Real Men Don’t shop? Think Again: Retail’s New Frontier

If you haven't called on a men's wear prospect/client lately get on it! The trend for Gen-X and Gen-Y...aka Millennials is growing. Any of your clients who sell men's apparel can raise their revenue projection by marketing to them. Read proof below. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

CNBC

By: Katie Little | News Associate
Published: Saturday, 21 Sep 2013 | 3:00 PM ET

They don't shop, coupon or ask for directions. Really????

Turns out the stereotypes about men are pretty off base, according to a new survey from WSL Strategic Retail, which analyzes retail trends and shopper behavior.

The firm found that 63 percent of men say they actively look for sales in stores and a little more than half admit to regularly using coupons. Millennial and Gen X men are driving this trend, the survey of 740 male and 780 female shoppers found.

Although both sets are exhibiting signs of being shaky consumers, a higher percentage of men than women say their financial situation improved over the past year and more men also expect it to improve more over the next year.

Shifting behavior "I think we've reached a point in society where millennial and Gen X men grew up a little differently," said Candace Corlett, WSL's president. "They grew up hanging out in a mall in a world where there were so many stores. They didn't marry as young, and now they're married to working women. Now all of these forces are coming together to create a new world of male shoppers."

Popular deals site RetailMeNot.com has also seen strong participation from the guys. In its most recent survey, the company found that about 40 percent of its users are men, said its head of communications Brian Hoyt.

"You saw shopping behavior shift during the recession, and men wanted to save just as much as anyone," Hoyt said. "There was no sort of social stigma to it online."The shift hasn't been lost on retailers. Several, includingLululemon Athletica,Coach and Michael Kors, have begun acting on the opportunity for growth in menswear after investing more heavily in womenswear for years.

"I think we're in an era where every shopper counts, and retailers are working hard to squeeze growth out of retailers and you can't count on Mom with the big basket anymore," Corlett said. "You have to look at every shopper in the store."

Total men's U.S. apparel sales are about $58 billion compared to about $112 billion for women's, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. Although men's had been growing more briskly than women's during the year ended in July 2012, they both grew 2.4 percent for the 12 month period ending in July 2013.

Going after the guys Michael Kors is trying to boost menswear. Its current business is relatively small, and driven by sportswear. During the first-quarter earnings conference call on Aug. 6, Kors CEO and Chairman John Idol said expect the category to accelerate its growth over the next few years.

Watches and leather goods are the other cornerstones of the men's business, Idol added. This trio of businesses could eventually become a more than $1 billion business as it expands its shop-in-shops in men's sportswear and men's leather goods, he added.

"So we are planting the seeds, we're making investments, and it's going to take us time, but we are very serious about the men's business and the opportunity it holds for our company," he said.

Rival Coach is also betting on the menswear business by opening more dual gender locations globally and expanding its men's selections in existing North American retail stores.

So far, the move appears to be paying off. In fiscal year 2013, Coach's men's business grew nearly 50 percent to about $600 million.

"Looking ahead, we remain excited about the prospects to our global men's business where we believe we can reach $1 billion in sales in three years from the $600 million achieved last year," said Coach CEO Lew Frankfort on its fourth-quarter earnings call July 30.

To reach this male audience, retailers often need to adjust their strategy.

Cortlett emphasized the need for retailers to make shopping more efficient so guys don't feel like the experience is tedious.

Having readily available staff helps. More men than women ask for assistance from a sales associate, according to WSL's findings—shattering the myth that men don't ask for directions (or at least they do in the retail arena).

And it might seem like a tough sell to convince men to shell out $100 for yoga apparel, but the bet is paying off. Speaking to analysts on Sept. 12, outgoing Lululemon CEO Christine Day emphasized the need to recognize "the unique characteristics of our male guests."

Lululemon saw "tremendous growth" in the last quarter, after more color was injected into its menswear line and more "technical" items such as clothing with wicking fabric were added back into its product assortment. In Lululemon's most recently ended quarter, roughly 13 percent of its total revenue came from men's sales. Next up, the company is scouting for locations for standalone men's stores, which it plans to open by 2016.

