Tesco's Talking Shop Blog

I recently discovered the Tesco Talking Shop Blog thanks to an article of French magazine Linéaires. Tesco is one of the leading retailer in the world, thanks to its leadership in England and different other countries. Tesco has also been rewarded thanks to its customer centric approach, and the usage they make from their loyalty reward program data.

In this blog, top executives of the company discusses about their job, they're philosophy, and what the innovations are at Tesco. It is a great source of information in order to know what the company is at.

As a professional of retail, it is a great opportunity to understand better what makes Tesco so unique. I invite you to have a look if you have the change.

Should Businesses Experiment? thanks to @ariegoldshlager

I wanted to share with you my thoughts about an article I read on the blog of @ariegoldshlager : Why Businesses Don't Experiment. Actually, I found this article very interesting, because it is true: From my personnal experience, I believe that companies tend not to test much. Most of the time, they would rather change their whole business at once than to conduct tests.

The thing is that testing is difficult, and requires you to have clear patterns and protocol to respect, in order to have usable data at the end of the test period. Testing is not only about launching a new product and letting a few sample of people try it, it is about targeting the right sample to use, and to define right from the beginning the data that will provide you a clear answer.

As Arie points out, companies would rather have consultant letting them know what to do with their core business and take their advises for granted than taking couple of months to figure out what the decision will imply.

Now I believe that once you want to make a decision either to experiment something or to set it on a larger scale, you should think about those two things:

• Experimentation is a great way to apprehend the impact one decision will have on the different component of one business, and then you would be able to correct it, in order to provide the best service to your customers once you make it on a larger scale.
• Experimentation takes time, and in nowadays society, in tough economy and tough competition, being fast is one of the key element of success.

I may not give a clear answer to this situation, but I believe that before skipping an experimentation process, you should deeply look after it, in order to know what would imply a testing period, how to do it, and then make a decision either to experiment or not.

Walmart To Set Lockers In Store For Online Deliveries

In Store delivery is probably the biggest challenge for online business. Indeed, E-commerce is still growing, but its growth pace has slowed down a lot lately. The share of retailing made on the Internet is becoming steady, which is a good and a bad sign:

• A good sign because it shows that online business is durable and counts for an important share of the overall retailing
• A bad sign for retailing because most of the growth of retail was based on online activities.

Walmart is trying a new service in its store, allowing online customers to pick up their products in one of Walmart's stores, thanks to a locker system. Here are some pictures of Amazon's ones.

I believe that there is a great opportunity for growth for online retailer thanks to this system:

• They benefit from new delivery places. In the case of Walmart, in a highly visited place.
• They can optimize their supply chain by delivering large quantities of goods in one single place, cutting the cost of the last mile (which is very expensive).
• The system is quite cheap (even though I don't know the fees Walmart may apply to the online retailer, in the caze of Amazon's locker for instance).
• They can skip the problem of deliveries that unsatisfy a lot of online customers. Who has never had a problem of a product that never came, or late, or had to call the post office to know where the mail has been shipped... This system I believe is more secure.

Thanks to this system, I believe that Walmart.com will get more exposure, and a competitive advantage. It is a very easy way to leverage the store network available in order to get market share online.

Amazon's Strategic Plan By Entering The Online Grocery Business

I read several articles on the web lately about Amazon's strategy to enter the Grocery Retail Market. I actually already wrote a blog post not so long ago about Amazon expanding their Amazon Fresh concept to new cities. Forbes.com has an interesting theory about these investment: Amazon is aiming to propose same-day delivery thanks to its ability to sell fast moving goods. Indeed, selling groceries, especially fresh products, imply Amazon to set up a supply chain allowing fresh products like fruits or meat to stay for the shortest period of time in warehouses, but also to deliver them with short notice.

Amazon is not looking for high margin rates, especially because grocery already works with razor thin ones:
“No one has cracked the nut of grocery home delivery in the U.S.,” wrotePaula Rosenblum, managing partner, RSR Research in a recent RetailWire online discussion. “The low margin nature of the business, coupled with the need for fuel-guzzling refrigerated vans and trucks, make it very hard to do — and that’s in ‘easy’ cities, which means relatively new homes, no five floor walk-ups or winding stairways.”


Mr. Heckman added, “It could also mean that delivery fees are lower, order size minimums are waived, and it certainly could mean that home delivery and in-store pick up will never pay out using traditional metrics and full allocated costs.”

Amazon has already started in France to sell fast moving goods, but mostly the pricy ones, with slow frequency of purchases: baby food and diapers for example.

What is interesting with this strategy, is that it somehow looks like a revert strategy of what hypermarkets have thrived on for years. Hypermarkets proposed non grocery products at discounted prices in order to attract foot visits for customers eager to find great deals, and then to sell food, which is where their core business were.

But now, Amazon wants to do the opposite: Attract people with grocery food, thanks to the home delivery service they can set up, in order to sell more of their core business item.

Sales representative/Store Staff are the best people for your customer relationship management effort

A very quick note to share with you this story: http://www.loyalty-ip.com/article-123-exceptional-cx-creates-brand-engagement?utm_content=buffer299e4&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

I believe you should pay attention to it. So many times I have emphasized in this blog that the best medium of your CRM strategy is the people directly in contact with your client. This story is just a great example. Beyond the big data, beyond the technology, human contact remains special, when it is carefully handled.

Why Mobile Commerce Should Not Be Taken Individually

Very interesting article of chainstoreage.com about mobile commerce ROI. Actually, the comment sounds familliar as mobile commerce is in the very same situation than traditionnal retail once e-commerce appeared.

When E-commerce started to spring up, a lot of people thought that traditionnal retailer would have a great competitive advantage as they owned store with high traffic to propose delivery and added value to online shopping. But one of the reason why it did not work that well at first was the way retailer was seeing the online store of the company: It was stealing some business from them, and on top of that they had to deal with the dirty work: after sales service, returns of non working products, the cost of stocks when people did not come to pick up their goods.

For mobile commerce it is even more true. Mobile commerce is 100% part of a ubiquitous shopper. One shopper may use its mobile added to different kind of channels, such as traditionnal stores, a computer, or maybe even a call center. That way, to link a sale to an activity on a mobile phone is difficult. And the perception of the return on investment of mobile commerce is difficult to get. 

Mobile commerce is growing fast though represent a limited share of the overal commerce, in most industries where it exists yet. But it is important to have in mind that the mobile phone will be the ultimate tool to link all the other communication and sale channels.

