Data isn’t a savior for brand irrelevance. Data won’t fix changing shopper behavior. And synthetic data will upend existing datasets as tens of millions of shoppers and transactions can be modeled by AI. The challenge is that marketers have lost the brand narrative chasing data. The 200+ brands that emailed me yesterday are chasing a conversion, not building a brand. They have all the data they need and yet none of the relevance. This drives up the cost of attention making most media investments unprofitable. Keep sending, maybe one day the data will convert. Or, maybe shoppers just don’t care.
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It's been a tough few days for Canadian retail. Store closures, brands 'trying out Canada' and failing, scaling without success... and next up is Ted Baker, Brooks Brothers and Lucky Brand 🇨🇦 I was interviewed by CBC news on what I think went wrong. --> Canada is not an extension of the US, just like France is not an extension of Germany because they share a border. Different customer needs. --> ABG just closed the deal to buy Champion so they have money. Not paying suppliers can't be the whole story. Or the excuse. --> Scaling a brand means investing in building brand loyalty + a merchandising & marketing strategy specific to that market 🗞 🗞 🗞 Liza Amlani, principal and co-founder of the Retail Strategy Group in Toronto, said the pending closures were not surprising to analysts. She said any problems between AGB and its suppliers is not the full story, given the large portfolio of brands AGB looks after. The real issues more likely involve the product mix at the store and a lack of understanding of the Canadian market, she said. "Every province you go in is very different," she said. "Customers are different, they're spending differently, they are dressing differently. So when I see brands coming into Canada without having that investment on the ground, that's where we start to see this sort of unravel." Amlani said Ted Baker did a good job of sorting its product mix, adding dresses, casual wear and athleisure wear, but "brands don't realize that what folks want in B.C. is very different to what customers want in Ontario." "Just like what happened with Nordstrom, that these bigger groups, these retailers, these brands coming into Canada, they think we're just an extension of the U.S., which is absolutely not true." "They're buying these brands because they can get them for cheap, not necessarily because they're using them to make a profit," she said. "I don't think that they're seeing this as a long-term investment. They're taking the intellectual property, the customer data. Data is worth so much more sometimes than the actual product that's selling on discount at these stores." https://lnkd.in/eAW64Dxd #retail #retailnews #tedbaker #stores #ABG Authentic Brands Group OSL Retail Services Paula Duhatschek
Charles Kochel
2mo
Mazhar Jaffri, MBA, B.Eng, let's win the market share whilst money is in motion and parts are moving in chaos. :-)
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2moPowerful comments John Andrews. Short term conversion like email is almost irrelevant to the role of brand marketing isn't it?