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Golfsmith uses its sales staff and store environment to inspire their customers to love life more. What other retailers inspire you to live life better? Share your thoughts below or on our LinkedIn Group.

Listen now and learn how Taco Bell thinks outside the bun.

How do you use social media to gain consumer insights? Share your thoughts below or on our LinkedIn Group.

Ever experienced joie de vivre with a brand? You’re about to.

Joining The Brand Show is Chip Conley, founder and chairmen of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and author of the book, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow.

Tune into this three part series as Chip shares the secret of visibility in a saturated market, why placing the human psyche in your business model creates success and the underestimated value of placing your team members first.

What brand brings you joie de vivre? Share your thoughts below or on our LinkedIn Group.

The song brought back a lot of memories, for sure, but then something profound struck me: even though we are surrounded by new tools, new capabilities and new ways to market to people, the basic premise of what we’re trying to do as marketers really hasn’t changed. We’re still trying to connect with and convince our targets to buy our stuff. Same as it ever was.

Today’s first speaker, Jamie Nordstrom of, well, Nordstrom, surely must concur. Ever since his great-grandfather sold his first pair of shoes in 1907, Nordstrom has focused on making the customer happy. From traditional signage to social strategies Nordstrom is now executing, it’s all about the customer. Nordstrom even has a very “Nordstrom-esqe” policy regarding how they use social. For an interesting take on their approach, click here.

“In the social space, we’re really doing what we’ve always done – customers talking to each other,” Nordstrom (the guy) said at the morning’s keynote address. “Twenty years ago, that’s how we were doing business.”

But make no mistake, Nordstrom is a fast-forward company. One of the first retailers to launch a commerce site when their catalog group led the charge and sold shoes online way back in 1998, the company continues to innovate.

“In the foreseeable future, we will not have cash registers in our stores,” he predicted. “It will all be mobile – iPods, iPads to make shopping easier. Customers are in the driver’s seat. Retailers that embrace that will thrive, ones that don’t will be gone.”

SmartBear. Really smart bear.
Tucked into north wall of the exhibit hall was an exhibitor ready to help retailers and manufacturers focus on delighting shoppers, too. Like Nordstrom, SmartBear Sofware, Inc. knows you won’t go wrong when you focus on the user. The SmartBear approach is unusual for a software company. Competitors might get mired in wireframes and analogs, but SmartBear goes beyond the basics to help their clients deliver a better user experience. That’s what SmartBear does: Web metrics that focus on enhancing the user experience from the user’s perspective. And when you realize that 65% of shoppers start searches on mobile phones and complete them on tablets and/or computers, creating great experiences and integrating them is vital.

“The difference today is the experience that’s provided across all the different screens,” Ken Godskind, VP of Monitoring Products at SmartBear, observed. “It’s not only that (shoppers) can accomplish something, but enabling them to enjoy it when they do.”

Godskind referred to a simple model for building a successful customer experience. Envision a pyramid structure with “I could get it done” at the base, “it was easy” as you ascend, and “I enjoyed it” at the top. Delivering functional reliability, ease of use and joy of experience is a simple formula.  The best ones often are.

The speed of innovation practically guarantees that marketers are going to have amazing new tools on a constant basis. It’s difficult to even imagine what might fill the Shop.org exhibit hall ten years from now, or even next year for that matter. What you can be sure of, however, is that successful companies will always have their sights and their sites fixed on making shoppers happy.

Or in the words of David Byrne, “same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” 

Quote of the day:  “Think in terms of what you want the outcome to be. That’s where innovation comes from.”
Ken Godskind, Vice-President, Monitoring Products, SmartBear Software, Inc.

Today’s keynote was delivered by Jerry Storch, Chairman and CEO of Toys R Us, whose company motto is “Playing to win.” Think his job is no fun? He dropped a stat on us that proves otherwise: Kids rank a trip to Toys R Us just a fraction below a trip to Disneyland. Not sure if the employees would fill the survey out the same way, but they surely might. That’s because Jerry and the folks at Toys R Us are deeply engaged in some of the most fun and most profitable kinds of marketing efforts out there. The Toys R Us Omnichannel approach puts them in front of their shoppers in nearly every way possible. “Showcasing?” That doesn’t scare Jerry one bit.