Category Management Series: Category Management And CRM

Here is a new article about category management. As you all know, I am category management at DIA but also a customer relationship management expert. And a lot of times, people wonder what is the link between those two activities.

A category manager, as I say most of the time, is in charge of the 4 marketing Ps of a category (a group of product).

• Products: The category management is head of the offer of a retailer. It defines the listing of products, optimizing both customers' needs and expectations and the retailers' sales and profits.
• Price: A category manager works on the price of the products in order to have a great price perception for customers, being competitive, but also have a good mix allowing the category to contribute in terms of margins.
• Place: The category manager sets the merchandizing plan trying to influence shoppers decision.
• Promotion: The category manager tries to define the best promotion plan throughout the year, with different goals, such as marketshare gains, speeding up sales of specific products, highlighting innovations to help them to have a good start...

A category manager has always in mind what are the priority of its company, in terms of sales and profitability. But it is also linked to customers' choices and needs. A category manager needs to analyze sales, new customer trends, market data... It needs to know what the customers need.

Hence, the category manager relies a lot on customer data, in order to make decisions. I believe that category managers may not leverage a 100% the full potential of CRM, in terms of knowing customers, being more efficient in its promotions and so on. But thanks to new technologies, especially mobile ones, it will become easier and easier to do so. New tools exist in order to interract more with them, to help them in their every day life, and these are the next challenges of the trade.

This is what I am trying to do as a category manager: 

• Always try to know more about customers decision making process
• Analyzing new trends, new usage of the products

This article is part of the category management series. Here are the other articles:

Category Management series

Category Management: The First Moment of Truth

Category Management: When The Client Is Not The Customer

Category Management Series: The Client Is Not The Customer

It is something important in terms of category management because it is one of the main difficulty of category management. In the retail business, suppliers provide products for customers, but need to go through a client, the retailer, in order to do so.

Hence, the supplier needs to take care of two peoples' expectation:

1. The customer: They need to define a product that will match their needs, will be better than the competition, and will have an affordable price.
2. The retailer: They need to propose high level of sales, good profit, low inventory, among other issues.

Of course, the goal of category management , both for the category management staff of the supplier and retailer, is to respond to both people. The difficulty is when there is one of both that is not fullfilled. Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post about the difference between the client and the customer. I believe he explains well the difference.

It is always better when the client is the end user (the customer) of one product, because it ease the customer relationship management process. Hence, one supplier (or provider as Seth is writting) needs to have two specific approach for the same purpose: selling a product to an end customer.

Let's not forget also that the supplier (or provider) do not always define products matching customers' needs. Sometimes (quite often actually) they launch new products to increase the profitability of a production unit: I acquired a new plant that do plastic tubes, I am going to put my best products in plastic tubes. I bought a brand recently, I am going to get my flagship product with the flavor of this new brand...

I believe that category management is efficient when it starts from customer needs. Of course, both the supplier and retailer may have industrial or economic interests, but in order to make long term decision, and analyzing all the different economical aspects of the decision, they should focus on how the category development may benefit the end consumer.

This article is part of the category management series. Here are the two previous articles:

Category Management series

Category Management: The First Moment of Truth

How Walmart Became The N°1 Retailer On Facebook

Walmart is of course the world laster retailer, especially due to its dominant position in its domestic market. Over the time, Walmart has been able to grow a base of 30 million fans on Facebook. French professional magazine LSA recently posted an article on the reasons why Walmart succeeded in its digital strategy.

Using Images and Video Media: 85 % of the content generated by Walmart's page is either videos or images. 

What kind of content?

• 45% of posts are about products, depending on the seasons.
• 17% is buzz contents, viral videos, that have nothing in common with the company's retail activities.
• 15% are tips on how to use products, or to better consume.
• 13% are interractions with fans, mostly through polls.
• 10% are about ethical causes, such as recycling, donations.

Here is a sum up of Walmart's strategy

Amazon's Strategic Move Into Grocery Business

Amazon  has been mastering E-commerce since it started its business. Amazon has set its reputation on cultural products, books, CDs and video games among others. As the time went by, Amazon expanded to new fields, and now is able to sell clothing, and even groceries.

According to a very interesting article of the CNBC website, Amazon has major plans for its grocery activities.

For five years, Amazon has been testing Amazon fresh in Seattle, and now plans for 2014 to open its concept in 20 new urban zones. Among one of the main reasons Amazon is betting on Amazon fresh, is to be able to offer to its customers delivery the same day of the order. 

Grocery E-commerce has raised a lot of questions. Indeed, there are very few companies in the world that have been able to develop a profitable business modell out of it. The most efficient and profitable way is for sure what exists now in france, drive through supermarkets.

But Amazon has for sure a lot of strength to succeed:

• A great knowledge of E-commerce website, with the ability to upsell for example.
• The excellence of their supply chain, which will help them to lower the cost of the last mile delivery
• A great data base of customers to leverage, and to convert to Amazon Fresh.
• Amazon already own top of the line warehouses, which means they don't need to invest much more to store the groceries.

What Is Going On In India?

India has been for the past decade one of the most promising country in the world. It is considered part of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), a group of country which share common assets that set them among the potential leaders of the future.

I have always considered India as one of the most promising of these countries for several reasons:

• They have a large population
• They have the chance to have access to the sea, which helps both importation and exportation
• They speak English, the language of world business
• They have high skills in computing, which is an opportunity.

But laetely, India has struggled to grow as much as expected.

A recent AT Kearney's report show that India fell to 14th on the most attractive destination for global retailers list. Those past years, a lot of retailers expressed a lot of interest in India, such as Carrefour which launched a cash & carry store couple of years ago, Walmart also, or Auchan that set a strong partnership with a big Indian company.

But things are moving slowly. The infrastructure remain low, and the average income too. What is the main issue remains political uncertainty and corruption. 

How long will retailers need to wait before leveraging the full potential of this continent-country?

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Category Management Series: The First Moment Of Truth

During these category management series, I am not really going to follow a specific order, nor establish a concrete way to manage categories. The goal is more to share some interesting thoughts and ways to have performning categories.

The first post of these series, I wanted to dedicate it to a concept I love, and that I have already discussed in this blog: The First Moment of Truth. Like a lot of other category management concept, the First Moment of Truth idea popped out of Procter & Gamble's people. Procter & Gamble was one of the first supplier to work together with Walmart to establish category management plan. 

The First Moment of Truth describes the fact that for fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) shoppers make their decision within the 7 seconds prior to pick their products on shelves. As a result, Procter & Gamble decided to shift its marketing expenses from mass media to point of sales advertizing.

At this time, First moment of truth was composed by paper-based brochures, signs etc... But nowadays, while social media and new mobile technologies are springing up and their cost is lowering, you may see more and more mobile apps, TV screens, and so on. 

The main idea to get is that the art of mastering one shopper decision making process in store is one of the key component of category management efficiency. New tools are available to marketers to help this decision making process in store.

Red Market: An Internesting Store Concept

Here are couple of video clips I found on French website Linéaires. Belgian chain Red has made these videos to create the buzz online for its stores. You can see people enjoying a 1 full minute of free goods!

Beyond the interesting offer, it shows you the store concept with the product range Red proposes.

I believe Red is a 2.0 hard discounter, proposing people to self scan their products. It allows the company to save a lot of money, as cash desk expenses are among the top expenses of such stores.

Axa Innovates In The Banking Industry: Introducing Soon

Axa launched on June, 1st Soon, a new mobile tool to manage personal banking accounts. My friend Henri Kaufman had the opportunity to try it as he was invited to the launching event of Soon. 

What is interesting with Soon, and what differentiate it from other applications launched by competitors, is that Soon has been based on the theory of Mickael Mangot, expert in the financial industry, that money does not make people happy.

The key strengths of the service:
- The tool allows you to program expenses in the near future to help you manage your account.
- The tool saves time: It is easy and fast to use, while usually keeping track of your bank accounts may take you a lot of time with traditional tools (tell me about it, with my complex Excel sheet I use!)
- The tool allows you to see the previous expenses, and therefore to analyse how your global expenses work, and where you may save money. This also creates opportunities for Axa to allow customers to save money that people will be able to place in their different products.

The challenge is high, but once you see this video, you clearly understand that Axa worked well around this problematic. 

soon from Soon on Vimeo.


I don't have any information yet on how many users have already downloaded Soon, or how many uses it, but clearly the service is efficient, and I believe that Axa took the lead on this topic.

I think these kinds of tools create a real added value for customers. The success of Mint in the US (which I can't help seeing it in France...) is a good example. Here is a video on how Mint works.

Thoughts of The Day 06/27/2013 : the correlation between sales performance and social media

I have interested myself in social media since the beginning, almost ten years ago (already). A lot of content has been developped about this topic, and how to use social media for business. Social media has grown fast, its use for marketing and sales purpose too.

But social media has entered in 2012 in a new era. To me, the transition has been marked by the IPO of Facebook. Indeed, social media companies like Facebook but also Twitter started a new phase when investors starts to ask for EBIT and profits.

This era started also by a slower growth of the number of users. There are still a lot of expectation from the marketing experts as I am, but the perspective changes. We start to see more and more studies questionning the supposely better efficiency than social media was suppose to offer.

From my prospective, I consider that it remains difficult to track the full benefits you may get from social media exposure.

But what is sure, is that companies that invest in social media tends to have the best results, or at least, tends to perform better than their competitors, especially regarding sales growth or market share gains.

Why? It is about the same than customer centric strategies:
1- These companies tend to create and innovate more, and we all know how innovation is important in these challenging times.
2- They tend to bond more with their clientele, so they tend in general to create more service and therefore more added value to customers.

Therefore there are a true, demonstrable correlation between business performance and social media presence. Now the goal is to have a clearer view of this link to understand it better, and to leverage it at its full potential.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Category Management series

I have been a category manager for over two years now, and I rarely talk about this topic in my blog. Why? Because this blog is mostly focused on customer relationship management, marketing, and retail strategy. Also because I don't really want this blog to be linked directly to my professional activities. I have always considered my blog to be a way to go beyond my job, and to try to see what goes on in the business world.

Nevertheless, I have tried several time to find category management content on the web and especially in social media. I have looked for blogs, for websites, but there is very few content available. I find that it's a pitty, because I believe that category management is on the edge of a revolution. 

Category management has started in the 80s with the partnership between companies like P&G or Coca Cola and Walmart. For about 10-15 years, a lot of content has been developped in order to build the tools and the skills of category managers. But since the past 10 years, commerce evolved a lot, through new technologies and new way to perceive sales performance. Indeed, I believe that new techniques and new tools will come out soon.

Therefore, I decided to dedicate a little bit of time to discuss about what is category management, how it works.

If you have ideas or topics you would like me to discuss during this series, feel free to contact me (on Twitter it is the easiest @schriver).

The Risky Virgin's Brand Strategy in France

Virgin is the brand created by successful serial entrepreneur Richard Branson. He has been able to create a multi billion $ holding, with companies working in various markets.

In France Virgin is mostly known for its "megastores", big cultural stores selling books, musics, and high tech gears. Unfortunately the company has recently shut down. Virgin megastore has been bought back in 2001 by Lagardère, but due to the crisis in the music industry, and the big shift towards Internet for cultural goods, the company has not been able to survive.

Richard Branson has sold several of its business those past few years. The equity of these companies most of the time were highly estimated due to the Virgin brand, which he spent his life building. Now a lot of these business, for different reasons have not been able to flourish as expected. There are several thoughts that comes to my mind while analysis what happened especially to Virgin megastore in France:

• Who do you maintain a global brand like Virgin while it is owned by different companies, on different market, with different interest? Building a brand is a full time job, and it requires coordination, which is impossible when the different entities composing it are independant. Maybe what has been done is a real threat to the Virgin business currently hold by Branson.
• What is the real added value of buying the Virgin brand? If your corporation is not able to bond with the brand's message, it is impossible that it works. Therefore, owning Virgin as a brand but without mastering the component of it is useless.

What would be interesting is to see what are the next plans of Richard Branson: Does he want to expand to new markets? Or will he rather focus on its top companies in order to secure the future of Virgin as a brand?

Thoughts of the day 06/20: the Future of Direct marketing mailing

I really started to interest myself in direct marketing back in 2006, when I started to work for Ubifrance as a direct marketing assistant. At this time direct marketing was very popular and seemed to have a bright future. I remember also at this time I had some direct marketing classes at Ipag.

It was at the beginning of the 2000s that marketing data base really started to sprung up. Direct sales company used to owned comprehensive data base, but not a lot of other industries could really leverage such data warehouses.

I have always been impressed about the creative potential of this medium. The ability to play on the format, on the paper quality, the texture of the paper, etc... Was fascinating. But since then, whereas mailing was the first direct marketing medium, other direct marketing passed it, such as emailing (obviously) or social media.

