Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Placed, a mobile geolocation vendor specializing in retail, found some intriguing stats when it was reviewing some of its retail findings. It found that the number of Barnes & Noble shoppers who were older than 55 increased 3.4 percent (for the month being probed) and that the number of customers earning fewer than $50,000/year decreased 2.2 percent. It noticed that Kohl's said its shoppers who earned more than $100,000 increased by 1.8 percent. And Target saw the largest increase in physical visits in the Midwest and Northeast regions of the U.S. Clearly, without many months (and perhaps years) of trend data, those stats are meaningless. But it does illustrate the kinds of insights that are possible when overlaying mobile geolocation tracking with CRM and demographic data.Read more...

There's no indication that any retailers are being targeted directly by the FTC. But increasingly, retailers that collect large amounts of customer data through CRM or loyalty programs are using additional data they acquire from brokers to fill in the gaps as they build a picture of customers. Some chains even use data as minimal as a name and Zip code, plus broker-provided data, to get a complete CRM record on a customer from a single transaction.Read more...

It doesn't take the next logical step and try and determine actual purchasing clout. For example, the most meaningful number would be how many dollars of purchases did that shopper's Tweets generate? It's nice if someone has a lot of Twitter followers and if they Tweet that the shoes on your homepage now are must-haves. But an influence rating needs to factor in what happened after that Tweet went out. Did it deliver 48 purchases of that product from the recipients of that Tweet?Read more...

The San Francisco health department notified the store late last Thursday (May 2) that an employee was diagnosed with typhoid and may have exposed customers who ate in the restaurant to it on April 16, 17, 18, 20 or 27. As of this week, no cases of customers or other store associates having the disease have been reported, according to the health department. But Nordstrom is still trying to track down anyone potentially exposed.Read more...

For customers, Consumerist's wisecrack—"Watch out for the Customer Appreciation price penalty"—seems pretty appropriate. For retailers, though, it raises a serious problem. You want to reward returning customers. You also want to entice new customers with low prices. The easiest way to tell who's returning (and link them with CRM data) is with cookies—but that's an invitation to embarrassment if new and returning customers happen to compare notes.Read more...

The Little Rock, Arkansas, police investigating the armed robbery—where the gunman slashed the assistant manager's tires to distract him before ordering him at gunpoint to open the safe—were not happy about being kept in the dark and possibly lied to. The investigating detective, Det. Julio Gil, "only learned of the cartridges being stolen from Kmart when he was called by media," said Sgt. Cassandra Davis, who is in charge of the Little Rock Police Department's public affairs unit. The detective "called Kmart and Kmart only then confirmed. He had to call them and ask about it before he learned what (the gunman) had actually taken. No one from Kmart made a report," Davis said.Read more...

Retailers routinely hire technology companies or marketing companies to help them better know their customers. These outside vendors can help retailers comb through mountains of data to determine the profiles of their customers, their wants and desires. But if retailers want to avoid liability for unfair and deceptive trade practices, they had better ask not only what these companies can do, but also how they plan to do it, writes legal columnist Mark Rasch. Even buying aggregated data from an untrustworthy source, or allowing a third party to mine your consumer data, can lead to big trouble.Read more...

Instead of IP addresses, they need to think about e-mail segmentation. Instead of database clusters, they need live content marketing. Instead of disaster recovery, they need to wake up focused on integrated marketing across all digital channels. It’s as much science and math as configuring a new router, and that has many marketers nervous. And it should. But as these marketers find their way into this new world of math and science (digital relevancy), they need to be careful to not cross the fine line between being relevant and being just plain creepy.Read more...

In the United States, it is generally presumed that the use of video surveillance technology in non-"private" places ("private" as in bathrooms and changing rooms) is perfectly legal. Unlike audio surveillance, which is regulated by federal and state law, there appears to be little regulation of video surveillance technologies. Retailers regularly employ them for loss prevention purposes, inventory management, and to defend themselves in liability lawsuits such as workers’ compensation claims or "slip and fall" claims by customers. Video surveillance technology can also be useful in tracking customer behavior and traffic patterns; footfall analysis; to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising or displays; and even to evaluate the gender, age and behavior of customers.Read more...

