We do love a good statistic here and here’s a few to mull over …
90 per cent of adults became angry and stressed at a slow or poor response via email from a companys customer service - Retail Bulletin - dealing with online enquiries
80 per cent of customers who buy online have researched in a catalogue first - Retail Bulletin - Integrated marketing fuelling ‘flick to click’ home shopping boom
Social networking at work is costing UK businesses £130 million per day! - E-consultancy, interestingly no information as yet (that I can find) about the financial benefit of social network websites.
Email volume overtakes direct mail - DMA
60% of UK online retailers provide no telephone number on their website, 43% displayed no business address, while 39% had no contact email address. In addition, 30% of sites provide no telephone number or email address. - E-consultancy
50% of shoppers won’t buy from a website without contact details - E-consultancy
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Pop up retail isn’t of course limited to the offline world. Amazon provides widgets for your blog or website, read the story on Mashable, or the original story on Problogger. Pop up retail is also happening (popping up?) however fleetingly in transactional emails, RSS feeds, blogs and social networks and affiliate and aggregate websites, although this trend seems more in B2B than B2C which inthe main hasn’t got to grips with the opportunities offered by Permission Marketing.
Topshop do this well as I’ve mentioned before, they also do the best bit of all which is join up their online and offline activity. Did anybody see their ice cream van recently? Many UK retailers are really missing the opportunity to use the web to create a buzz about their stores online or offline. Mass interruption advertising is (slowly) dying and the retailers that succeed will be the ones that integrate all their marketing activity, seamlessly and do it well.
A couple of websites worth checking out that are interesting models for a newer, more original retail online world are osoyou.com (following the fashion trend of black, white and a colour), Topshop of course as well as Asos (which I’ve just realised has a cookie to remember your sex, or at least the section you last looked at).
With an announcement today of the iPhone I wonder if this might be the catalyst that retail needs to become more mobile and start using the mobile medium and its opportunities more. It’ll be interesting to watch and see who gets to grips with mobile retailing and when.
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This week I received my copy of Frame magazine and was completely taken with the article on page 241 ‘Plastic Dreams’ an exhibition in Shanghai Times Square: beautiful red plastic mannequin’s from La Rosa and a fantastic plastic walled structure with clear plastic blocks from Sturm und Plastic what an amazing sight.
What a fantastic opportunity to create a exhibition/moving retail environment. Food for thought for all those internet retailers out there who need to find ways to promote themselves offline, think of the opportunities to introduce a new product range using visual merchandising in pop up retail environments, but most of all to build customer awareness and create great publicity.
Unfortunately you can only see the image in the magazine but all the more reason to buy one for some design inspiration.
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These beautiful billboards from the Johnson Banks thought for the week, reminded me of these blank billboards in São Paulo, photographed by Tony de Marco, originally via the Creative Review blog. This New (or is that Nu?) Austerity trend seems to be gaining traction.
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With the strapline of “from designer to downright comfy” Oxfam’s online shop sells a range of what we might call ‘vintage’ fashion including accessories and childrenswear. Here’s another business getting its act together online. This is a great way of using an existing offline social network to create a new online network. Sometime soon are we going to see something like this become a marketplace, (although maybe this exists already somewhere?) percentages of buying and selling going to the help fight poverty, far better than being chugged in the street. This surely is the tip of the iceberg for this kind of charity/business. At the moment clothes/fashion, as this grows toys, bikes, books, etc., perhaps buy online and pick up from your local store, this could be a quiet revolution in charity retail.
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