Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

There's no small amount of irony that Amazon—which has a well-earned reputation of leveraging every piece of customer information in any way possible to boost sales—is the one making this privacy argument. It's as though Amazon is channeling a classic line from Animal House: "He can't do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges."Read more...

By also using the phone to purchase food, beverages, t-shirts and other merchandise at the show, Apple's approach goes beyond convenience because of the CRM potential. For the first time, producers can learn precisely which guests are purchasing which extras and for how much.Read more...

What if instead of a disloyalty cardboard card, this approach became a disloyalty mobile app? Instead of forcing the rival store to do anything, the phone's GPS (geolocation) kicks in and confirms that the consumers are where they claim to be when they click an icon for that rival retailer. Read more...

Retailers are nervously watching from the sidelines, with one eye on their phones and another on the millions they're spending on interchange fees to payment processors.Read more...

Smartphones scanning barcodes is easy. The tricky part is accessing a frequently updated database that knows of the smallest ingredients—a recent CDC probe identified a food poisoning culprit as contaminated black pepper sprinkled on salami—and current non-obvious food triggers.Read more...

The new defendants are Nordstrom, JCPenney, Macy's, Blockbuster, Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Cabela's, Guess, Panera Bread and Starbucks.Read more...

A new report from Forrester Research analyzes that dilemma and has one clean recommendation for today's retailers: Don't worry about it. Consumers either don't care or they understand why the prices might be different. Let the prices be different and worry about more important matters.Read more...

But just how deep they penetrated the $18 billion clothing chain is unclear, with the Justice Department, JCPenney and intercepted messages from Gonzalez IM conversations all painting very different pictures.Read more...

In further proof that consumers make very different transactions when they think they’re being observed by other shoppers, one regional convenience store chain is finding sharply increased revenue—and profits—from sandwich sales when orders are placed privately.

Taking things one step beyond the anecdotal evidence that E-Commerce can more easily sell items that are less environmentally friendly than can in-store, one regional convenience store chain has discovered that when consumers make sandwich orders privately at a kiosk (away from prying fellow shopper eyes and ears), they tend to be much more generous with calorically intense (and profit plentiful) add-ons and related sides, including extra meat and cheese. Instead of having customers order the sandwiches at the counter—out loud, to a clerk, in front of everyone—they now do it privately at a kiosk and then take a printout of their order to the cashier, who makes the customized item, bags it and hands it to the customer. This approach is faster for the associate, more private for the consumer and more profitable for the chain. Who said privacy can’t be profitable?…

Describing the smartphone as a "cord to my soul" and a consumer's "most personal device," Tracy Benson, senior director of Best Buy U.S. marketing, said the trial is promising some contextual relevance to know precisely where a customer is standing and what direction they're looking when they have their phone. Today's mobile technology "doesn't tell me where the customer is looking. This uses different sound waves to detect precisely where they are."Read more...

Long before the term customer relationship management was bastardized to secretly mean salesforce automation, many companies had the vision of an IT system that would help them manage and maximize the relationship they have with their customers. The idea of being relevant is a complex equation that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Because no one really knows the secret formula to being relevant, Michaud's goal as an IT leader is to create systems that will help his business partners answer questions they don't yet know to ask.Read more...

The counter argument has been that these technologies allow retailers to redeploy people into positions where they can truly deliver customer service. The classic example: taking cashiers out of checkout lanes and instead having them carry customers' bags to their cars. Would Macy's be facing less of a backlash if, instead of quietly laying off some of those box wrappers, it prominently featured them in highly visible customer-facing situations? Consider an associate working aisles wearing a button that declares: "I was taken off giftwrap so I can help you here."Read more...

First, Procter & Gamble and other major manufacturers started direct selling, undermining their longtime retail partners. Now comes word that Visa is setting up its own virtual shop to move products. What, Brutus, the sharp, 8-inch interchange dagger wasn’t enough? You had to go for the jugular?

Visa’s E-Commerce move, called Rightcliq, is actually a rather clever CRM move to collect more data on consumers directly. “Rightcliq will enable consumers to track their purchases in one convenient location. This removes the hassle of remembering tracking numbers, digging through confirmation E-mails or having to double-check delivery dates,” a Visa statement said. “The information will all be stored in Rightcliq, giving consumers more control over their online shopping experience.” And here’s the unexpected kicker: The service will accept “other payment options, including competing brands.” Visa is setting up an E-Commerce arena in which people can make purchases on their Amex card? That says everything that needs to be said about how much Visa values those extra CRM tidbits.…

What would happen if we turned NFC on its head? For example, rather than the phone making a payment to the POS, it makes a payment to the restaurant's bank in the cloud. What would happen if the restaurant deducted the cost of lunch from Facebook credits? What if the guest could earn a free lunch by promoting the brand on Twitter? What if restaurants gave guests their menus on an iPad? What if that menu was customized to each diner’s likes, dislikes and allergies? What about a restaurant booth that has a video-conferencing setup that allowed to people to have lunch together without being in the same restaurant? Read more...

The conventional belief among retail marketers is that Gen-Y consumers (especially teenaged girls) have zero sense of privacy and that they will—and do—share every aspect of their lives with anyone online. Well, if a new study out of Europe is to be believed, those girls may be a bit more private than their personaes would imply. It suggests that the teens will indeed share anything, but only with a relatively small circle of friends.

The report comes from Euro RSCG: “Although the average teen girl might have more than 100 friends on Facebook, she focuses on sharing key information with the one or two people closest to her,” the report said. “When they find a good deal, teen girls want to share it—but they’re more interested in tipping off a friend than in broadcasting the information. Shopping with just her best friend or sister, a teen girl will spend 23 percent more than when shopping with two or more friends. Shopping with a boy, she will spend less than half of what she spends with her close friend or sister. And shopping with her mother, who provides access to a larger budget and is also a key member of her intimate circle, she will spend triple the amount she spends with a group of friends.”…

The Centers For Disease Control have to tackle some wonderfully difficult detective assignments, including a recent case where they had to find out why people were getting sick from salami. (It turned out to be some pepper used as a seasoning.) The government operation is now formally tapping into loyalty card CRM databases from retail chains for help.

Some chains—such as Costco—have been using their CRM databases to alert customers to recalls for years. But the CDC hadn’t done so, at least not in an organized fashion. Now they are, according to this Associated Press story. “Through interviews and questionnaires, investigators suspected some kind of Italian meat was the culprit, but people couldn’t remember what brand they bought, CDC epidemiologist Casey Barton Behravesh said,” according to the AP story. “So the CDC asked supermarkets for certain buying information on seven victims in Washington state, focusing on suspect products rather than everything the customers had bought, Behravesh said. ‘We didn’t care about the brand of toilet paper people were buying,’ she said.”…

The power of a mobile coupon program is not just in the convenience of the always-with-you device format. It's in the customizable nature of it and the related upsell and CRM implications. Why wouldn't Target offer consumers the ability to pick and choose—from their desktop machine—from a huge selection of offers? Those choices would provide valuable targeting information on an individual shopper basis. And if Target's decision is indeed to offer one blanket list of mobile opportunities, why not use existing CRM data to target certain offers to specific customer segments? Plus, why update those offers only once a month?Read more...

The direct-sell CG announcements are all couched in politically sensitive phrasing, with promises that it's just a short-term test to better understand mutual customers and that some of the data will be shared with retailers. Some even argue that these direct-to-consumer moves will help retailers make more money by allowing the manufacturer to better target its products. (That argument is not necessarily impressive, but making it with a straight face is.)Read more...

But we have now seen the first concrete government effort to slow down that data flow, and it comes from European Union data privacy regulators. An EU letter said that not only must Google provide more warnings to consumers before it sends cameras out to shoot street views, but that Google "should shorten the length of time for which it keeps the uncensored photographs it takes from one year to six months."Read more...

Think video store, convenience chain, 24-hour restaurant and gas station. Hacking away out of boredom is a very different profile from someone looking to harm the chain or even steal something to sell later.Read more...

"The product now doesn't disappear from your mind after it’s sold. It actually just begins a different lifecycle," said Larissa Hall, the Best Buy general manager in charge of the consumer end of Best Buy's new venture. "Why let eBay have all the fun? You don’t throw away a car when you're done with it. Even a broken DVD player is worth something."Read more...

When news of the spying laptops from Lower Merion, PA, first surfaced, my initial reaction was fury. No, not at the laptop spying itself (when the Supreme Court sanctioned strip-searching students for over-the-counter medication, I gave up on school privacy). My fury: They’re giving free MacBook Pros to thousands of high school students while my kid’s school is laying off teachers.

But what’s a lot more interesting—especially given the federal, state and county law enforcement probes—is the district’s reliance on the contract that students must sign when they are issued the laptop. If that small-print defense is upheld, retailers will have a field day. Imagine laptops that will report back to the mother ship about every online purchase made, which rival’s sites are being visited and the disposable cash of that consumer (hello online tax returns and personal finance programs). With the Webcam activated, you can now see what the customer is wearing and with what accessories and even listen to what he/she is saying about it. If that case doesn’t come down hard against the school district, they will have at least completed part of their education duty: they will have taught a lot of people some new ways of making money.…

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud adds that the kicker is that most retailers don’t even know it’s happening. We're talking about your closest competitors having access to some of your customer profiles (at a much deeper level than what you probably are aware of), the purchase patterns of those customers and the amount they are spending on each visit. And you have no idea. Sound scary? It is.Read more...

Target said Monday (Feb. 8) it will start accepting gift cards—but only its own, for now—displayed from customers’ mobile phones. The chain will redeem the cards via associates scanning the barcodes at checkout, a process that some retailers have avoided because of a high number of scanning errors.

Target issued a statement claiming that it “is the first major retailer with the ability to scan mobile barcodes in all of its stores. Guests may access their Target Mobile GiftCards to add value at store registers, and check GiftCard balances at any time via the Target.com mobile site. In addition, Target Mobile GiftCard functionality allows guests to save multiple GiftCards to their account and label each one for easy reference.” This approach may prove to be a good move for Target, but it will almost certainly give a lot of cover to executives who want to try mobile gift card scanning. Unanswerable Question Of The Day: Is it better for the associate to hold the consumer’s phone during the scan—risking liability if, for example, a high-priced iPhone is dropped and shattered—or for the consumer to hold the phone—making a consistent scan much more difficult?…