Consumer Analytics

Columbus, Ohio -- Rolfe Swinton, a creative, consumer insight and technology entrepreneur, has joined strategic brand and design firm Chute Gerdeman as CEO.

Swinton founded and built Lumi Mobile, a provider of mobile-enabled consumer insight technologies backed by WPP and Australian billionaire Chris Morris. He also co-founded Reality Mine, the leading provider of passive mobile data collection and behavioral analytics.

San Francisco -- Piracy and discoverability are the top issues facing app developers today, with 26% of app developers reporting their apps have been pirated. A survey of more than 250 app developers App Developers Conference (ADC) also shows that a similar 26% found that their apps had been hacked, or obtained without proper payment.

Redwood Shores, Calif. – Cross-channel experiences are vital to customer experience. Recent customer experience studies of retail executives — by Oracle Corp. and Tata Consultancy Services — show that to 50% and 47% of respondents, respectively, cross-channel experiences are vital to providing overall customer experience.

Walnut Creek, Calif. – While the percentage of retailers who think they know about their customers is rising, fewer retailers think they are proficient in using that knowledge for marketing purposes. According to a new study from RSR Research, “Retail Marketing 2013: Organizational Drift,” 36% of retail marketers said their customer loyalty program is a foundational element of their marketing strategy in 2013, compared to 32% last year.

Chico, Calif. – Online home improvement retailer Build.com is using Adobe Marketing Cloud as the cornerstone of its digital marketing strategies, diving deeper into visitor data to better understand what they are looking for, how they navigate online, where they are coming from, and what drives purchase decisions.

Amsterdam, Netherlands – Staples Europe has launched a new Staples.es website aimed at helping small businesses locate and purchase products.

The site has a new look and feel and offers many new features to improve the overall shopping experience including personalized shopping with product recommendations based on customer preferences, an updated search engine and filtering tools, streamlined reordering for frequently used products, and quick checkout with a mini-cart that designed to ease inserting coupons, saving addresses and reviewing orders.

New York – Men are highly engaged shoppers, with 63% of men actively looking for in-store sales and 53% regularly using coupons, according to WSL’s “How America Shops: Men & Shopping Report.” The study also shows that 67% of Millennial men use mobile phones to shop, compared to 52% of Gen X men and 29% of Baby Boomer men.

By Jeff Wakefield, Verifone

Mobility. It is such a broad concept, meaning different things to merchants and consumers. Mobile acceptance, mobile payments, mobile POS, mobile shopping – each plays a distinct part in the overall mobile experience and each has different risks and rewards.

Within this larger mobile arena, the security of the mobile payment device offers the greatest risk for both merchants and consumers alike.