Cheaper media like emailing have replaced mailing in most uses. The price/contact is indeed favorable to emailing, especially as the number of email contacts available is far more important.

Nevertheless, I believe that the quality aspect of mailing is still interesting to use. Obviously, due to return on investment considerations, mailing is mostly used to promote products with high added value or with a high facial price (airlines, car manufacturers...).

Because the number of mailing has lower, using mailing may allow your company to stand out, and have a high visibility.
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Toolbox Solutions: Great Category Management Tools

I was looking for blogs who were discussing about category management when I encountered the nice website of Toolbox Solutions.

Toolbox Solutions is a Canadian company, expert in category management tools which are proposed to both suppliers and retailers. They propose applications and software that allows category managers to pilot their category performances, on any kind of digital devices: tablets, computers, smartphones...

I believe this is very interesting, as most of the time it is difficult to get easy to access and user friendly graphs and stats to support category management decisions.

I 

Expert in CRM MDC Partenaire Launches Its New Website

I'm going to do a little bit of commercials for a company that I appreciate, especially its founder Christophe Bouguereau, one of the best expert of customer relationship management I know, who taught me a lot.

I am also eager to promote this new website as I participated in the launch of the former one, so I always like to keep track of the previous job experience I had. 

MDC Partenaire is a consulting firm expert in customer relationship management. Its field of expertise encompass all of the aspect of CRM:

• Data base management
• Direct marketing campaign (mailing, emailing, etc...)
• Customer relationship management strategy (analysis, set up of CRM solutions...)
• Call Center management...

MDC Partenaire has also invented a 360° customer relationship management model, called OSICAM. As CRM is a complex trade, OSICAM allows to analyze each component of the CRM chain, and also to check how each component is connected to the others.

What I like about the new site:

• The graphs are clean, it is not polluted by too many charts or pics.
• The content is clear, and you can see who are the people working at MDC Partenaire, and what are the key information about the company.

If you are interested about further information about MDC Partenaire, feel free to contact me, I will help you to get in contact with them.

Thoughts of The Day: 13/06/2013

I decided to start these thoughts of the day posts for 3 main reasons.

The first one is that it takes a long time to write great blog posts. It requires to monitor and check information sources where you will get the ideas and content. It requires you to write long posts, detailed. It also requires you to add several things, such as pictures, videos, external links, or labels, in order to improve the simple text content.


The second reasons, is that a lot of the blog ideas I have and I had in the pasts come from thoughts running through my mind, without even noticing them. This is what Henri Kaufman would call serendipity: the fact of founding great things by not searching for them. Also, and Henri would also acknowledge, by willing to have the best blog possible, you procrastinize a lot. And most of the time by doing that, once you finish writing the post, it isn't as appealing as you pictured it.

The third reason is that I saw a lot of success of people having cool concept that required them little time. Henri Kaufman used to do “drawings without pencils“ basically picturing a scene of the day! Same thing for my friend Shawn Champagne that takes a video every day and then compile It, one second per day, every year.

Therefore I decided the best way to keep on a good pace of posting was to write almost everyday, just letting thoughts crossing my mind and sharing it with you.

Hope you like it.

Monoprix To Sell Via Amazon's Marketplace

Monoprix is one of the most active French retailer in the web. Its leading position as proximity stores in France has pushed him to look for a connected clientele, that uses a lot new technologies and social media. Therefore, even though Monoprix only counts for about 3% of grocery market shares, they have the most likes on their Facebook pages (586 Ks, which is roughly 1% of French population, and should be about 30% of the penetration rate of the company).

Monoprix has decided to use Amazon's marketplace in France to sale its private lable clothing lines. This is a very interesting news, for several reasons:

• As a private label, I don't know any other examples of concrete retailers' private labels that are sold outside of their stores... It would be interesting to see how customers will react to it.
• Monoprix is part of French retail tycoon Groupe Casino, one of the largest retailer in Fance and in the world, which owns Cdiscount, the 2nd largest e-merchant in France. Why didn't they pick cdiscount to distribute their products instead of Amazon, which is a competitor? I would like to know why they made such a move.
• Monoprix already sold its clothes on its website, Monoprix.fr. By going on Amazon, what is the idea behind that? What is the strategy? To me there are several opportunities. Going online may help Monoprix securing large amount of goods sold, in order to leverage potential purchasing power over suppliers. It may also help them with a more efficient supply chain online than what they currently have. Also, maybe Amazon has more traffic, and therefore, that is the added value Amazon proposes to Monoprix...

I believe that so far Monoprix is testing Amazon's marketplace, to see how they may use this new distribution channel to leverage new sales, and gain visibility online. It would be interesting to see how this activity evolve, as other retailers may be interested, such as Carrefour, or Auchan.

Thoughts of the Day 06/12/2013: New way of blogging

I'm going to launch a new series to my blog: the thoughts of the day. When I started my blog about 10 years ago (time flies...) the blog was called Schriver's Thoughts. The purpose was to share my opinion about business topics, mainly Internet, marketing and retailing.

My blogged of course evolved over the time and I specialized myself as an expert in CRM and digital marketing. I have always been eager to write well documented blog posts, with added value, most of the time based on some articles I found worth sharing with my audience.

But those past few years, I have not been that prolific on this blog. My job as a category manager has taken a lot of energy and focus. Now that I am more senior in my position, I would like to spend some more time on this blog. This is the reason why I have decided to write more often and to share more with my audience.

I decided that I would like to write these kinds of informal posts at least twice a week, and I'll explain you more about my philosophy later on.

Study Questions Social Media As A Traffic Source For E-Retailers

Social media's budgets and expenses have raised fast those past few years. As social media gained exposure , companies tried to leverage these new media in order to raise sales, especially by reaching customers in a brand new way. Hence, a lot of market studies and professional articles discussed about how an appropriate social media strategy helped companies to trigger sales, and raise revenues.

Nevertheless, it seems that the real potential of social media as a revenue generator is still questioned. A recent study showed that social media is already lagging as a direct traffic source for e-merchants. 

"Social media represented just 1.55 percent of all ecommerce traffic, way behind search (31.43 percent) and trailing email (2.82 percent). And social media traffic numbers were down from Q1, 2012, when they were 2.36 percent. The data lead to the question: Should brands change their approach to social marketing?"

I have always been an early user of social media, but also an evangelist. Despite these facts, I have also studied a lot how to use social media like Facebook, Twitter among others in order to generate more business, and in general to improve customer relationship management. And as I have become an expert of the question, I still wonder sometimes how to use these tools in order to have concrete business results.

