store staff performance

Retail Portfolio Management: Store Staff Performance

Analytics, ,

While excellent staff and service are what distinguishes brick and mortar from online retailers, staff performance is often overlooked in store evaluations. Two new KPIs help account for the human factor.

When evaluating a retail portfolio, very often mangers only look at the financial results of a store. But excellent service, competent and dedicated sales staff are a key differentiator of brick and mortar retailers. A fair and objective store staff performance evaluation is therefore increasingly important. This article introduces two new KPIs that help to fairly evaluate staff performance and to determine optimal staffing for each store in your portfolio.

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Global Retail Best Practice 2019

Best Practice, , , , , , ,

The likes of Amazon and Alibaba open tech-heavy brick & mortar stores, but best practice commercial brand retail still happens elsewhere.

Early sales reports indicate that 2018 was a good year for large parts of the lifestyle brand industry. Almost 4/5 of the top 100 European and US American lifestyle brands had a growth year, and for the most part did better than in 2017. This was despite a global department store fallout and online growth and was largely based on store growth.

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Why the Netherlands Have Become a Last Mile Innovation Lab & What We Can Learn From It

Brand Distribution, Digital,

Parcel costs are on the rise and customers disapprove of growing numbers of delivery vans on the streets. As a result, cities and the logistics industry are piloting alternative solutions in last mile innovation.

The Online Boom Drives Parcel Volume

The ongoing boom in ordering goods online has led to a boom in the logistics industry in the Netherlands with 295 million packages delivered (plus 30% compared to 2015).  However, it is only now that consumers have begun to complain about the high number of delivery vans clogging up the narrow streets of Amsterdam.

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Brick & Mortar is the new Online: E-commerce Trends 2019

Brand Strategy, Digital, , ,

Amazon just released sales numbers for 2018 and the details indicate that the mother of all e-commerce is confronted with new growth realities.

And Amazon is not the only one.

  • GLORE, the stock index for global online retailers stayed far behind old economy stocks.
  • E-commerce became ‘weather sensitive’, had bankruptcies and major players missed sales forecasts by far.
  • Almost all online pure players are working on brick & mortar concepts, already leading to over 20 stores in Berlin.

So let’s look at the fundamentals behind the e-commerce trends 2019 that indicate a new direction in growth.

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Retail Portfolio Management

Retail Portfolio Management: Renegotiating Your Rental Contracts

Analytics, , , , , ,

This is the second installment of a short series that dives into a few uncommon KPIs for successful retail portfolio management. Learn how traffic cost and footfall per hour can help you renegotiate rental contracts.

For many years, retail expansion was the main growth strategy in the brand retail world. More recently, however, brands increasingly face an under-performing retail portfolio. Realising that retail expansion doesn’t work without like-for-like growth of existing stores, brands are busy assessing their retail portfolios in order to focus on profitable stores and stores with potential for improvement.

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Brand Expnsion Iberia

Spain & Portugal on the Brand Horizon

Global Growth,

Is it time for brand expansion to Spain and Portugal? The economic outlook for the Iberian peninsula is currently boosting the confidence of international retailers on the lookout for new opportunities.

Spain and Portugal are back in the mindset of expansion managers! Several international brands are currently revisiting their expansion strategies or considering taking up business in Spain and Portugal. There might even be more opportunities for international brands now than there were before the crises.

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Alexander Zick [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Retail Portfolio Assessment: The Good Ones Into the Pot, the Bad Ones Into Your Crop

Analytics

What tools are available to help brands choose their most promising retail locations, and identify the not so promising ones? Let’s mobilise some unusual KPIs!

Inspired online stores, a lack of innovation in brick & mortar retail, overpriced retail locations and double-digit traffic losses all contribute to diluting 4-Wall contributions of many brick & mortar stores. It’s therefore no big surprise that we are frequently asked to help brands to pick out the most promising retail locations, to identify locations to shut down and, even more importantly, to identify the ones with potential for store performance improvement.

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online customer acquisition

Online Customer Acquisition: Challenges and Opportunities for Brands

Brand Strategy, Digital, , ,

Building a successful e-commerce business requires a strong online customer acquisition strategy, especially when the competition are big platforms like Amazon or Zalando. How can brands leverage their strengths to compete?

A brands’ ability to operate a successful e-commerce business clears the path to bigger margins and critical access to customer insights compared to wholesale channels. If you are an executive working for a ‘traditional’ fashion brand and want to better understand the marketing of your online store, ask your e-commerce director this simple question:

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