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 the refitted stores!

M&S Plan A

Alan Giles — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:04:29 +0000

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 comments are really interesting is on the trade-offs between social and economic objectives.

Is that what they think of us? Mapping stereotypes.

Jonathan Reynolds — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:15:20 +0000

An entertaining piece by the Guardian’s Tim Dowling summarises the work of Yanko Tsvetkov – freelance graphics designer and visual artist. Tsvetkov’s work captures the bigotry and cultural sterotyping which characterises the country perceptions of others. *Warning* some may consider some of the original artwork (rather than the Guardian article) offensive.

Geodemographics – free app

Jonathan Reynolds — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:48:10 +0000

In our recent lecture on segmentation, I mentioned the commercial segmentation services provided by companies like Experian. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to demonstrate Experian’s MOSAIC system. For those of you with iPhones or iPads, there is a free downloadable app, available here. This is a fully functioning version of the UK database. You can look up your own postcode and see a map of surrounding lifestyle clusters. Great fun.

What’s in a name?

Jonathan Reynolds — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:49:44 +0000

An interesting site (http://stocklogos.com/topic/how-famous-companies-got-their-names) which traces the obscure origins of famous brand names. If nothing else, could be useful for a pub quiz ……