For over 50 years, passwords have served as access controls for technology. Paradoxically, as the technology that we use in our everyday lives has rapidly evolved to meet our every need, passwords and security have largely remained unchanged since their inception. Today, the average American has more than 130 online...
Is Your App Best for the Job?
Customers install your app hoping to complete a task to achieve a desired outcome. Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen describes this as a Job to be Done in his book, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice.1 He defines the Job to be Done as the “progress...
The Cashless Trend
Several organizations are making changes to go cashless or at least pilot the concept, including Massachusetts’ MBTA, American and United terminals in select airports (Miami being the latest) and Shake Shack’s recently opened cashless location in New York, to name a few. Living in the Seattle area, I have access...
The Loyalty Sweet Spot
What’s the sweet spot of a loyalty program? If you asked a consumer, you may get a far different answer than if you asked a business. The consumer wants: free items (that they would typically buy anyway) rewarding their current behaviors and shopping frequency at the places where they shop...
The Voice Assistant: A New Mobile Frontier for Merchants, Part I of II
Voice activated personal assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri have exploded onto the scene. It’s expected that by 2022, 50% of US households will have at least one smart speaker with personal voice assistant capability.[1] While the number of devices in use is huge, the functionality they currently offer...
Answer 7 Questions to Discover a Winning App Strategy
The Android and Apple app stores now present more than 5 million apps1 to consumers and are dominated by two behemoth brands, Facebook and Google, which publish 8 of the top 10 apps.2 Developing a winning app strategy in this hyper-competitive app marketplace is a challenge for any size retailer....
Know Your Decision Makers and Build Your Community of Support
Having trouble getting a project or initiative in motion? Are people your biggest challenge? Regardless of your level or position within a company, you need to gain support for your effort and get the commitment to the next steps. Knowing how people respond to change and how they make decisions...
Have You Identified Your Holiday Mobile Strategy?
The sheer amount of pumpkin spice flavored offerings in the recent marketplace tells us that the holiday season is right around the corner (or it could just be an impatient marketplace offering pumpkin spice as early as July?). Last holiday season, consumers flocked in droves to their smartphones to complete...
How to Discover Your App’s Retention Hook and Improve User Retention
With more than five million apps in the two-leading app stores1, app publishers are making larger investments in app development and user acquisition. Most are failing to achieve success, as demonstrated by the average app losing more than eighty percent of their users within just seven days of downloading the...
Click & Mortar – About To Be at a Whole Foods Market Near You
August 24, 2017 - Today Amazon announced several initiatives it will begin to execute on when it closes on its deal to acquire Whole Foods Market this coming Monday. I blogged about this just two months ago and my vision closely matches the plans Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide...
What Have We Done To Consumer Expectations?
Whatever you think of him, Steve Jobs was excellent at product development. Consumer friendly, intuitive design was the at the core of every product he introduced. He felt that the user should be able to effectively use a device or software without being told or shown how, and he did...
How Net Neutrality Affects Your E-commerce Business
What is Net Neutrality? Imagine that the websites you access most often suddenly begin to charge subscription fees. Some of these fees you may opt into— online news subscriptions, video streaming, etc. Other fees you may not even notice you are paying— the shoes you want become more expensive as...
