Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 59
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
🇳🇱 🤣 Shit test room: test toiletpaper before you buy
Jumbo, a supermarket chain in the Netherlands, has one store who transformed the toilet into a test space where you can try different variants of the toiletpaper the sell🤣. The sign says: “Testarea, test here your favorite toiletpaper. Jumbo, every day a little bit better”.
🇸🇪 🇨🇳 Retail community centers: Shanghai opens $1 billion mixed-use development
I wrote earlier on “community centers” maybe best described as shopping malls, with a mixed use of retail and community. I visited a few of them in Bangkok. I really liked the concept. Now I read in Shanghai there is a new one opening as part of IKEA’s shopping mall business. When I am in Shanghai in december, I will try to make a visit there. I write it here because I think the concept of community centers, is good (and not seen yet in Europe -also not sure if it will work here-).
“It is not the time to lean back and do what you always did, it’s really important to lean forward now and develop the offer,” she said.
This type of mixed-use development has an advantage over traditional retail models because they are community-led rather than commerce-led, Anderson said.
In this video I visited a community center shopping mall in Bangkok.
Details: https://insideretail.asia/2024/09/26/ikeas-ingka-opens-1-billion-mixed-use-development-in-shanghai/
🤣 Time for a laugh: looks familiar?
Ok, sometimes I feel like that as well, also when you are out with people who don’t care about e-commerce, digital marketing 🤣
🤖AI Tool: Gamma.app: generate awesome presentations from boring documents in minutes
There are so many AI tools now and so many subscribtions you can take that it is difficult what to sign up for. I decided to test this one, because this one gained 20million+ users in less than a year. I think can be very helpful to many people especially in business or school. You can upload, create a prompt or submit a webpage and Gamma generates a presentation or even a website for you of this content, of course you can edit the content. I tested two PDF’s, one the SCRUM Guide 2020 (see video) it does a pretty good job. and second, the mr Beast production guide, I wrote about earlier. I think it does a pretty good job!
Check it out here: gamma.app
🌎🧐The fourth Marketing Rebellion: a consumer shift in biometrics and AI
Now something to think about, to brainstorm with yourself or your collegues: a peak into the future with Mark Schaefer’s fourth Marketing Rebellion. A rebellion is a major shift in consumer behavior and marketing philosofies. I have copy pasted some citations below and some (strategic) questions to ask.
…The third rebellion started around 2010 and the advent of social media. Historically, a "brand" is what a company told you it was. Advertising disrupted your view that Coke was colored sugar water and turned it into playful polar bears, for example. However, with social media, brand marketing was disrupted because customers owned the conversations. In fact, more sales occur through consumer social posts than traditional brand marketing. This was the end of marketing control.
Now the fourth marketing rebellion might be is approaching there:
At the end of the book, I projected that the fourth marketing rebellion would have something to do with biometric data.
Mark refers to AI agents who deeply know you. It fits in predictions others do, like for example AI agents who do all your shopping or negotiate on your behalf. Would we accept such convenient agents, the same way we now trade our privacy for fun at social media?
In the next few years, collecting and accessing customer biometric data could present revolutionary new marketing opportunities for personalization, customized drug therapies, and products that adjust to moods (and change them!). Yes, this is exciting. Yes, this can be profitable. But let's not lose sight of history and the implications when we cross the line.
A question to ask might be, what strategies can we implement to ensure transparent consent mechanisms when collecting biometric information?
AI Agents will have access to so much personal information that significant new levels of consent and security will be required. The threat level of information being used out of context is extremely high. Since agents will "plug in" to external services, we will place abnormally high trust in our agents and how information is stored and used. A data breach might mean that every fact of our life and health would be available on the web.
How can brands leverage AI agents to foster deeper emotional connections with customers without losing the human touch that defines their brand essence?
What metrics should we track to measure the effectiveness and acceptance of AI-driven personalization efforts if a complete webshop is AI personalized? And what control should a user have on this?
If AI agents start doing shopping for me how would an e-commerce shop get to know its customer? Maybe by API’s that allow your personal AI agents to distribute your information to companies? Maybe via a feedbackloop via my AI agent?
But what if people get sick of AI agents? What about the real human touch? Will this be only paid support in the (near) future? Will that be part of the value proposition?
A lot will change, start thinking about it now, just like I am doing. Don’t assume things will take time, things might go much faster than you think. This is Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and he predicts that this happens very soon.
