The Power of Retail

I spent Sunday in Chandigarh on a super fast trip there….on the Shatabdi on Sunday morning and returned to Delhi this morning. Chandigarh is booming, but it’s hard to understand that on a sunday, since there’s barely anyone on the roads. Everyone is at the Lake and the Rock Garden on sundays, I believe! I do love the city, it’s efficient, clean and full of educated and worldly people. The city has the highest per capita income of India, the highest number of vehicles per household and the highest number of women drivers. All brands are making a beeline to the city, to set up shop in the Sector 17 shopping piazza, which has the maximum brands in one area in the country.

The magic of Hawaii is calling out to us, it seems! Somehow wherever we go, we are nudged a bit closer to taking a vacation there, and I’m hoping it’ll happen sooner rather than later. Hawaii is one of the top spots in our must go-to list and we are really looking forward to taking some nice long Hawaii luxury vacations. There really is something very special about Hawaii and unless you go there, you can’t imagine how much you’ll fall in love with its beaches, its people and its way of life. We love to stay in long stay apartments and condos rather than hotels since they offer a more well rounded and complete experience. HawaiianBeachRentals offers all these and more, along with lots of Kauai Vacation Info. There really is no bad time to go to Hawaii and it’s best to start planning in advance, so you can a good deal.

Doesn’t just about everyone hate computerized customer service? According to a study by Accenture, customers are so unhappy with automated customer service systems that they are willing to move to another company just for that reason alone, but vendors just don’t see what the fuss is about. Accenture conducted two separate studies, one with 1,200 customers of technology companies who were asked about the kind of customer service they got from the company, and a second study on 35 technology vendors on how happy their customers were with the service they provided. The results tell two completely different stories.

While the majority of vendors thought their customer service was above average, 54% felt that their service was among the best in the industry. On the other hand, 78% of customers felt that their vendors provided average or worse service. The biggest problem that the customers faced was having to go back again and again to get their problems solved, instead of them being taken care of in the first instance.

Yahoo has made its first purchase under the new leadership of Jerry Yang, with its purchase of Rivals.com, a college sports website. The company is likely to be making changes in the way it operates with the departure of its CEO of six years, Terry Semel. With this new purchase, Yahoo will be competing directly with News Corp.’s Scout.com which is a similar site to Rivals.com, as they both deal with sports fans who are looking for specific details on college sports.

Everything revolves around marketing, about having your product or service placed in the right location, whether that is online or offline. One of the more direct and streamlined approaches is to use pay per click advertising that reaches your target audience in the most effective manner. Google and Overture are the tow companies that give marketers the ability to bid on successful keywords across several networks. If you know how to run pay per click campaigns on major search engine sites like Google and Yahoo, a marketer can actually make more money by fine tuning marketing campaigns.

Paid search advertising is a great way to create buzz on a new product or service and shows results quite fast, although it cannot be the only marketing strategy to follow. Search engine optimization takes a bit longer but its effects are longer as well. Paid search can be quite expensive as certain keywords can be very costly, but the system is still a good way to create a well rounded marketing campaign. ACS has a good ppc management guide that every budding marketer must read, which has details on how the sytem works and its benefits.

How quickly your e-commerce site loads could be the difference in making a sale or not. Dell provided the fastest broadband access time from the Top 50 retailers for the month of May, with the site loading in 2.83 seconds. Zappos.com loaded in 3.49 seconds and J.C. Penney’s site took 4.02 seconds to load. On dial-up connections, OfficeDepot.com was the fastest site to load at 39.76 seconds.

Whole Foods Market opened its first international store in London last week. The UK is not exactly known for its high class taste in food, but over the past few years there have been changes in the kind of food that is available in the city, with more Michelin-star restaurants than even New York. Whole Foods London store is spread over 80,000 sq ft on three floors and has more than 10,000 grocery items, including 1,000 wines, 425 cheeses and 40 types of sausages. There are also 55 chefs at the Whole Foods store, a sushi bar as well as a champagne and oyster bar where a DJ plays music for late night shoppers. Whole Foods is going to focus on organic produce, which at present only accounts for 1.6% of the UK’s $167 billion food industry. Organics are the fastest growing segment of the food industry in the UK at present.

Planning an event is not an easy task when it is at a different location than one’s office. We found that out first hand, when we planned to combine an internal company event with a pleasure trip to a nearby resort. The pleasure part was all fine, but the work part suffered since we did not have the right equipment to set up the event properly. Thankfully, the next time we planned such an event, we got all our computer and technology equipment from a company that did just that and were the experts in setting it all up. A company like ComputerRentals.com takes care of not only all the computer equipment you need but also other items like plasma rentals, a 5000 lumen projector rental and much more. There are also touchscreen LCD monitor rentals available, which is the one item that we were not able to find anywhere else. Their nationwide delivery option makes it easy to plan an event, whether it is a trade show or a seminar, where ever you want.

The Kroger store in Cincinnati, Ohio has installed Shop24, a convenience store machine that provides customers with approximately 150 products from drinks to pain relievers 24 hours a day. The machine is automated and does not need to be manned and accepts payment via credit cards, coins or cash. These machines are already being used in Europe and is only the second one to be installed in the US. Kroger’s machine is not yet fully stocked and will most likely be opening on June 25th.

H&M announced that it had recorded a 31% rise in profits for the quarter. The company posted a profit of 5.134billion Swedish krona (approximately GBP372million) and its sales for the second quarter increased by 18% to 20.1billion Swedish krona. Sales have been below analysts expectations, partly due to the company’s M by Madonna collection that was not accepted well by consumers and was sent to the clearance racks in just a few weeks. The company also announced its intention of launching a collection by Roberto Cavalli for both men and women, whcih will be just a one time collection by the designer and will be available at 200 stores from November this year.