October 15, 2019
When your system goes down, your store associates are firefighting. Sales are lost, customers are unhappy and an otherwise delightful customer experience has disappeared in moments.
October 11, 2019
Advertising Week has become a fixture on the New York conference calendar in September, attracting brands, marketers and technology providers as well as retailers and celebrities. This year there were more than 100,000 attendees, 350 sessions and 1,200 speakers. KWI’s Chief Customer Officer, Frank Weil, curated and emceed the Retail track on day one of this four-day conference. With a focus on retail and direct to consumer (DTC brands), Advertising Week’s Retail track featured sessions on modern commerce in the digital world and sought to understand how retail evolved the ways brands sell, and how has it changed the way consumers buy.
The start of the school year and back from summer vacation always come in strong, with retailers still focused on back to school rush while already preparing for the holiday boom. Within the retail industry, a few policy issues have the potential to impact the broader industry. Potential tariff increases from China could have the retail industry increasing prices passed on to the consumer. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index, apparel prices haven't gone up meaningfully in at least 7 years, and for items like toys and cosmetics, prices have actually been trending lower. “We’ve trained customers to be so cheap," Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester Research is quoted in Axios. “Amazon is a symptom of the consumer obsession with low prices,” not the cause.