By the nature of social media, even though they are set with a large amount of customer data available (what people calls "big data"), it is difficult to link one sales to one action on social media. 

What is for sure is that companies that have invested important budgets in social media most of the time are the ones who thrives the most on their market. This study is for sure very interesting because it sets two facts we should never forget:

• Social media remains small compared to other mass media like TV, radios, or even newspapers
• Social media return on investment is not that easy to measure. 

I believe that social media is here to stay, and that there is a lot of room for improvement in order to have better results with their usages. 

How To Leverage The Potential Of Web to Store?

I'd like to thank PPC, a famous French blogger and friend, that tweeted a grat article (in French) on how to leverage the potential of Web to Store.

Indeed, a lot of retail professional complains on the new hype of "show rooming", the fact that customers tend to visit stores to see and touch products, get information by the sales person, and then compare prices at home to finish up buying at home, most of the time on a competitor's website.

The show rooming trend is hitting hard some retailers working on the cultural goods, like Virgin in France, Barnes & Noble in the US, and also the high tech retailers, like Best Buy, or Darty in France.

Nevertheless, there are also ways to leverage the Internet in order to create foot traffic in stores. This is what the article calls "the Web to Store".

There are 4 ways to use the web to store approach:

1. Couponning: Propose to customers to print online coupons to use in stores.
2. Store locator: Allow customers to prepare their visits on line by giving them extensive information on how to get to your point of sales.
3. Click & Collect: The shopper shops on line, but get its product at the point of sales. The advantage for both the customers and the retailer is that you save expenses on the delivery trip. The retailer may also trigger additional sales thanks to the visit.
4. The shopping preparation: Sometimes the web is better to get information, and to finish up the work in store. I believe that works a lot for purchases with a long decision making process, that will need the advocacy of a sales representative.

Despite the fact I believe web to store may help one store to raise its sales and in overal, grow the whole business (both online and in store), I believe that in overal, the rise of Internet will destruct in the end the performances of traditional stores. But in the end, companies that will be able to set a strong position online with a great quality network of stores have a great advantage upon competition. 

What do you think about it?

Le category management à l'ère du multicanal et du digital

Un petit article en français pour souligner l'exellent travail entre autres part le master distribution et relation client de l'Université Paris Dauphine.

Le travail porte sur les évolutions du métier de category manager causées par l'avénement du Drive. En effet, le drive ne cesse de gagner des parts de marché sur les magasins traditionnels, et bien évidemment, les techniques se doivent de s'adapter à ce canal de vente.

Cela me rappelle un peu la problématique soulevée par Henri Isaac au sujet de l'évolution des techniques de merchandising en ligne. Le category management des points de ventes virtuels en ligne n'en est qu'à son début, et je suis sûr que les présentations de produits et les techniques de vente vont s'améliorer et se développer très rapidement.

Le travail se focalise principalement sur la structure de management de l'offre: Est ce que les équipes dédiées à la gestion de catégorie des drives doivent elles être différentes des équipes gérant les points de vente classique?

Vous pouvez trouver en cliquant ici l'étude menée, et les réflexions liées.

Il est sûr qu'il est intéressant d'avoir des category managers qui gèrent les 2 parties de l'offre, car le client ainsi que le produit reste le même. Néanmoins, je pense qu'il y a énormément de compétences à développer via le drive et les courses en ligne, afin de capitaliser sur la croissance déjà existante.

French Retailer Intermarché Tests Connected Glass For In Store Usage

There is a lot of hype around Google glass now that Google allowed few people to test them, like Loic Lemeur. I have seen this cool video of Sergey Brin explaining how Google Glass works.

Technologywise, for sure, Google Glass has great potential. The technology is very advanced, but there will be a long time (at least 3 years I believe, as the cost when they'll be on the market is going to be outrageous) before it may actually be available to the mass market. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how people and companies will be able to leverage the potential of this device in order to improve people's lives.

Companies that will test and try these technologies now will get a very important advantage upon competition.

French retailer Intermarché is conducting right now some tests of connected glasses technology to see how it could be used by shoppers in store. They set up a partnership with French agency Digitas.

Here is a video showing their works.


They have identified 5 main usages:

• Indoor GPS: It may be very interesting, even though I think that their example is a little bit too limited to show how it may improve shopper experience. I believe that this application should be connected to the grocery shopping list to save time and being more efficient.
• Product scanning: Pretty cool, it already exists at Auchan with self scanning, even though you need a remote control to do so. But the cool thing is all the added infos you may get through it.
• Customized promotions: I don't know about this one, because I am affraid this may be too disruptive for customers.
• Cross and up sell: Let's be careful with this one too.
• Easy-Check out: This is just awesome! I believe a lot in it, even though there must be a lot of control to avoid stealing.

I believe they have already thought through a lot how to use  these glasses. Here are some thoughts that crossed my mind while watching this video:

• These applications will actually be able to be proposed to customers once the customers will own some connected glasses. Same things with smartphones, it would be too costly for a store to borrow some of theses glasses to shop, as they must keep razor thin margins.
• It is important to create real added value, and the technology must not be too disruptive. For instance, proposing recipes when you buy a product is a cool idea, but pretty scary in terms of usage. Once marketers will use these kinds of techniques, it will scare shoppers off to use these glasses.
• I love the payment system. Retailers may save lot of money thanks to it (as cashiers are one of their biggest expenses) and customers will save times.

Demand and Sales Data: How To Leverage Both

As a category manager, I am used to deal with a lot of data: Sales statistics, market research, among others. The purpose of a category manager is to understand how to build the offer of one store in order to respond to consumers' demand and hence increase sales.

I read the article of the Harvard Business review: Demand and Sales Aren't Equivalent with a lot of interest. Indeed, the goal of this article is to show that sales figures don't really necessarily translates what consumers really need. And I must admit that as a category manager, with the hands full of sales data, we tend to focus on sales data.

But as the article details, there are a lot of reasons why both are different:

• Sales data don't show you the detail of how one household consume a product. One shopper may buy 3 different kinds of milk, but you may not know what will be the usage of it. Is there any milk that has been bought because you were out of stock of another milk? Is it because of a specific recipe? Is it a recurrent need?
• Sales data won't show you if your products match one consumer needs: If you sell for example shampoo bottles of 600 ml and only 600 ml, you will never know if this is too much, not enough. Consumers will buy it because they won't have the choice. 
• Sales data are mostly analysis of the past. It is tough to forecast future consumers behavior based on sales data (even though you may expect high increases of sales in different segments, but once you notice them, it is already too late). Markets evolve faster and faster, and it is important to have ways to watch what will be next.