Get to men's apparel stores, sporting goods retailers and local department stores where men's departments carry large inventories of men's clothing.from casual to suits and ties....even underwear and pajamas. In department stores there may even be some co-op dollars available.Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

Best New Books in Marketing 2012

Because we are all in the field of media marketing and advertising...I thought it would be helpful if our blog listed strategy+business's best books in the field of marketing. Education for those in professional media sales and marketing management is always an imperative. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

Jim Stengel
Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies
(Crown Business, 2011)

Laurence Vincent
Brand Real: How Smart Companies Live Their Brand Promise and Inspire Fierce Customer Loyalty
(Amacom, 2012)

Doc Searls
The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge
(Harvard Business Review Press, 2012)

Mobile Now

strategy+business

With the latest mobile technology, the ability to deliver seamless, omnichannel consumer experiences is finally within reach.

by Matthew Egol, Fabian Seelbach, and Naseem Sayani

June, 2013

Imagine this: On a commuter train to Manhattan, a young woman named Suzy searches for vacations on her smartphone and saves several locations in a travel app. Her husband Jason gets a notification on his phone that Suzy has created a new destinations list. He selects London, browses upcoming events there, and highlights a few. That afternoon, Suzy opens her tablet, peruses links to London hotels, which have been recommended by the travel app based on her browsing history and personal profile, and “favorites” the ones she likes.

When Suzy and Jason sit down to watch TV that evening, a personalized travel ad featuring a video about London appears. Following the video, Suzy launches the TV’s Web browser so the couple can review additional information on the hotels and events they each identified earlier, along with packages and pricing. Jason modifies the choices on his tablet, which automatically update on the TV. They pick the options that they like best and book the trip using the TV’s remote.

On the flight to London, Suzy skims a list of restaurants compiled on the basis of current offers and five-star ratings by travelers with similar profiles, and makes a dinner reservation for the next night.

Throughout their vacation, Suzy and Jason receive daily itineraries, confirmations, curated guides and offers, and tailored maps on their mobile devices. They use their devices to access reviews and recommendations, ask questions and get real-time answers, and post pictures and videos to share with their friends and family. They pay for their purchases with their smartphones’ mobile wallets, and their purchases are automatically recorded in loyalty programs.

You may recognize elements of this functionality. Perhaps you have benefited from some yourself. Indeed, most of the technology needed to deliver Suzy and Jason’s vacation experience already exists—but it is being deployed in piecemeal ways. Companies that seize the lead in weaving together available mobile functionality to create truly personalized consumer experiences will gain a distinct advantage in the near term—and set themselves up as the strongest competitors in the mobile-driven future.

Mobile Is the Glue

Increasingly, mobile is serving as the adhesive that holds a consumer experience together. (Also see "Smartphone to Aisle Nine," by Heidi Froseth, Tina Manikas, and Ken Madden, below.) It can link together all other marketing touch points, including TV, outdoor, print, online, word-of-mouth, and in-store channels. And because consumers carry their devices everywhere they go, it bridges the digital and physical realms. Mobile is changing the game for the entire consumer marketing ecosystem—across brand manufacturers, retailers, credit card companies, mobile carriers, media companies, and marketing services providers. Companies that grasp the transformative capabilities of mobile and follow the four principles below will find that true omnichannel marketing is within their reach.

First, realize that mobile is personal. Mobile devices are a direct connection to the information consumers access, the brands with which they engage, and the social tools with which they connect to others. Vast amounts of data about the personal preferences and activities of consumers, including their physical locations, are generated by their interactions across digital media, which are increasingly conducted via mobile devices. With these rich new streams of data, marketers can personalize any shopping occasion and deliver far more relevant solutions to consumers.

Mobile enables marketers to link and sync consumer data and personas across touch points. Mobile can make TV and print personal—consumers can read or see an ad, scan a code, and receive individually tailored offers. In the store, shoppers can receive personalized information while walking down an aisle or at the register, and react to that information instantly. The multidirectional nature of such interactions provides marketers with additional data they can use to further tailor content to consumers, and to glean insights they can employ to improve the consumer experience.

Ad, TV Industry Leaders To Advise BlackArrow On Advancing 'Advanced' TV Ads

MediaDailyNews

by Joe Mandese, 6 hours ago

On the eve of Advertising Week, “advanced” TV advertising technology developer BlackArrow is unveiling a new advisory board comprised of advertising and TV industry executives to help accelerate still nascent TV advertising opportunities, including the vast unsold inventories of ad-supported video-on-demand programming on cable and satellite TV systems.

Charter members of the board include 4As President-CEO Nancy Hill and GroupM Director of Emerging Communications Mike Bologna, as well as TV industry representatives David Poltrack (chief research officer of CBS), Marcien Jenckes (senior vice president and general manager of video and entertainment services at Comcast), Marc Krok (senior vice president of advertising sales at AMC Networks) and  Bob DeSena (CEO and founder of the Engagement Marketing Group).

