Suni Munshani's blog

If it hasn’t already happened – the days of the Paper Coupon are numbered.

Stores all over the world need a wake up call. There is way too much at stake and it seems to me like they aren’t even focusing on it.

The recent credit crisis highlights some of the inherent weaknesses in the current model for providing consumer credit. That model relies on tried and true inputs and limited real time data to arrive at its conclusions. When the factors turn out to be wrong or incomplete, the models fail.

There are several location based service (LBS) applications such as Loopt and Mapquest's FindMe. These are based on GPS and focus on finding friends, restaurants and other points of interest in the vicinity of a person.

According to the GMA (Grocery Manufacturers Association) – grocer’s budgets for shopper marketing in 2007 grew at 21 percent per year, compared to just two percent growth seen by overall marketing budgets.

Recently, Saks upended the luxury market with some deep price cuts. A 70% price cut caused a stampede in one store with over eager shoppers fighting for a $535 pair of Manolo Blahnik's going for $160.

If you want to see one of the reasons why shopper marketing has been carving off an ever-bigger slice of the marketing pie, just compare the number of weekly shoppers at major retail chains with the number of Americans who tune into top TV shows.

When it comes to brand loyalty, Todd Morris, a Senior VP of Catalina Marketing says in his AdAge Article “Forget the old B-school nostrum that 20% of customers account for 80% of sales: It’s a gross overstatement even for mass-market package-goods brands.

Walk into any bank, retail establishment or hotel these days and the customer experience often leaves a lot to be desired. In a frenetic world where time is the most valuable commodity for most people, customer-facing retail establishments need to re-look from the ground up at the customer experience they provide.

The concept of session metrics is well known in ecommerce. For example Amazon.com does the analysis of the click-stream behavior of its customers so it knows what pages on the site you visited, what products you looked at even if you did not buy, and how long you spent on their site. It then customizes the site for each individual based on the click-stream analysis or session metrics of other.