Back-to-School Retail Sales Numbers for 2016

Posted on September 6, 2016 by bermanevansretail
For many retailers, back-to-school revenues represent a significant component of their annual revenues. In the United States alone, the National Federation estimates that total 2016 back-to-school revenues will exceed $27 billion.
Take a look at this infographic from Statista to learn more.
 
 
Infographic: Back to School By The Numbers | Statista

 

Posted in Part 3: Targeting Customers and Gathering Information, Part 6: Merchandise Management and Pricing, Part 7: Communicating with the Customer | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Retailers: Engage in Scenario Planning. Please!

Posted on August 31, 2016 by bermanevansretail
Note: This post applies to both (a) business planning and the retailer’s flexibility to change as needed and (b) personal planning and YOUR flexibility to change as necessary. In either case, we must be able to adapt to an uncertain future.
Scenario planning involves planning for the future by understanding that different marketplace outcomes may occur in response to any strategy and that each possible marketplace outcome must be planned for to avoid the worst case scenario.
Here’s a simple example: Suppose that a leading supermarket chain decides to carry a new non-carbonated cola beverage. These are just a few scenarios that are possible:
  • The sales of the new beverage meet expectations and do not cannibalize the sales of other supermarket products. Overall company revenues and profit rise.
  • The sales of the new beverage meet expectations, but slightly cannibalize the sales of other supermarket products. Overall company revenues and profits rise slightly.
  • The sales of the new beverage meet expectations, but greatly cannibalize the sales of other supermarket products. Overall company revenues stay the same, and profits fall somewhat due to the investment in the new item.
The premise of scenario planning is to anticipate the possibility of each of these outcomes occurring and have in place a pre-planned framework (contingency plan) to deal with each scenario.
Recently, Shardul Phadnis, Chris Caplice, and Yossi Sheffi wrote an article for the MIT Soan Management Review titled “How Scenario Planning Influences Strategic Decisions.” The authors reached three major conclusions:
  1. “The use of multiple scenarios is not necessarily an antidote for overconfidence. One should not assume that simply using multiple scenarios to evaluate a long-range decision will help alleviate the negative effects of decision makers’ overconfidence in their own judgment.”
  2. “Scenarios influence judgment — and their content matters. More than half the judgments in our studies changed after single-scenario evaluations. Scenario users became more favorable of investing in an element — either by increasing confidence in their original recommendation to invest, decreasing confidence in their original recommendation to not invest, or changing their recommendation to favor the investment — when they found the element useful in a scenario.”
  3. “The use of multiple scenarios can nudge executives towards more flexible strategies. Executives often choose strategies optimized for a particular environment. While such strategies may perform well in the environment envisioned at the time of their implementation, they may not be easily adaptable to new opportunities or in response to unexpected threats.  Under such circumstances, evaluating strategic decisions using multiple scenarios can help executives appreciate the importance of choosing more flexible assets or approaches — even if doing so is not the most optimal choice for present-day conditions.”
Click the image to access the article.

 

 

Posted in Part 1: Overview/Planning, Part 2: Ownership, Strategy Mix, Online, Nontraditional, Part 3: Targeting Customers and Gathering Information, Part 5: Managing a Retail Business, Part 6: Merchandise Management and Pricing, Part 8: Putting It All Together | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Retailers: Beware of Ransomware

Posted on August 30, 2016 by bermanevansretail
The term “ransom” has been around for hundreds of years and is best described as a way to redeem someone from captivity, bondage, detention, etc., by paying a demanded price.
Today, we have another destructive variation of the word ransom — that is “ransomware.” What is it and what can we do about it?
TechRepublic recently produced Ransomware: The Smart Person’s Guide, written by James Sanders. This is an executive summary quoted from the guide:
  • What is it? Ransomware is malware. The hackers demand payment, often via Bitcoin or prepaid credit card, from victims in order to regain access to an infected device and the data stored on it.
  • Why does it matter? Because of the ease of deploying ransomware, criminal organizations are increasingly relying on such attacks to generate profits.
  • Who does this affect? While home users have traditionally been the targets, healthcare and the public sector have been targeted with increasing frequency. Enterprises are more likely to have deep pockets from which to extract a ransom.
  • When is this happening? Ransomware has been an active and ongoing threat since September 2013.
  • How do I protect myself from a ransomware attack? A variety of tools developed in collaboration with law enforcement and security firms are available to decrypt your computer.
Sanders adds: “For those who have been infected, the No More Ransom project — a collaboration between Europol, the Dutch National Police, Kaspersky Lab, and Intel Security — provides decryption tools for many widespread ransomware types.

 
Here are a couple of informative infographics by LogRhythm:



 

Posted in Online Retailing, Part 1: Overview/Planning, Part 2: Ownership, Strategy Mix, Online, Nontraditional, Part 5: Managing a Retail Business, Part 7: Communicating with the Customer, Privacy and Identity Theft Issues | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments