James Tenser

NRF 2019: Three Vibrant Themes from Tenser’s Take on BrainTrust LIVE!

November 2, 2021January 14, 2019 by James Tenser

LIVE FROM NRF 2019: My BrainTrust LIVE! report from the Big Show in New York, Jan. 14 2019.

Tenser’s Tirades reports from the crossroads of the Big Show floor as hundreds of attendees flow past. This year’s event boasted 37,000 registered attendees, 900 members of the media and more than 120 keynote, breakout, and vendor-sponsored educational sessions.

BrainTrust LIVE! January 14, 2019 – With James Tenser
Topic: Our BrainTrust panelist, James Tenser, reports in from the floor of NRF’s Big Show and boils things down into three areas of innovation he’s seeing as most prevalent at the show. [13 minutes][Posted by RetailWire on Monday, January 14, 2019]

The Five Yeses of Retail Tech Marketing

June 19, 2023February 12, 2018 by James Tenser

IF YOU HAVE a great retail technology solution to offer, five yeses control your future.

You already know – more or less – who the decision-makers are at each target account: the CIO, the head of store operations, the head of merchandising, the CFO, and the CEO.

Each of these individuals has the power to say “no.” If your solution doesn’t seem to align with one of their objectives, the game may be over. You need all their heads nodding to close the sale. Is your story designed to be persuasive to all five yeses?

What Amazon and Whole Foods wish they knew about in-store fulfillment

June 24, 2020June 24, 2017 by James Tenser

MINDS WERE BLOWN last week when Amazon announced its intention to acquire Whole Foods Markets 461 locations in a $13.7B cash buyout. A media and analyst frenzy followed that has kept the world of retail business on edge for many days.

As it happens, your intrepid storyteller was already deeply involved in a project focused on the in-store fulfillment of online orders. Click & Collect has been coming on strong for many months. It seems like Amazon’s serial adventures with AmazonFresh Pickup, AmazonGo, Prime Now and Prime Pantry have been a primary catalyst. Obtaining a portfolio of physical stores is its most audacious experiment to date. Now the competition gets interesting.

Millennials: The Next ‘Pig in the Python’

June 24, 2020October 24, 2016 by James Tenser

FOR GRAYING BABY BOOMERS like me, the awesome power of demographics has in many ways defined our lives. There are a lot of us. We clogged our kindergartens, our universities, our workplaces, our media, our politics and our communities with sheer numerical might; and the retail marketing universe seemed to revolve around our needs and our sense of entitlement.

In his 1980 book, Great Expectations, author Landon Y. Jones called this phenomenon “a pig in a python” – a rather visceral visualization of how the boomers’ demographic bulge has traveled through America’s culture, distorting as it goes.

Along the way we also had a lot of kids. So many, in fact that we engendered an echo boom that is numerically larger than our own. In case you haven’t noticed, those 75 million “millennials,” as the demographers like to call them, now largely dominate cultural, political and marketing discourse. Not to mention our consumer economy – the 18-34 cohort wields $2 trillion in purchasing power.