Consumer Analytics

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Some people love pizza so much they get emotional about it. Now Domino’s Pizza is letting them express those emotions by placing preset delivery orders via pizza text emoji.

Customers who opt into Domino’s new mobile text ordering service and add their mobile number to their online “pizza profile” can also reorder their established Easy Order by texting the phrase “Easy Order.”

Fast growing grocery delivery service Instacart is adding a value-oriented chain to its network of grocery stores.

The company announced it is teaming up with Smart & Final to allow customers in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area to choose from virtually any items carried at their local Smart & Final store and have them delivered in as little as one hour.

Prices on Instacart will match Smart & Final's everyday low in-store prices, excluding special offers.

Philadelphia — Except for a momentary spike during the 2014 holiday season, conversion and add-to-cart rates have been dropping steadily year-over-year. However, according to the global Ecommerce Quarterly report from Monetate, personalized, relevant product recommendations help brands avoid this issue.

Armonk, N.Y. — Retailers looking ahead to meeting the needs of holiday shoppers should be aware of the continuing growth of mobile’s importance as a consumer channel. According to IBM’s Eighth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, mobile accounted for 23% of sales and 45% of traffic in November and December 2014, respectively.

Los Angeles - Marketing services company Connexity Inc. has acquired the PriceGrabber retail lead generation platform and network. The company will provide shopping leads that result in more than $2 billion in annual sales for retailers and brands.

PriceGrabber's shopping-focused publisher network offers more than 2,000 retailers marketing access to tens of millions of shoppers each month from online shopping destinations such as Yahoo!, Ask.com and PriceGrabber.com. Retailers will manage a single lead channel.

Generation Y prefers to shop at Walmart over Target, Costco, Kroger, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, according to Ad Age.

"Millennials now, as a generation, like Walmart the best, more so than Generation X, more so than boomers," Matt Kistler, Walmart’s senior VP-consumer insights and analytics, said.

Walmart is most popular among people under 24, as well as every store but Target among 25- to 34-year-olds, according to InfoScout, a provider of shopper insights with a nationwide panel of more than 170,000 shoppers.

Target’s annual meeting was pretty much a non-event on June 10, aside from the fact that a corporate structure in which Brian Cornell serves as both chairman and CEO doesn’t sit well with many shareholders. 

The nationwide expansion of the Facebook Place Tips in-store mobile promotion service, complete with free proprietary Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, was interesting news.  Here are three implications of Facebook’s latest effort to serve as a commercial platform: