Store and shop owners need to adjust to changes in shopper behaviour; for example: shoppers do more research online on products of relevance before visiting a physical store — they prepare for their visit and come more informed; shoppers visit a physical store or shop to browse and inspect merchandise on display first hand but… Read More
Whole Foods Market in the Hands of Amazon
When Amazon.com acquired the food retail chain Whole Foods Market in the summer of 2017 (for $13.2bn), it stirred bafflement mixed with speculations: What is happening here? To what aim does the giant e-commerce retailer need physical stores of a natural and organic food retail chain? Customers were worried out of concern about what Amazon… Read More
Getting the Balance of Customer-Company Effort Right
One of the more frustrating experiences for a customer occurs when he or she is working hard to try resolve a problem in using a product or service of a company, while seeing that the company is doing only little to help. More and above the time and effort that the customer reluctantly has to… Read More
Recording Open-Ended Answers in Video
A new capability has been added to consumer and customer surveys in the past few years: Capturing the answers of respondents to open-ended questions in video, recorded in particular by a respondent on his or her mobile phone in selfie-mode. For many users of smartphones it should come as a natural and instinctive way to… Read More
Who Owns the Brand?
There is an on-going debate on who owns brands. There are some who argue that the company that created a brand is its owner, fully in command of it. This is the formal straightforward view. However, support grows for the claim that customers are the true owners of a brand. Essentially, a brand is still… Read More