With all of the attention being paid to Occupy Wall Street and the ills of big business, it’s heartening to shine a little light on two new start up’s who are working hard to make the world a better place.
I recently joined the advisory board of these companies—teams of folks with a big vision, unwaveringly commitment to tackling huge problems and these visions are seeing success.
The first is blissmo, founded and led by Sundeep Ahuja (one of my Stanford classmates and a co-founder here at {rr}). blissmo creates consumer products which bring sustainability to a broad audience. They are leveraging social media and new sales methodologies being pioneered by Groupon, Woot! and BirchBox to reduce the complexity of choosing products that are good for you, your family and your world. Already blissmo’s revenue model is working and they are clearly hitting a sweet spot in terms of emerging demand: the right products, the right discovery and the right price. We’re even a customer at {rr}—as soon as we started testing in one of our offices it was such a hit that the other offices immediately asked to participate. Check them out at blissmo.com.
New whitepaper determines how advertisers can best position themselves to “own” the moment that really matters – whether the purchase occurs in the store or online
San Francisco, CA – Nov. 10, 2011 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, today released a new whitepaper for CPG marketers entitled, “Owning the Moment That REALLY Matters in Online Retail.” The report, the third in the company’s Did You Know series, elaborates on Google’s Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) concept and shows how marketers can meet – and influence – their customers at this critical point. This includes new strategies for partnering with retailers on free and paid merchandising opportunities, as well as best practices for using the ZMOT to capture real-time consumer insights.
“Forrester predicts that more than $1 trillion in retail sales will be influenced by the web this year,” said RichRelevance CMO, Diane Kegley. “Brands need to understand how to best optimize their campaigns to reach these consumers where the purchase occurs. Without this knowledge, brands risk continuing to misallocate marketing dollars and ignore these floods of free consumer insights.”
Key Take-Aways: Owning the Moment That REALLY Matters in Online Retail
The new whitepaper delivers a dozen concrete best practices to help CPG marketers effectively capture the two-thirds of shoppers who begin their purchase path online – and covers real-world examples of how 3M and other successful CPG brands are building brand awareness at the point of highest purchase intent. Topics include:
- Free opportunities in partnering with retailers: The report offers CPG marketers concrete ways to support consumers in the ZMOT phase by leveraging free merchandising tactics offered by retailers. This includes news strategies to effectively merchandise their entire product lines online, as well as effectively use online video and strategically partner with retailers around SEO.
- Paid merchandising opportunities: CPG marketers must make the most of new opportunities to own brand awareness across the entire purchase funnel (not just at the top of the funnel on sites such as Facebook and Yahoo). Insights from the whitepaper include tactics for using ad servers, owning brand and product pages, and winning at the category level.
- Using the ZMOT to capture real-time consumer insights: The whitepaper also highlights the fact that the most advanced brands are leveraging the ability to pull real-time qualitative customer research through their paid merchandising campaigns via online retail sites. Real-time consumer data brings insights to brand managers immediately, allowing realistic and robust rationales for how best to allocate scarce merchandising and advertising resources.
“We continue to field many questions from marketers and advertisers about this profound shift in consumer behavior and realized we needed to provide business intelligence to our colleagues as soon as possible,” continued Kegley. “We trust our partners in CPG marketing and advertising to leverage these concepts to take immediate advantage of the opportunity to generate brand awareness in the new ‘digital aisle.’”
Additional Resources
- The whitepaper is available to download from the RichRelevance homepage.
- Watch the related webinar with Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Sucharita Mulpuru here.
- Connect with RichRelevance on Facebook and Twitter for updates and news.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Walmart, Sears, Target and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $3 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called shopping media which allows manufacturers to engage shoppers where it matters most – in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.
David Selinger joins leading names in tech to discuss innovation and the hottest trends in data today
San Francisco, CA – Nov. 9, 2011 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, today announced that CEO David Selinger has been selected by the editors at Dow Jones and VentureWire to speak at the VentureWire FASTech Conference. Selinger will join executives from CA Technologies and Wipro to discuss the latest innovations in big data as well as share their thoughts on what the future holds. The panel entitled “The Big Challenge: Where Does The Effort To Manage & Disseminate Data Go From Here?” takes place on November 9 at 9:20 a.m. PST at the Sofitel in Redwood City, California.
“Data has emerged as the single most valuable asset for retailers and manufacturers today, but many brands still struggle to transform petabytes of information into real consumer strategies and experiences,” said Selinger. “I’ve been focused on solving this problem since heading up personalization R&D at Amazon.com, and I’m excited to join the FASTech community in a dialogue on what the future has in store.”
Moderated by VentureWire reporter Deborah Gage, the panel will focus on efforts to control data, the role that the cloud is playing or can play, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. In addition to Selinger, the panel features tech veterans Andi Mann of CA Technologies and Jack Story of Wipro Technologies.
About VentureWire FASTech
Hosted by top editors at Dow Jones and VentureWire, FASTech brings together leading start-ups, angel investors, venture capitalists, investment banks and corporations to provide attendees with expert insights on the future of this rapidly evolving sector. The conference features some of the biggest names in the tech and venture capital community, including The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, Deep Nishar of LinkedIn, Peter Thiel of The Thiel Foundation, Javier Soltare of VMWare and many more.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Walmart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetize site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than $2.5 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalized advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.
UK digital media site New Media Knowledge talks to RichRelevance Chief Evangelist Jake Bailey on how marketers can find success on their e-commerce sites below the mythical fold.
In 1994, when the Internet was in its infancy, renowned Internet strategist Dr Jakob Nielson argued that Web users paid much less attention to information not visible in the first screen view of a website. The term “below the fold” was born to highlight this area that was only visible after users scrolled down. Three years later Nielson added that scrolling was “no longer a usability disaster”, but the debate has raged amongst marketers ever since.
RichRelevance CEO, David Selinger, talks about big data on the Wall Street Journal FASTech blog.
There’s a big gap in Big Data, but it’s not in the numbers—it’s between the engineers and the executives at companies around the world.
“The gap is on the management side,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance, a company that analyzes retail data to help companies better target customers with the products they want. “The thinking is, if IT is empowered, then management is not empowered.”
Selinger spoke at the VentureWire FASTech conference along with fellow Big Data executives Andi Mann, VP of strategic solutions for CA Technologies, and Jack Story, CTO of Wipro Technologies.