A big benefit of {rr}’s downtown SF location is the variety of companies and personalities that you can connect with throughout the day. One of the rituals I enjoy daily is the elevator ride in our building because you never know who you’ll bump into.
A recent ride to our new offices at our expanding headquarters re-acquainted me with Patrick Hoge with the SF Business Times. {rr} has enjoyed a great relationship with the SF Business Times — from being named a Best Place to Work in their 2009 and 2010 surveys to now sharing the same floor at 275 Battery. Patrick and I got talking and realized I had been neglectful in sharing an update in our continued growth and success in the e-commerce personalization space. Patrick, ever the on-the-beat reporter sniffed a story and voila — here’s an update on {rr} and our expanding footprint in both our corporate offices…and in the personalization space.
It’s a topic that is on the forefront of every one of our agendas: mastering the art of cross-channel optimization. Whether you are a big box retailer or a specialty chain, we are all confronted with the same core issues of delivering seamless customer experiences across our channels of business. I’ll be tackling this topic during a session at the upcoming Annual Summit (Optimizing the Cross-Channel Experience for the Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace Consumer) along with industry notables, Lou Ramery, SVP Customer Relationship Marketing with Sears & Kmart and Lou Weiss, CMO of The Vitamin Shoppe.
RichReaders,
Today, we’re starting a less-businessy side of the {rr} blog. Some of my friends and mentors are able to blend the blogs of business and personal together (e.g., Glenn Kelman over at Redfin!)–it seems silly that {rr} as the leading personalization company isn’t already making its blog a little more personal.
Today’s post is just a little thank you. A thank you to the guys who founded Skype, the people at Google who copied it to create Google voice/video, and the folks at GoGo In-Flight internet who have upgraded their network so that it’s now powerful enough to enable meaningful vid-chats–from an airplane.
As an entrepreneur, I interact with many different branches of business at our various partners, customers and vendors: from sales and marketing, to engineering, to IT and corporate development. While I’ve spent the least amount of time interacting with Corp Dev, I’ve nonetheless maintained a highly ambivalent view of them—until very recently.
The naming of Amazon.com as the top-performing brand in the US by market research firm Millward Brown is truly a watershed moment for e-commerce players who have neither the long standing history nor seeming reach of many traditional multi-channel retailers. This ranking applauds those who have toiled night and day to build a rich, rewarding and relevant experience for online shoppers and demonstrates how much power this relatively new channel has in not just supporting but creating brands. What’s particularly interesting is that among the top ten performing brands in this study, six are products (e.g. Tide, Tylenol, Huggies), three are services (FedEx, WebMD, UPS) and only one is a retailer: Amazon. This is crazy—how is it that an e-commerce pure play trumps national retail chains that boast web sites, sales people and physical footprints?
Welcome to a new era of retail where the shopper is in charge. With competitors literally a click away, total transparency in the purchase experience and the ability to instantly price check from a mobile, today’s consumer is fully in command of the shopping experience. With this in mind, RichRelevance has launched a new campaign: Respect the Shopper.