News

New York -- President Barack Obama visited Safeway Inc.’s distribution center in Upper Marlboro, Md., where he spotlighted the chain’s efforts to improve truck efficiency and called for new fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks by March 2016. The new standards will mean “thousands of dollars in savings every year” for truck operators, Obama said.

Health and beauty pioneer Horst Rechelbacher died at his home in Osceola, Wis., at the age of 72 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Kimberly-Clark North America has named Grant LaMontagne as president of customer development. In his new role, LaMontagne will lead all sales and customer development activities for the company’s operations in North America and will report to KCNA group president Michael Hsu.

LaMontagne joins KCNA from Clorox, where he was most recently SVP and GM for Clorox Professional Products business, which includes the health care, janitorial/sanitary and institutional foods channels.

In recent years, retailers have aggressively implemented in-store systems to track customers’ every move from the moment they enter till the moment they leave (hopefully including a trip through a checkout lane). Specific details such as how long customers spend in front of a display are also carefully monitored and analyzed. Technology now allows retailers to keep tabs on what customers do in the store almost as rigorously as they follow customer actions online.

New York – Consumers are increasingly performing omni-channel shopping, and prefer personalized offers across the different channels they shop. According to a new survey of more than 1,000 online consumers from retail personalization technology vendor Synqera, U.S. consumers still prefer promotional content and coupons from traditional print media (magazine, newsletter/flyer, newspaper) (75%), found online (72%), or received after a purchase (62%) for future shopping.

The ability to develop actionable insights by listening to social conversations is among several powerful new capabilities that have been added to Microsoft Dynamics CRM portfolio.

Microsoft introduced a comprehensive set of new marketing and social listening capabilities to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM suite which are designed to help organizations match their customers to the right products and services, engage with them in the right way at the right time and nurture relationships.

Abilene, Kansas – A group called Concerned Alco Stockholders (CAS), led shareholders David Pointer and Dilip Singh, it intends to mail its own proxy statement to stockholders of Alco Stores Inc. for the purpose of giving Alco stockholders the opportunity to vote for new board members at the Alco 2014 annual meeting of stockholders.

With approximately 1.5 billion smartphones currently in use today, it is safe to say mobile is radically changing consumer retail behavior. To maximize in-store sales opportunities and minimize hurdles to purchase, retailers must change their approach to reach a new generation of customers steeped in a mobile lifestyle.

But how should retailers best interact with their customers in this new age of mobile? A new innovation from Apple could be one answer: iBeacon.