Two stories that illustrate UK consumers’ very different reactions to personalisation emerged this week. On the one hand, a (social) media storm erupted when it was reported that Tesco plans to use face-scanning screens in its garages to show relevant adverts to those waiting to pay, based on their age and gender.
On the other hand, a survey of online shoppers by the IDC and RichRelevance found that many value personalisation technologies. The study found that 53% of the UK consumers it quizzed said personalised product recommendations were clearly relevant to them, and 26% said personalisation made them more likely to return to shop at the same retailer. Timing, it seems, is also important, with 45% of UK consumers using recommendations because they are presented at the right time in the decision-making process. There’s more detail from the study here.
It seems to me that both of these two stories have something to tell us about personalisation and its impact on UK consumers.
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Women’s retailer integrates customer feedback as part of strategy to deliver comprehensive product information and a personalised online shopping experience Sweaty Betty recently revealed it has selected RichRelevance to deliver dynamic e-commerce personalisation for its customers online, to drive sales and increase customer engagement.
By integrating RichRelevance’s personalisation technology online, the women’s boutique activewear retailer will be able to cross reference shopping behaviour with data on fitness wear products, the type of activity products are best suited to, brands available and product specifications to create a more customer-centric user experience.
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The UK leads the rest of Europe in the adoption and usage of personalisation technology when shopping online, according to a study released by IDC and RichRelevance.
The study, which surveyed 1,000 consumers in the UK, Germany and France, investigated how shoppers utilise personalised services in their purchasing choices and online shopping habits. Personalisation is most advanced in the UK, with 53 per cent citing personalised product recommendations as clearly relevant to their purchasing habits compared to four in 10 shoppers in Germany and France.
Not only do recommendations fuel greater spend, they also drive repeat visits. The highest online spenders are also the most likely to respond well to recommendations. Forty per cent of those spending over €600 buy a recommended product. In the UK 26 per cent of consumers also said that recommendations would make them more likely to shop at the same retailer again.
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The study, which surveyed 1,000 consumers in the UK, Germany and France, investigated how shoppers utilise personalised services in their purchasing choices and online shopping habits. Significantly, personalisation is most advanced in the UK, with the majority of Britons (53%) citing personalised product recommendations as clearly relevant to their purchasing habits compared to four in ten shoppers in Germany and France.
Not only do recommendations fuel greater spend, they also drive repeat visits. The highest online spenders are also the most likely to respond well to recommendations. Forty percent of those spending over €600 buy a recommended product. In the UK, over a quarter (26%) of consumers also said that recommendations would make them more likely to shop at the same retailer again.
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As soon as a shopper lands at BuildABear.com, the site’s recommendation engine technology has a sense of who the shopper is. It knows how she landed on the site, what device she’s viewing the site on, where she’s located, whether she’s visited the site before and, if she has, what she has looked at and bought. With each click through the site, the engine presents her with suggestions based on its insights into the shopper and what similar consumers typically buy, says Bryan Sawyer, the retailer’s e-commerce director.
While the retailer had used a product recommendation engine for years, it was only in June, when it began working with RichRelevance Inc.‘s recommendation technology to dig deeper into individual shopper’s characteristics that the retailer began seeing significant results from its suggestions, Sawyer says. Since then Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. has posted strong “double-digit” sales growth online thanks largely to BuildABear.com doing a better job upselling and cross-selling merchandise, he says. And since June the retailer’s web site has outperformed its stores in terms of the ratio of shoes sold per stuffed animal sold, a key metric the retailer regularly tracks.
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With 96 mobile subscribers for every 100 people on the planet, the uptake of smart mobile devices by generations X and Y has led to the widespread assumption that all efforts involved in reaching these ‘digital natives’ should be directly channeled through mobile tech. But the dramatic increase in the role that mobile technology plays in our lives has also given rise to concern that diminished face-to-face interaction will contribute to increased social isolation.
Mobile technology shouldn’t be about eliminating human interaction in our everyday lives; instead, it should be about enhancing human resources and relationships. The retail industry is at the forefront of innovating technology that caters to society’s changing patterns of behaviour, and for good reason. Research by John Lewis shows that mobile now accounts for more than 40% of traffic to johnlewis.com, with traffic up over 115%, year on year…
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Twenty-one years ago, a year before the first web browser appeared, Walmart’s Teradata data warehouse exceeded a terabyte of data and kicked off a revolution in supply-chain analytics. Today Hadoop is doing the same for demand-chain analytics. The question is, will we just add more zeros to our storage capacity this time or will we learn from our data warehouse infrastructure mistakes?These mistakes include:
- data silos,
- organizational silos, and
- confusing velocity with response time
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Uncomfortable. Adversarial. A Darwinian struggle for survival.
These are all terms used to describe Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ relationship with his staff, according to four former Amazonians who have branched off from the e-commerce giant to start their own businesses.
Dave Cotter, Dave Selinger, Nadia Shouraboura and Kristina Wallender joined Bloomberg writer Brad Stone (author of “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”) at a Churchill Club event Thursday to discuss what they had each learned from Amazon’s unique corporate culture and Bezos’ management style.
The panelists all agreed that Bezos’ demanding attitude and “maniacal focus on the right answer” have helped the company grow to a $150 billion business whose stock continues to surge despite posting losses in several quarters.
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