Loyalty Marketing

Cambridge, Mass. – Target is the grocery brand with the highest positive consumer sentiment rating. In a survey of the grocery habits of 763 consumers exclusively released to Chain Store Age, analytics technology provider Luminoso Technology found that 60% of consumers had positive sentiment about Target as a grocery retailer.

By Bill Davis, Director, MB&G Consulting

For much of the last year, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have been mired in a slump. Not only was last holiday season the toughest in several years, the consumer discretionary sector, which includes retail, was the only one of the 10 macro S&P sectors to be in the red for the first half of 2014. As a result, retail is widely perceived to be in a funk.

New York -- Parents and their children in grades K-12 will spend a combined $543 on back-to-school items, and double that, at $1,223, on college spending. According to new survey data from Deloitte, parents alone expect to spend 13% less than in 2013.

Atlanta -- First Data has taken a key step toward expanding its payment services by acquiring Gyft Inc., the Silicon Valley-based company that entered the $100 billion gift card market in 2012 and pioneered the concept of a mobile wallet for gift cards.

Fort Worth, Texas -- RadioShack is opening 21 new interactive remodel stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. RadioShack began remodeling and opening highly experiential concept stores across the country in July 2013, and has refreshed its more than 4,000 U.S. company-owned stores.

Los Angeles – Specialty apparel Windsor will present a new look for the Windsor website on Aug. 29. The redesign is intended to make the site’s look and feel more customer-friendly.

New shopper features include easier navigation, larger and more vibrant images, social media component, creating a wishlist, find product in store, filter tool by size and color, customer reviews, easy and fast shopping cart procedure and total customer engagement.

Santa Cruz, Calif. - Sixty-six percent of retailers attending the recent Big Data & Analytics for Retail Summit believe the number one way to ensure a successful holiday season is to understand customer behavior to drive sales and build loyalty. Moreover, data from business analytics provider Looker shows that four-in-10 retailers feel they are still ineffective when it comes to using data to improve business performance.

Petaluma, Calif. – E-commerce platform provider MarketLive has entered a strategic agreement with Amazon Payments, offering the ability for MarketLive retailers to help streamline the login and checkout process and increase conversion numbers. The integration of login and pay with Amazon with the MarketLive platform allows shoppers on MarketLive retail shopping sites to leverage their existing Amazon account to quickly login and select their shipping and payment information that they use for Amazon.