Although the current version of the system has serious technical limitations, the potential is probably greater for facial recognition than any other technology. Unlike PIN, cardswipes or any other form of biometrics, facial recognition has the promise to do far more than verify identity, including guessing at emotional state, gender, age and other attributes. Selling suntan lotion? How about the ability to identify shoppers with deep tans? Want to be able to tailor suggestions made to first-time shoppers based on gender or age? With a thermal scan comes the ability to pitch hot cocoa to shoppers whose skin is especially cold or ice-cold lemonade to those whose skin is especially hot. (It could factor in the outside temperature so that it doesn't confuse someone who has been working in the sun with someone who is just running a fever. And if that shopper does have a fever, how about 50 cents off Tylenol?)Read more...

The chain may eventually use that data to promote specific products aimed at EV drivers, said Brian Koontz, director of strategic corporate development for Ecotality, which runs the network of charging stations.Read more...

The precise methodology of the accused thief, Mark A. Douglas, is not clear, but he apparently created a list of Macy's account holders and then used various techniques to learn their Social Security numbers. Making the false identifications—with the real shopper's name and a picture of Douglas—seems to have been the easy part. Although sophicated cyberthief techniques could have been used to create that list of Macy's cardholders, it might also have been done as easily as standing near a Macy's cashier and listening.Read more...

For the last couple of years, retailers have had this intense love-hate relationship with self-checkout. Chains have touted "customer service" as their reason both for yanking the self-checkout units out and for adding more of them. Higher theft rates have been reported in some stores and not others. Much of it is like any other retail IT deployment, influenced sharply by how much attention is paid to the deployment and how the customers in different neighborhoods — based on demographics — react to the machines. But the idea of requiring CRM to self-checkout is a new twist. Chains — and that's triply true for grocery — have always struggled getting shoppers to use their loyalty cards. To be fair, many of those difficulties have been self-inflicted.Read more...

One of the results of StorefrontBacktalk‘s being acquired back in December is that we are going to be expanding into coverage that goes beyond Retail IT into other areas of retail. The first example of this launched last week and is a daily newsletter and site called FierceRetail.

The site applies the same kind of perspective, analysis and bad jokes that StorefrontBacktalk has always delivered, but we can now explore issues way beyond IT. Consider our coverage of an unorthodox Apple patent, the reasoning behind the Sears Portrait shutdown, why Target’s Manatee mishap is a lot worse than it looked, Samsung’s real retail strategy, why Best Buy and Target’s Geek Squad alliance was doomed and stats showing Visa having all-but-cornered the debit market. It’s all free, of course. If you’d like to sign up, our latest thoughts will be in your Inbox early each morning.…

Wait—isn't losing control of CRM data the biggest reason chains aren't wild about digital wallets in the first place? Wasn't everyone worried that Google might somehow share transaction data with a chain's competitors? Apparently, that fear was well-founded—just misplaced. It turns out the people who will do anything to grab CRM data are the card brands and issuers.Read more...

Given that its program would deliver expensive value in the form of free food and drink at its stores, the first priority of the rollout was to try and discourage fraud. And that involved some creative packaging and identification mechanisms. And a choice to exclude mobile from the launch.Read more...

In fact, Amazon Marketplace now brings in almost 12 percent of Amazon's retail revenues. But it also represents more than 40 percent of the goods sold on Amazon's site, which makes the Marketplace merchants both competition and a huge market-research pool for Amazon—and, potentially, a legal time bomb.Read more...

Grocery—and other food selling—chains that are trying to encourage shoppers to use CRM? Nothing makes customers more loyal than saving their lives. (Yes, Bentonville, even more than saving them money. Sheesh.) With a steady stream of news reports touting loyalty records as key tools in finding and then notifying customers about poisons, CRM should become a much easier sell.