“I know what the hot toy for the holidays is going to be, but I’m not going to tell you what it is,” Storch teased. “We’re having them make as many as they can for us. When you have exclusives and great house brands like we do, we’re the only place to get it. You can’t showroom something that only exists at one store.”

If you’re thinking the hot new product for the holidays is the Tabeo from Toys R Us, guess again. No doubt, this new tablet is awesome but it was introduced yesterday.

Needle made a point.
Besides having a really cool bus subbing as their booth space on the exhibition floor, Needle is doing some very cool things and having a lot of fun while doing it.  Needle, a self-described “fan-sourced sales chat company,” might be the tool ecommerce sites have been looking for to stitch together (yeah, sorry) the selling process with real time chat from passionate subject matter experts. I watched a guy named Doug – who just happens to be ranked 24th in the world at Halo – connect with gamers to talk gaming and sell them high-end Skullcandy headphones. Doug knows what gamers need because Doug is a world-class gamer, and when Doug says you’ll need the Skullcandy headphones, people pull out their credit cards. Up the stairs of the bus on the deck (yes, a deck – how fun is that?) I met another SME, this time for Norton, who was hooking up with “geeks like me that want to know more about Norton.”
Needle’s founder Morgan Lynch puts it like this: “We’re not a chat company; we connect our clients to end users. This is a pre-sell platform; we help people figure out what to buy.”

So does Needle work? Conversion bumps in the 20% to 35% range, average order values 20% to 40% higher, and site lift up anywhere between 2% and 5%. That’s great and fun.

All in all, a very educational Day Two at Shop.org. And with apologies to my mom, a pretty fun one, too.

Quote of the day:  “’Now’ and ‘next’ are the same thing in this world.”
Jerry Storch, Chairman and CEO, Toys R Us

Seven experts spoke but one message kept reappearing: Brands do better when it’s the shopper’s voice that’s heard.  Give people something to love, something great to talk about, and you’ll see amazing things happen to your brand. Andy Sernovitz, author and CEO of WordofMouth.org and SocialMedia.org made that point on several occasions during his early morning presentation on the effectiveness of Word of Mouth.

Sernovitz illustrated the point with a simple math equation. “Add a company’s ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’ and then multiply that figure by 150 (that’s the average number of friends a Facebook user has),” he noted. “That’s a big number, and it’s free.”

Other presenters throughout the day concurred with the notion that shoppers are the best salespeople. Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak, noted that Lazy Boy saw a 10% lift when they added rating stars and that Vintage Tub and Bath got a 65% better response when a site redesign added a consumer review quote next to featured products.

Word of Mouth Love Lessons
Sernovitz offered some words of wisdom for companies interested in making Word of Mouth part of the marketing plan:

- New love is powerful. People really enjoy showing off things they love. Very few people wandered in to Krispy Kreme – someone usually brought them to see the hot doughnuts.
- Love and money don’t mix. A company cannot buy a good recommendation from a shopper. Recommendations are personal, valuable and not for sale.
- Nobody talks more than a lover scorned. If you let someone down, they will share their dissatisfaction on blogs, reviews and Facebook posts.

All good things to remember, and all good things to share with other marketers. That is, of course, unless you’re out of breath.

Quote of the day:  “Your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what others say it is.” Andy Sernovitz, author and CEO, SocialMedia.org, WordofMouth.org

Theresa illustrates how NFC can create valuable customer interaction by engaging consumers in retail outlets and then securing sales on their path-to-purchase. Unlike QR codes that require downloading a reader app as well as an Internet connection, NFC-enabled phones allow shoppers to easily engage with ads, posters, point-of-purchase displays, inventory kiosks, instant pay options and more with just a ‘tap.’ The NFC tag can direct to an informational video, a virtual customer service representative, a map of the retail space, or just about anything that will keep consumers connected to a brand, store or promotion. Listen as Billy describes how NFC is the future of customer engagement and loyalty.