Retail And Mass Transfer

This is the line waiting to get in to the Old Country Buffet in Factoria, WA, on a Friday evening at 7:30pm.

Two years ago, you could walk past this dining establishment and you'd be lucky to see twenty patrons dining on a veritable plethora of hot-light heated goodies. Now, you wait fifteen minutes for a table.

In the same mall, there is a specialty apparel retailer. Within ninety seconds of taking this low-res image, I snapped an image of the traffic within this store. Yup, you guessed it --- no traffic
at all. In fact, I didn't see a single employee either --- maybe management read the Sequoia Capital Death Spiral presentation.



The last image is of the Apple store in Bellevue Square. These are products you don't need, and yet, this store is absolutely nuts. And when you walk into the store, it feels vibrant. Plasma monitors telling you where you stand in the queue, recommending you sign up for future Genius consultations online due to the long wait --- tons of employees, yet not nearly enough to handle the throng.



From a Multichannel Forensics standpoint, we're experiencing transfer, actually, mass transfer. As our perception of the world changed, we made immediate changes to our shopping habits. Instead of spending $42 on dinner for two at Chili's, we transferred our loyalty to a $22 dinner for two at the Old Country Buffet. Instead of buying apparel, we hang on to what we already own, but we transfer apparel dollars to music and accessories at the Apple store.

Obviously, we don't have the ability to understand macro-economic transfer (HINT ABACUS & THE CO-OPS --- YOU HAVE THIS CAPABILITY AND COULD CREATE A PRODUCT THAT CAN HELP YOUR CLIENTS UNDERSTAND THIS ACTIVITY!).

But we do have the ability to observe transfer when it comes to the products we sell. It is critically important to analyze how customers are migrating out of expensive items, into inexpensive items --- migrating out of fashion and into staples.

As these trends become evident, we forecast the long-term trajectory of the trends --- capitalizing on the trends without having to fire employees as an expense management best practice.

Four Out Of 150 Online Retailers Truly Leverage RSS Feeds

I entered the URLs of the top one hundred and fifty online businesses in the Internet Retailer Top 500 into my Firefox browser. Of these one hundred and fifty leading online retailers, a grand total of four (4) lit up the URL line with the RSS symbol.

Of the four retailers, one really takes advantage of the technology. Apple does a spectacular job of allowing customers to pull a myriad of information about the company into their browser. One of the stories in their feed talks about podcasting. This article is actually a link to a story in the press about Apple and Microsoft's Zune product. In this article, Apple takes you to PC Magazine to read a product review. These are good examples of using RSS technology to link internal information, articles in the press, and product reviews. All of this technology is close to free --- somebody has to identify the material, and get it into the feed. The customer just sits at home or work, using Bloglines or Google Reader to read the information anytime the marketer wishes to make it available.

Three other retailers use RSS feeds to directly sell featured merchandise to the customer.

Newegg features many different products in their feeds. For instance, this article features a ViewSonic monitor. Their feed offers numerous product selections.

Zappos and their marketers continue to outpace their online and multichannel competition. Within their feed, you can see featured merchandise, like this Michael Kors Handbag for $371.

Buy.com also features an assortment of merchandise in their RSS feed. Here is a Crucial 1GB CompactFlash card for $30.

Apple, Newegg, Zappos and Buy.com --- four out of one-hundred and fifty in the Internet Retailer Top 500 who are taking the time to experiment with different ways to market merchandise via RSS feeds. Kudos to each of them for leveraging this inexpensive marketing channel.