Therefore, it is important to have data tools that will allow you to analyse the demand, and sales.

Some Thoughts About Yahoo! Buyout Of Tumblr

I am not used to comment fresh news on this blog anymore, as my schedule don't really allow me to write on a daily basis. Nevertheless, there has been a lot of buzz around the buyout of Tumblr by Yahoo! those past few days. 

I have never really used Tumblr, even though I reckon it is a great service, as I already owned my blogspot blog, which I find to be fine for my usage. I followed a bunch of blogs on the service. Probably Tumblr was a fresher and more adapted blogging service than the historical ones, and this is the reason why it works so well.

But Yahoo's and Tumblr's moves have been largely commented. I read this great article that resumes well the situation. Is there any winners in this situation?

• Yahoo has probably made the moves in order to strengthen its audience, especially leveraging the social media hype. Yahoo has for sure a strategy based on content. They have abandonned their own search engine, and is the 4th world most visited web page. But how will Yahoo find synergies between its actual services and Tumblr? It seems difficult to tell.
• Tumblr has never been oriented yet toward making a profitable business model. They have not earned any money yet. How will they be able to change quickly their service in order to turn Yahoo's investment into a profitable action?
• In overall, most of buyouts like this one, never really benefits the service for its customers. Orange for example is trying to sell Dailymotion, skype has been sold by Ebay not a long time after it acquired it, without making any improvements to the service. Sometimes the service even stop existing. So users most of the time are sacrified.

I also read another interesting article (I don't find the link back though), which was interesting: Yahoo, despite all, remains a profitable business, that has been able to adapt the different cycles of the web history. Yahoo has always been able to adapt itself to adapt its business model. Maybe Tumblr's acquisition is one of many moves that will secure Yahoo's future.

Nevertheless, what has just happened is symptomatic of what happens in a lot of cases with start ups in the Internet world: A lot of companies develop cool products that interest a massive amount of people fast, but with no business model, hoping a bigger company will buy it out before they need to prove any consistent ways to generate revenues. And I believe that this fact will end soon, as Internet companies start to get bigger and bigger.

Henri Isaac: Building A New Path For E-Merchandising

Henri Isaac is a great source of inspiration for me. He was my teacher as a student @ Paris Dauphine, and I have always loved his passion for what his does, and his ability to envision what technology may bring to customer experience.

I had the opportunity to discuss with him not a long time ago, and he told me how furstrated he was to see how e-retailers were conceiving their merchandising approach. Indeed, whereas the Internet world has changed a lot those past 10 years, with the arrival of social media, smartphones, tablets, and new technologies, product pages have not evolved that much. 

Henri recently published an article about this topic. He explains that the products catalog concept, which is used by most of e-merchants is not adapted to the best online shopper experience. Even though products catalog have improved, it is important to have a better way to link the different products of the offer together, in order to improve the shopping experience.

He also believes that brand content will be key in order to raise the shopping experience.

I must say I totally agree with him, especially when it comes to tablet. I ve tried several times to shop on different websites, and most of the time it is almost impossible to shop with a tablet.

In my opinion, it would be interesting to see what kind of merchandising concepts will appear within the next few years (I shall say few months...) in order to benefit 100% from the different platforms that exist (tablets, smartphones...). And probably this will come from a new comer, as e-retailers for most of them are already too big to try some of these actions.

If some of you owns any kind of examples or great websites to check which are highly innovative in terms of e-merchandising, I'd be thrilled to know. Feel free to comment on this blog about it.

What do you think about it?

Some Thoughts About My Kindle Fire

Since this Christmas, I am the owner of a Kindle Fire from Amazon.
I already own at home:

• A Samsung laptop
• An Ipad (1st generation) which is still working great
• A Blackberry bold

But I was eager to add a new peace, especially for all what is to read things. Here are my different uses of the gears I own at home:

• The Laptop: I use it to blog, to do my Exel's spreadsheets, sometimes to go on the Internet, to upload photos. I still believe nothing replace a computer when it comes to editing and creating things.
• The Ipad: I use it to watch youtube videos mostly, which I do a lot. I also use it to read my Flipboard, or some newspapers like Lefigaro, or the Huffington Post. I also uses several apps, but to be honest, it is not something I do on a daily basis.
• The Blackberry:   I use it for social media usage, such as tweeting, Foursquare's checks in, or Facebook reading. I also uses it to get fast info, for example on websites like wikipedia.

What I use the Kindle for:

• Read books: I got couple of books, and I am pretty happy about it. It is easy to read
• Watch US channels. I don't know how, nor why, but I am able to watch some US TV channels on the Kindle... Like History Channel, Showtime, ESPN, ABC... Love it
• Read websites and blogs: I love the screen and the size is perfect. I love the flipboard app.

I love the Kindle Fire, and I believe this is what I use the most now. The size, the screen quality, the battery life are just great. Also, what I love is how sharp the digital keyboard is. I have always been a fan of Blackberry because I always consider nothing compares to a hard concrete keyboard. The Kindle fire is amazing, especially when I go to conferences to take notes, even though I experienced some problems after a little while, the app to take notes (I use the draft of the email app) tends to bug and freeze. Maybe there are better applications I need to look for. Also, I love the book store. Really well done, it is always easy to find what you are looking for.

What I don't like

• The limited number of applications: All the apps I own are great. But Kindle is working on Android, which counts a huge number of apps. Nevertheless, I can't download (at least officially) any of them! This is silly.
• The bug when I take long notes as I already said.
• The OS is not as simple as the Ipad's one. At the beginning, you struggle to closes some apps or to look for them. But after a while, you adapt. But there is still room for improvement.
• Some videos I can't watch on websites, due to restriction of the web browser. Nevertheless, it is ten times less frequent than the problems I have on my Ipad...

I highly recommend the Kindle, which is cheap compared to the competition, and propose a great added value to a computer, smartphone and traditionnal tablet; 

Social Media And Retailing: How Lidl Uses Facebook In France

Social medias uses in business and retailing starts to be common. Most of retailers on a fan page on Facebook, and sometimes a Twitter account. But today I wanted to write about not a standard retailer, but a hard discount retailer that have decided to communicate on social media : Facebook.