Infinite context window (as large as 50 books)
AI Agents (system that performs tasks with memory, that can remember context)
Text to action (writing code, replacing (basic) developers)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/prediction-fourth-marketing-rebellion-mark-schaefer-riwre/
🧐Same Traffic, 60% More Revenue with product collection optimization
Sometimes you stumble upon a great e-commerce or performance marketing post. This is such a post on perfomance improvement. It talks on metrics you might not have used yet and/or might help product owners to develop user stories that help both the user and the company, on terms of product discovery. So worth a share. See highlights and link below.
For almost every collection, I identified outperforming products (hidden champions) that were getting a lot of clicks even though they weren't in prime positions. On the other hand, some products that were getting the most impressions weren't performing as well.
People stopped browsing more often when there were a lot of poor performing products in the visible space. So good products didn't even get a chance to be seen by many people.
What if we could change the allocation of these products? – Give good products more visibility and bad products less.
Clickrate by Position: This tells us which products are catching customers' eyes based on where they’re placed on the page. If a product isn’t getting enough attention, we can suggest moving it. The actual CTR of each product is compared against the expected CTR for each position.
Basket Rate: Some products might be getting clicks, but they’re not converting into sales. This metric helps us spot those products and figure out why they’re not making it into customers’ baskets. If this number drops for a certain product, we should check the product detail page.
Purchase Rate: We analyze if certain products get added to the basket but aren’t being purchased, helping refine pricing, shipping, and other strategies to close the sale.
Product LTV: This metric looks at the long-term 90-day value of each product, considering item value, product returns, repeat purchases, and margins to ensure we’re not just boosting short-term sales or promoting cheap products but building sustainable growth.
https://learn.retentionx.com/shopify-strategic-merchandising.html
🇷🇺 Dentist makes “The Mask” advertisement on meta: thumb stop guarantee
I like those advertisements that makes you stop scrolling, that really give you a “thumb stop” (a.k.a. “hook rate”). (that’s why I also think that is a great metric). Too often (larger) companies ignore that. The good thing is, small local companies do understand that. This is a dentist from Russia, who made an advertisement that makes you not only “thumb stop”, but also for sure this video will have a good “hold rate” as well. It made me think of the recent “polish hotel ad” that was something similar (although that one was made by a professional agency)
Check out “The mask visiting the dentist”. Keep on being creative and make those thumbs stop!
Metrics that I think are important with such ads:
Hook rate or thumb stop rate = 3 Second View/Impression * 100
Conversion rate = purchase/ landing page * 100
Hold rate = 25% Video view / 3 Second view view * 100
🗺️Amazon’s plan to maintain its ecommerce dominance
It’s always insightful to keep an eye on what Amazon is doing, and this article sheds light on their regionalization strategy. It also emphasizes how deeply Amazon is investing in AI and robotics, with customer experiences expected to evolve rapidly.
While there are plenty of opportunities on Amazon, there are also numerous ways to compete against it. Amazon’s broad focus leaves room for niche and ultra-niche players to carve out their space. Although Amazon is making big moves in AI, there are now many low-barrier AI tools that can also give you a competitive edge, even against a giant like Amazon.
What Amazon plans to do next is grow, and how Herrington plans to do this boils down to two factors: delivery speed and what Herrington calls “cost to serve;” essentially, finding cheaper ways to be faster.
When we speed up deliveries, we sell more,” Herrington explained. “When a [product] offer has a faster delivery speed, it’s going to get a higher conversion rate, more sales per glance view. But what’s even more interesting and has a bigger impact is that customers who experience those faster delivery speeds will come back sooner and shop more, so that growth flywheel gets going because of speed.
Amazon is focused on what it calls “perfect placement,” or as Herrington described it, “maximizing the probability that when a customer places an order, [the product] is already in the region where they live and, better yet, already in the fulfillment center that’s closest to them.
— but nothing like this, nothing as big as this, nothing coming on as fast as this. And the toolset that [gen AI] is providing us is just amazing. We’re able to go back to a lot of products and services that we’ve had for a long time and rebuild them or enhance them with generative AI, and the part that I love is we can also now invent new services and customer experiences that just seem like science fiction. There’s really not a team across my organization that’s not using generative AI in some way to work on their products and services across the whole suite.”
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