James Tenser

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.

At Shoptalk: Fulfillment’s Faster, Freer Finale

June 24, 2020May 26, 2016 by James Tenser

IN THE FRICTION-FREE WORLD of online retailing, getting the order is easy. Delivering on the promise is hard.

At the Las Vegas Shoptalk conference last week retail thought-leaders shared insights about the fulfillment challenge. Their consensus: it’s not going to get any easier.

“My bet on shipping is faster and freer,” said Jason Goldberger, president, Target.com and Mobile Target, in a panel on The Changing Role of Stores in Ecommerce Fulfillment.

“It used to be that our guests just wanted free shipping,” he added. Now they demand overnight delivery and same-day store pickup.

Michael Tobin, SVP Strategy & Innovation at Macy’s, explained that successful and cost-effective fulfillment now requires a sophisticated algorithm that considers multiple factors, including the ship-to address, units on hand, units to ship, location capacity, combinability of items in an order, and more. “We’re on the 3^rd or fourth version of that algorithm,” he said.