Lidl is one of the largest retailer in the world. Despite a low cost model, short product ranges and very little advertising, it has been able to spead all around Europe, and (even though they don't communicate their sales figures) it is believed they are in the top 5 ranking of the largest retailers.

Lidl has never communicate much. It is in its strategy. As a hard discounter, its goal is to minimize every cost possible, in order to sell its goods as cheap as possible, maximizing the mergins. 

But Lidl has changed over the time, as the hard discount model is starting to go in limbo. They have hence decided last year in France to create a Facebook Fan's page. After one year, they already have 280 000 fans! What is even more impressive, is that they have way more fans than retailers that are at least twice bigger than them in France: Intermarché (200 K), Leclerc (133 K) and Carrefour (the largest one with only 34 Ks). 

We must say that a year ago, Lidl has made a large advertising campaigns on its leaflets in order to launch their fan page.  But nevertheless, even though they don't communicate that much now about it, the fan community growth pace is still fast.

What does Lidl post on it?

Well, mostly, promotions and products reviews. Clearly they don't have a budget to animate the community, like some other brands have (proposing games, specific discounts, content such as receipes...). Despite the little budget they own (once again there are only two people dealing with the whole Internet presence, which is also encompassing emailing campaigns and the website maintenance), they really bond with the customers, as they have a 10% interaction rate on most of their posts...

Some thoughts about Lidl

Even though Lidl is a concept based on private label, and on proposing no brands, Lidl is not a no-brand, it is actually a strong brand, with which customers bond. This is the reason why they have been able to create such a connection with their community.

Social Media in Lidl Strategy

Lidl is evolving fast, leaving the traditional hard discount concept to a more modern one. Nicolas Calo, the communication manager of Lidl France, declares that the social media investment is part of the overal strategy of the group to modernize their concept. He also adds that "the concept goes more toward modernity and proximity: that is what Facebook is bringing to us: Modernity of communication, and proximity to our clientele".

I find that amazing that Lidl, despite very little budgets compare to its competition, despite a concept that is based on very little advertizing and customer service, has been able to become one of the best success story in the Facebook's retailing world.

What do you think about it?

Should You Still Believe In Foursquare?

I have been a big fan of Foursquare since I have tried it couple of years ago. I believe the technology is great, and you can clearly see how businesses could use the service to generate in-store traffic, and therefore revenues.

But for a little while, whereas geolocalization has been a hot trend lately, Foursquare seems to struggle. I recently read an article about why people stop using Foursquare. And I must admit I understand them. After a fast start, with a high adoption, a lot of place registered, and even some specials. 

But still, with all this potential, they haven't been able to convert the service to its full potential. Still I believe Foursquare has a bright future ahead of it. 

Recently, Foursquare raised $41 millions in order to keep on building its capacity to generate revenues. Let's hope it will be enought to buy some time to develop the business model: Foursquare is worth $600 million but only got $2 millions in revenues last year.

Mon feedback sur les salons M Direct Expo, SEMO, et relation client 2013

Comme tous les ans, (ou presque), je me suis rendu aux salons du marketing direct, des études marketing, de la relation client. Cette année, comme ce fut le cas ces dernières années, ces salons ont été rassemblés autour d'un même événement, ce qui est plutôt intelligent, car cela permet de pouvoir voir l'ensemble des intervenants sur la même date.

Mais cette année, plus que les années précédentes, je fus déçus:

• Les conférences étaient à mon goût de moins bonne qualité. Hormis l'excellente conférence sur le neuromarketing, qui a elle seule valait le coût de venir, les autres n'étaient pas forcément aussi intéressante.
• La taille du salon a réellement fondue. Certainement que les prix pour la participation à ce type d'événement à augmenter fortement. Qui plus est avec la crise, beaucoup d'intervenants ont certainement souhaité faire des économies. J'ai participé à d'autres salons professionnels ces 2 dernières années, et pour avoir discuté avec des exposants, beaucoup ont décidé d'abandonner ce type de salon.
• Peu d'intervenants réellement majeurs étaient présent. Ce particulièrement dans les études. Pa de IRI, de Kantar, pour les études, de Soft Computing (qui était présent il y a quelques années), de Microsoft pour le MD. Alors certains étaient quand même présent, notamment Orange et La Poste, mais cela manque de locomotive, qui pourrait faire bouger l'ensemble du marché.
• Une mention spécial pour le SEMO, le salon des études. D'une qualité exceptionnel il y a 5 ans par la qualité des exposants et des conférences, qui remplissait le palais des congrès, il a fondu quasiment totalement. Très dommage.

Je trouve très dommage que ce salon que je qualifierai "du Marketing", n'existe quasiment plus. La France est un grand pays du marketing, avec des agences de communication renommées comme Publicis, des vrais experts des études tel qu'IRI, pour ne citer qu'eux... J'espère vraiment que les organisateurs arriveront à repartir du bon pas, et que les différents acteurs du marketing arriveront à relever le défi de construire un salon digne de ce nom pour la profession.

Neuromarketing Conference In Paris

I attended couple of weeks ago a neuromarketing conference held in Paris during the MD Expo.

I did not know much about Neuromarketing before coming to this event. My knowledge was mainly based on the Neuromarketing blog, which I actually read quite often.

The conference had a prestigious panel: 

• Henri Kaufman was the host, and animator of the conference.
• Pierre Gomy  Marketing director at France Millward Brown France, which talked about the company's experiences held in Great Britain.
• Mark Van Rymenant  founder of Netway, a Belgian company specialized in Neuromarketing since 1997.
• Marie de Linage Europe CRM manager Sony, which talked about her experience with neuromarketing techniques.
• Bruno Teboul, an expert of neuromarketing, soon to get his Phd, he is studying the usage of neurosciences for marketing purposes around the globe. He is also the author of "L'Absolu Marketing",  which explains all the new marketing trends from the big data to neuromarketing. I haven't read it yet, but I am planning to soon.

Here are some highlights of the conference:

Read Montague's Study

Neuromarketing has really emerged in 2003, when Read Montague studied thanks to IRM scans 50 volunteers to taste Coke and Pepsi sodas. It appears that out of these 50 people, 49 prefered Pepsi while blindfolded, but once people knew which brand was which soda, the results were reversed. The study showed how brands could change one product perception. Its since this research thanks to IRM that neuromarketing really started.

The button to buy

There is no real trigger in the brain that you need to push for someone to buy. Though there are some well known now zones that have a key role during the decision making process. There is such a high complexity in the brain that the interconnections between the different zones makes it impossible to resume the action of neuromarketing by simply pressing one button.