The capabilities and lives being saved by CRM is hardly new. Costco (NASDAQ: COST) has championed it for years, and Safeway (NYSE:SWY) has been sued for not using loyalty to protect shoppers’ health. Grocery, QSR and convenience chains often complain about the difficulty of getting shoppers to sign up for—and to routinely use—their loyalty cards. Instead of pushing savings, maybe this is a much more effective and truly altruistic (well, semi) argument to make. On the flip side, to help government food investigators do this magic, a lot of data will have to be shared. When that data is then shared with other government agencies and a customer is surprised by an IRS visit? Law enforcement has been finding nuggets in POS databases for years. Privacy violation or saving customer lives? The joys of retail decisions.…

When it comes to softening up shoppers and making them more comfortable sharing personal information with retailers, nothing has done a better job than social media sites. Mobile devices, with their geolocation capabilities and continual beaming of “this is who I am” signals to anyone who chooses to listen, come in a close second. But a recent study has challenged that thinking. Understanding the nuances of how shoppers perceive privacy, what information they consider to be private and what incentives will work to make them give up data is crucial, whether it’s for a CRM (individual) strategy or to merely better understand shoppers in aggregate. With teen shoppers, the challenge is different. The tactic to get them to surrender a piece of private data has to start with understanding what they consider private. What Facebook and Youtube have indeed done is to make them think many of the most intimate details of their lives are not private. Hence, if you want their E-mail address, a one-time $5-off coupon may be all that’s needed.

This is explored in StorefrontBacktalk‘s March monthly column in Retail Week, the U.K.’s largest retail publication. The column lives here at Retail Week. For those who don’t have a Retail Week subscription—shame on you!—here’s a copy at StorefrontBacktalk. You can also check out all of our recent Retail Week columns here.…

At KFC, the mobile percentage is expected to be much higher. That's because people typically want pizza delivered to their home or office, whereas a bucket of wings is picked up—after having been ordered from someone driving or walking near the store. (KFC in the U.K. does not deliver.) Pizzas also take longer to cook—compared with preparing already-cooked chicken parts—making the "order and have it waiting for you" model ineffective for KFC. Instead, KFC UK will soon add a geolocation function (likely to be launched in May), so the app knows when the customer is truly right by the restaurant and can ask the customer if the order can be prepared.Read more...

That is already the law outside the United States and Canada, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, and it may already be the law in those two holdout countries. It's a matter of interpretation.Read more...

"Over time, Facebook users in our dataset exhibited increasingly privacy-seeking behavior, progressively decreasing the amount of personal data shared publicly with unconnected profiles in the same network," the CMU report said. The implications for retailers are stark, suggesting that many of the privacy strategy underpinnings on both retail and e-tail may be flawed. The report also found that those same consumers started sharing more information during that period, but only with people they assumed to be in a private group. And that sharing was expanded "both in terms of scope and amount of personal data." For retailers trying to extrapolate insights from this report to apply to chain CRM and mobile programs, these two conclusions are frustrating.Read more...

That good sign? As badly broken as its system may be, Isis is trying to fix what's actually broken.Read more...

And if you go online to search for a better price? The results are "rigged." If you are showrooming at a Best Buy (NYSE:BBY), see a 60-inch LCD for $950 and scan the barcode for an Internet search for a lower price, Best Buy could pay Google (or others) not to deliver lower prices—either to the world or to certain profiled individuals.Read more...

The 1,100-store chain is also a few months away from going live with a new financial system from Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL, to be followed before the end of the year by merchandising, planning and allocation systems, all of which will replace legacy systems. That's presuming the board's patience with CEO Ron Johnson holds out—unlike most big chains, JCPenney's E-Commerce site isn't doing any better than in-store, and the chain lost $552 million during the last three months.Read more...