BlackArrow said the board will help “set a direction and promote the role of advanced advertising,” including best practices for mixing conventional linear TV advertising buys with new addressable advertising, VOD, and multiplatform TV viewing. This is not the first time BlackArrow has organized a cross-section of the advertising and TV industry to help drive the advanced TV advertising marketplace forward. It was a major driver behind AAMP, the Advanced Advertising Media Project, which has held a number of industry summits on the subject and has conducted field trials demonstrating how addressable advertising improves ad effectiveness, as well as the experience of TV viewers.

Television One Zero

TV Board

By Stacey Lynn Schulman, TV Board for Monday, Sept. 16, 2013

Recently, eMarketer released a report touting digital’s coming of age.  Haven’t you heard?  In 2014, digital media usage is predictedto eclipse television usage?   Astounding, considering that there is a three-year trend of increasing TV usage informing this unprecedented and highly anticipated decline. 

Full disclosure: In my current role as chief research officer at TVB, I take the health and welfare of television seriously – but not at the expense of good research.  In fact, it was only two years ago that the Council for Research Excellence and Ball State University released its seminal Video Mapping Study that proved conclusively that respondents overstate their consumption of digital media like the Internet and understate their viewing of television.

Not convinced?  Ask yourself, could you accurately report down to the minute how much time you spent with TV, mobile and the Internet yesterday?  What if you were on the Internet via your fancy new IPTV-enabled TV set?  Or you watched the local news on your mobile app?  Or shared a clip from “America’s Got Talent” with your friends on Facebook?  Is it time spent with TV or is it time spent with digital?

The fact is, it’s now impossible to separate “television” from “digital.” Since 2009, virtually all commercial television is digital.  Even over-the-air-only homes have to have a digital TV set, or at least a converter box.  As an industry, “television” has had an easier time changing its infrastructure than changing perceptions.  It’s hard not to associate “digital” with a dot-com.  Not including television within any discussion of digital media is grossly misrepresenting the role that digital plays in our lives today.

Even Mediapost’s Editor in Chief, Joe Mandese, challenged eMarketer’s predictions, pointing out in a recent article that “thinking of ‘digital’ as being synonymous with ‘online’” is problematic. TV’s DNA is the same as the Internet’s DNA.  They’re all Ones and Zeroes.
Nearly every station today has a website, apps, video and a social presence. Digital sub-channels make use of the digital spectrum to offer multiple layers of station content, and Mobile Digital TV allows TV to be part of people’s lives on the go.

Most importantly, no matter the platform, television content is the driving force behind time spent.  Television remains the most-used medium of American consumers, and this, in turn, stimulates user-driven content within social media.  What is derided as “traditional media” is actually the wellspring of our cultural touchstones, driving usage, interaction and conversation across all means of access: analog and digital.  We talk about what we watch and we trade on that knowledge in social circles, online and off.

So let’s not mistake an eco-system partner for a competitor.  It’s time that we take better care to define our terms along the lines of how consumers engage with our media, and not how we’d prefer the advertising pie to be divided.   Media ecology is a messy, interdependent space that, like nature, doesn’t fit into neatly discrete boxes to compare and contrast.  The complexity demands more hybrid approaches to marrying real behavioral analytics and proper market research methods to best understand how media consumers are engaging.

And yet, sometimes it’s as simple as considering your own experience as a reality check.  In addition to “a sucker,” there apparently is also a research statistic born every minute.  Sometimes the difference between being informed and being educated is in trusting that little voice of experience in the back of your head.  In this case, in the constructed reality of “digital” vs. “television,” you need only consider what really constitutes your digital media consumption these days.  Without television, you’re probably missing most of the picture.

Marketers Struggle With Tracking Customers Cross-Platform

OnlineMediaDaily

by Gavin O'Malley, Sep 6, 2013, 5:07 PM

How well do you recognize your customers across multiple touchpoints? If the answer is “not well enough,” new research shows you are not alone.

In particular, “most global firms fail miserably,” according to Forrester analyst James McCormick. “They fail to recognize their customers as they interact across many of their channels, and confess that a large proportion of interactions are anonymous.”

The benefits of tracking customers across various channels are many, and include executing successful multichannel campaigns and holding conversations with customers.

The difficulty for many marketers, however, is associating interactions to individuals or segments.

