Author / First Retail

Retailers become Marketplaces Historically retailers performed three functions: 1) curation of products from an array of suppliers, 2) moving physical product from supplier to consumer and 3) breaking bulk. This required a retailer to maintain substantial infrastructure and stock investment. Today almost all barriers to entry have been removed by online suppliers directories, drop-ship vendors,…

  The Six C’s of Social Technologies By Andreas S. Weigend, Gam Dias, and Anthony Chow (Social Data Lab and First Retail, Inc.) In this foreword to the proceedings, we revisit and consolidate the most exciting ideas that emerged during the three days. We frame our observations by casting our minds back 8 years ago…

Common Outcomes of Data Bottlenecks Retail information bottlenecks are best understood in the context of the value chain: Assortment Planning; Merchandising; Availability; Fulfillment; Marketing and Customer Loyalty. Information about products is not as good as it could be – data received from the vendor community can be incomplete, inconsistent and sometimes just plain incorrect. At…

#1. Make your sponsor a hero The number one rule – you have been engaged to serve your sponsor and to make them successful in their role within the client organization and to do so within their mandate. Deflect glory to your manager. #2. Be the solution not a problem You are there to solve…

Ready for Change? Before e-commerce, consumers were starving for information about products, even as they forked over their personal data so that marketers could better target them. Brand advertising failed them by not feeding them real information. Before the emergence of today’s read-write web, the brand’s message — what the advertiser said about the brand…