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Retail Results Improve but Consumers
Still Wary
By Brad
Dorfman
CHICAGO (Reuters) - For retailers that
sell everything from toilet paper to
refrigerators, 2010 may be more about winning
sales from competitors than about getting
consumers to buy a lot more of their
merchandise.
Discounters like Target Corp and Sears
Holdings Corp's Kmart stores posted improved
sales performances on Tuesday, while home
improvement retailer Home Depot Inc and
department store chain Macy's also forecast
better sales in 2010.
Many of them saw demand pick up for items
that sat out the recession on store shelves, but
cautioned investors that they don't expect a
huge improvement in sales trends this year while
unemployment remains high.
"You are going to see these times where
you have consumer explosions, where business
will pick up for five or six days, but then they
are going to go down again to lower levels,"
said Britt Beemer, founder of America's Research
Group, which monitors consumer
sentiment.
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Get the
Competitive Edge with Mobile Retailing for
CounterPoint
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Sign up today for one of our upcoming
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All times are US/Mountain
Product
Date
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Sign-up
2B
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certified solution
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What is in-store slack? Consumers
often plan for unplanned
purchases
Those unplanned grocery purchases may not
be so unplanned after all. According to a new
study in the Journal of Consumer Research,
shoppers often expect to buy a certain number of
unplanned items, and most have a pretty good
idea of how much they'll spend on them.
Authors Karen M. Stilley, Jeffrey Inman
(both University of Pittsburgh), and Kirk L.
Wakefield (Baylor University) say that consumers
have spending expectations for grocery shopping
trips, called mental budgets, and those budgets
typically leave room for unplanned purchases.
The authors call this "in-store slack."
The researchers conducted a field study at
several grocery stores in Texas. They asked
shoppers what items they planned to purchase,
how much they expected to spend on the planned
items, and how much they expected to spend on
the total trip. After shopping, participants
provided their receipts and answered questions
about themselves and the experience. More than
three-fourths of the participants included room
for unplanned purchases.
"Shoppers in the study indicated that
they employ this strategy both because they
anticipate 'forgotten needs' as well as because
they realize that they will encounter 'unplanned
wants' -- with some respondents even explicitly
indicating that they expected to make impulse
purchases," the authors write. Consistent with
prior studies, the shoppers were remarkably
accurate when predicting how much they would
spend. The average budget deviation (actual
spending minus planned spending) was only
$0.47.
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Tech Tips
NEW FEATURE IN
CounterPoint 8.3.9!!!
Scrapping items
during returns
Previously, when a customer returned an
item that was broken, defective, or otherwise
could not be resold, you were required to enter
and post an inventory adjustment to "scrap" the
item.
In this version, you do not have to
manually process inventory adjustments to remove
scrapped items from inventory. Instead, you can
scrap an item while you are entering a return in
Ticket Entry or Touchscreen Ticket Entry by
specifying a valid Scrap reason code for a
return line. When you post a ticket with a Scrap
reason code, CounterPoint automatically creates
and posts the necessary inventory adjustment
transaction to remove the scrapped item from
inventory and make the appropriate accounting
distributions.
Are you ready to upgrade to
8.3.9? Contact our support coordinator (or
Rosie Grant) to schedule your
upgrade!
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13 Tactics to Make Social Media
Work Harder
By Heidi Cohen,
ClickZ
last year's exponential growth of
Facebook and Twitter, marketers accept that
social media is a requisite element of any
integrated marketing strategy. But social media
is new and in some ways different from
traditional media. The challenge is leveraging
social media effectively to build your prospect
list and customer base, drive sales, and develop
customer
advocates.
While marketers intuitively understand
this, many need to use some fresh tactics to
help build a social media marketing plan that
achieves these goals. Here are 13 actionable
tactics:
1.
Understand how and why members of your target
market use social media. As with any marketing
plan, it's critical to know your target audience
so you can develop properly tailored content and
communications to meet their needs. Here are
three factors to consider to better understand
why they participate in social
media:
- People want to connect with people who have
similar interests to socialize.
- People are looking to expand their network
of relationships, especially in situations where
they need a personal referral.
- People use social media as a search filter
to get input from trusted sources.
2. Develop
content that meets consumers' needs and
interests. This should go beyond just
broadcasting some offer. You should limit
promotions to one out of 12 messages at most.
Specifically, provide information that fulfills
customers' and social media participants' needs.
Remember, with social media, your audience is
broader than your target market. Consider the
following types of content and
information:
- Provides product support and/or how-to
information. This is particularly useful to
encourage purchase (for example, recipes) or to
provide additional instructions for
post-purchase.
- Relates to consumers' hobbies and personal
interests. Also, consider targeted communities
like Ravelry and Dogster.
- Provides humor, because everyone likes to be
entertained.
- Acts as a communication channel to aggregate
relevant news, announce meetings,
etc.
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Tell another retail store that is
looking for a Point of Sale system about
Advanced Retail Management Systems. When
you refer a retailer to us that participates in
a 1 hour web presentation for Retail Pro,
CounterPoint or Microsoft RMS, we will send you
$100 - it's that simple!
Register
your referral today. Call Susie Carmen
today at (303) 738-1800 Ext 357
or E-mail her at susie.carmen@armsys.com
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