“Even with [a] rich trove of customer data, firms struggle to translate knowledge of customers into an actionable outcome,” McCormick explains.

What is the solution? “There are links that identify a person at point of sale, on eCommerce Web sites, on social media, and on every channel that we use to interact with customers.”

Forrester calls these links touchpoint interaction keys (TPIKs), which vary from being constrained to single-channel and single session to multiple channels and sessions.

For example, first- and third-party cookies can link Web users to multiple interactions across owned and third-party sites. Session cookies, however, tend to be limited to single interactions before disappearing for good, as McCormick notes. He stresses that TPIKs that associate interactions to individuals have more uses than those that associate to a broad segment.

While great awareness builders, “reach channels” like search, advertising, and out-of-home promotions have weak association to individuals, and limited ability to maintain dialogues across channels and sessions.

By contrast, “relationship channels” like email, social communities, and direct mail make possible ongoing conversation with customers.

“The associated TPIKs -- such as social identity, account details, registration details -- are strongly linked to individuals and can persist over many sessions and multiple channels,” according to McCormick.

Forrester has long advocated that marketers move away from a funnel-based approach to thinking about their customers. Rather, the research firm believes marketers should consider the customer “life cycle” that involves how they discover, explore, buy, and engage.

TV Ad Spend Up, National Radio Also Rises

MediaDailyNews

by Wayne Friedman, 7 hours ago

Thanks to higher TV spending, total U.S. advertising expenditures perked up some in the second quarter from the same period a year ago.

The second quarter was up 3.5% to finish the period at $35.8 billion, with total spending over the last six months 2% higher -- reaching $68.9 billion. The second quarter of a year ago had a 0.9% rise.

“Ad spend has now increased for six consecutive quarters and in reaching 3.5% growth for Q2, had its best performance in a non-Olympic period since the end of 2010,” stated Jon Swallen, chief research officer at Kantar Media North America.

Television outgrew the market overall, with 6.4% higher spending.

Cable TV spending remained the major portion of TV’s overall rise -- up 14.9%. Broadcast network TV spending was up 4.9%. Spanish-language TV spending improved 6.1% as a result of higher budgets from direct-response marketers, auto manufacturers and restaurants.

Spot TV expenditures sank 3.5% in the period -- mostly due to lower political ad spending, which regularly occurs in odd-numbered years. But taking out political spending, core spot TV spending was the same versus a year ago.

Outdoor ad spending grew 7.4%, while Internet display advertising gained 4.1%.

Newspaper media continued to decline. Local newspaper ad spending dropped 4.3% as a result of a decline in auto dealers, financial services and retailers spending. Consumer magazines were up 1.9% -- but with a lower number of ad pages sold. Sunday magazines witnessed spending up 4.1% but ad pages lower by 6.3%.

National radio grew 5.8% from telecommunications, restaurants and retail business. Local radio sank 1.6% which as Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D. suspects is a result of stations selling, promotions, packages, initiatives in place of selling long-term branding campaigns which is a better position for clients to take in gaining awareness, recognition and market acceptance against competition.

Always Be Measuring: The Role Of The 21st Century Marketer

Marketing Daily Commentary

by Mike Volpe, Yesterday, 8:11 AM

Last week, CMO Survey came out with new data that shows only one-third of top marketers can demonstrate a quantitative impact for their marketing spend. Despite all the technology, tools, and tactics available to marketers to quantify organizational impact and return on investment, we are all still missing significant opportunities to measure our business impact. Here are three tips to help marketers more effectively quantify how inbound marketing drives results.

1.  Define your buyer persona

If you ask any marketer about his or her target audience, far too many people still respond with a vague answer. In the Internet age, this is simply not enough: marketers need a deep understanding of who they are marketing to on a daily basis, and it must go well beyond vague generalities. Every company needs to understand the buying behaviors of their target customer, what drives his or her purchase behavior, and what moves the needle on influencing this type of buyer. Creating persona discipline informs everything from the type of content you create to the social networks you target to the event opportunities you consider.

If you don't know enough about your buyer persona, spend one day interviewing your customers to understand how they consume content, the Web sites they visit, and what matters to them most. Listen more than you speak, and record what they are saying in their own words, then work with your team to develop a comprehensive picture of your buyer persona. Persona-based marketing allows you to focus your efforts, making it easier to measure and move the needle with your audience.