The brain map

Thanks to the important work of research around neurosciences, scientists have been able to set up a map of the brain. There are 52 zones in the brain that have been noticed. Each zones have different roles. Actually, the researches have also established that human brains are similar to other human brains by 99%. 

 It is thanks to this map that we are now able to understand and make experimentations through IRM and use them.

Why Neuromarketing Matters

• 5% of what we do is conscious
• 95% is unconscious

Marketers have spent years to work on the conscious part, trying to understand the logical aspect of customers' decision making process. But now neuromarketing techniques allow to explore the other 95%.

Also:

• 85% of decision made are based on emotions
• 15% by rational thoughts.

How That Works?

There are 3 techniques that are used:

• Eye Tracking: We use technologies following the eye movements in order to see what catches the attention of someone.
• Electrophalogram: The most used techniques
• IRM: The most precised one, but the most difficult to use. 

About the IRM technique, most of the time it is used only on 6 to 8 people, because it is pricy, difficult to get (you need to use hospital material), but also because it is enough to have usable results.

Even though it is the most famous technique, it only represents 15% of the researches conducted.

Culture, Sociology and the Brain

There is a certain "plasticity" to the brain. Indeed, people from certain cultures may have been used to certain cultural or social things that may shape the way they percieve things. Even though studies seem to tell that there is no particularity. For example, the color red is associated with stopping, because the color red has been chosen for the red lights. You may change the red light color for yellow, it will take a while for people to adapt and the red to get back to a normal color. 

So far I believe it is too early to say if culture and society may impact neuromarketing results.

Sony Case's Study

Sony Europe had issues with the different local marketing departments to implement the European guidelines about Sony's brand content. Most of the time, local branches argued that the European guidelines were sometimes not adapted to local market. Sony decided to use neuromarketing in order to test then its messages and brand components thanks to the eye tracking techniques. Through small tests, on some emailing campaigns, they experienced great results, which pushed them to experiment more. It helped Sony to rationalized its European guidelines, thanks to the neuromarketing results they got. 

I will post soon a new note about what I think about neuromarketing. The aim of this article is to sare with you the great knowledge I got thanks to this conference.

Carrefour: Un Combat Pour La Liberté: Mon opinion

Il y a quelques semaines de celà, j'ai eu l'occasion de rencontrer Yves Soulabail lors d'une conférence se déroulant à Paris Dauphine. Yves est bien connu du monde de la distribution pour son ouvrage "Carrefour un combat pour la liberté". Je connaissais aussi déjà bien son oeuvre, visitant très régulièrement le blog Carrefouruncombatpourlaliberte.fr . 

Le Pitch

1976, Carrefour existe depuis plus de dix ans, et la croissance folle du début est difficile à maintenir. Carrefour est en pleine remise en question. Cette année, notamment Etienne Thil, directeur marketing et communication, et les directeurs de Carrefour, décide de lancer les produits libres, qui deviendront bientôt les MDD, qui à l'époque est une véritable révolution dans un monde de la distribution dominé par les marques (Nestlé, Coca Cola, etc...).

Ce que j'ai aimé

• Énormément de moments historiques de la distribution française (fondation de Leclerc, début de Carrefour, lancement des MDD chez les concurrents) sont présentés dans ce livre.
• L'incroyable précision et le détail des données du livre. On y apprend les volumes, les chiffres d'affaires, les marges, etc... Bien évidemment, elles sont très loin de celles de nos jours, mais dans un monde de la distribution où il y a énormément de secret, c'est formidable d'avoir pu aller si loin.
• Un ouvrage rare, qui donne beaucoup d'informations sur l'histoire (même avant les produits libres) de Carrefour. Ces origines, sa manière de fonctionner, les hommes importants. Carrefour reste, malgré les problèmes actuelles, une formidable histoire, qui part d'une petite épicerie il y a 50 ans à devenir la 2ème entreprise mondiale de distribution.
• Une vrai leçon de bon sens et de principe pour les distributeurs. Il remet bien en place ce qui est vraiment important pour un distributeur, le volume, l'image prix, les basiques, la gestion des hommes... Etc. Une très grande leçon, que chaque direction de grande distribution devrait garder en tête.

Ce que j'ai moins aimé

• Parfois, le livre est un peu brouillon, car très axé sur donner de l'information "brute" (notes de réunions, articles, données chiffrées, etc...). Ce qui rend la lecture parfois difficile, sur certains moment, surtout au milieu.
• J'aurai aimé avoir plus d'informations sur Bernardo Trujilo, car je sais qu'Yves est le spécialiste de ce génie très méconnu du monde de l'entreprise. Il a façonné l'ensemble de la distribution mondiale, néanmoins il reste quasiment inconnu du grand public. Néanmoins reconnaissons que cela n'était pas le sujet principal du livre. Peut être pour un autre livre?

En résumé

Ce livre est une formidable leçon au sujet de la grande distribution. Il retrace avec détail et précision les phases de lancement des produits libres, et explique bien dans quel mesure ce lancement a changé profondémment le monde de la distribution, mais aussi donné une longueur d'avance à Carrefour.

Je le recommande à tous professionels de la grande distribution.

Auchan's Entreprise Feedback Management: Leveraging Store's Feedback

Enterprise feedback management is an important part of a comprehensive customer relationship management strategy. EFM aims to collect and organize customer's feedback from whereever it may come. With nowadays over connected world, feedback may come from in store comments, emails, mailings, social media, phone calls, blogs, among others.

I have been reading in Linéaires an article about the CRM manager at Auchan Jérôme Desreumaux, one of the largest retailer in France, selling mostly fast moving goods. Each Auchan stores in France welcome every day on average 10 000 different customers! Therefore leveraging the informations these customers may give can be a powerful tool in order to improve the commercial concept. Auchan recieves every year 200 000 feedback. It is important to know how to give meaning to these feedbacks, but also it is very important to know how to collect those.

What is interesting in this article, is the split between the different sources of feedback:

• 25% comes from store comments left in a ballot by customers
• 25% comes from employees from the frontdesks who type in customers' comments
• 25% comes from notes taken by store and department managers
• 25% comes from other media, such as mailing, emailing...

What is fascinating, is that still 75% of comments come from the store! Indeed, in retail, stores remain the main medium of communication. 

It is always more difficult to get these insights, as it is difficult to automate feedback in store. It is interesting to see how Auchan succeeds in getting so many feedback from stores.