2.  Measure the impact of your content on your buyer personaConsumers today often complete 60% of their research on a product or service before ever talking to a sales rep, so it’s more important than ever that you create content that is relevant to potential buyers. When people think about content creation, they often think about written content, but the truth is that you should experiment with both the nature of your content and the medium or channel, from Vine videos on Twitter to blog entries to memes and photos on Facebook. Creating content is a wonderful (and imperative) portion of inbound marketing, but it's not sufficient unto itself to deliver results: you need a system to test, measure, and quantify your efforts across channels.

Successful marketers don’t just think about impressions or page views: they create content for multiple channels (blog, social, email, etc) and quantify the impact on their efforts in terms of conversions: what percentage of the people who opened your email eventually became customers? What types of tweets drove the most revenue last quarter? These are the types of questions that 21st-century marketers need to answer.

3. Create a service level agreement with salesWe practice what we call “smarketing” --  the alignment of sales and marketing using measurable, scalable goals that hold both of our teams accountable. In addition to being persona-based and metrics-driven, the SLA is based on a dollar value associated with each lead our marketing team delivers. In turn, sales is responsible for delivering on revenue relative to the number of inbound leads we provide, and our executive team and board hold each of us accountable to deliver upon these goals.

Fundamentally, marketers can create and deliver upon as many qualitative metrics as we would like, but until we are willing to quantify lead goals that align with those standards, we will also struggle with value delivery. To that end, push your team to examine and formulate a service level agreement with sales. Doing so not only facilitates measurable impact for your team, but also enables more relevant conversations with your executives because the metrics drive core business value versus impressions, likes, or visits.

Sixty-six percent of marketers feel increasing pressure to exhibit more measurable impact on a daily basis, according to the CMO Survey -- and yet far too few of us change our ways to reflect the way that modern consumers shop and buy. The 21st-century marketer needs to be tech-savvy, forward-thinking, a digital native, and a prolific content creator, but all of these attributes are for naught if we can't measure organizational impact. If the motto of the 1980s salesperson was “always be closing,” the modern equivalent for marketers is “always be measuring”: delivering real business value is challenging, but it's the only way to demonstrate true return on investment and ultimately facilitate more effective interactions with your prospects, customers, and leads, as well as your executive team.

ANA: Agencies Are Being Disintermediated By In-House Shops

Looks like a return of the days when stations' reps, smartly went after more controllable in-house agency accounts. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

MAD Media Post's Agency Daily

by Steve McClellan, Yesterday, 11:55 AM

For years, agencies have felt pressure from clients to cut fees and add value. Today that pressure increased sharply with the issuance of a new report from The Association of National Advertisers. The ANA used the D-word—disintermediation—to describe a fast growing trend developing within the advertiser-agency relationship.

But the ANA said that marketers aren’t going to other third parties so much as relying on their own internal resources to accomplish what they need to do in the ad marketing space.
The new survey, conducted in the spring, found that 58% of marketers now utilize in-house agencies, a 16 percentage point increase from 2008.

Just over half (52%) are assigning new marketing functions—digital, social and mobile—to their in-house agency. And 56% have moved established business from an external agency to an in-house one.
According to the survey, the shift is driven by internal expertise, greater cost efficiencies and quicker turnaround time. And it reflects an economic environment that “challenges corporations to do more with less,” the report concludes.

“We are seeing a seismic, eminently important industry shift between marketers and agencies,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice. “The growth trajectory of advertising agencies is in question as marketers move existing and emerging functions in-house. The emergence of the in-house agency is a potential warning sign for agencies. We urge our agency peers to adapt to this new reality and offer greater value to avoid gradual disintermediation with clients.”

The ANA survey also cited “institutional knowledge” and in-house brand expertise as reasons for the shift. Also, the report found, the quality of in-house agencies appears to be getting substantially better. Five years ago 61% of marketers said a lack of deep strategic thinking was a weakness of their in-house shops. In this year’s survey only 30% cited that disadvantage.

In a blog post on the ANA website ANA Group Executive Vice President Bill Duggan elaborated that the most commonly handled service by in-house agencies surveyed is creative for collateral/promotional materials.  Email, tradeshow/event materials, and direct mail are also widely serviced by in-house agencies.

Half of all in-house agencies handle some level of media planning and/or buying.
“Newer media, specifically social media, online display advertising, and search engine marketing, rank high on the list of media services handled in-house,” Duggan wrote. “In fact, when asked an open-ended question about the biggest changes in their in-house agencies in the past year, a significant number of responses centered around newer media.”