Amazon is seeking to transform the competitive landscape in logistics
As early as 2014, we announced that Amazon would become a competitor to traditional delivery companies such as DHL and FedEx. The last five years have proven us right. After launching its network of automatic lockers, Amazon is putting additional pressure on its suppliers by encouraging its employees to become competitors of DHL, FedEx and other UPS through its “Delivery Service Partner” program. Amazon offers a bonus of...
Using sensory marketing to improve your brand image
The company Arthur Dupuy, based in Montpellier, France, specialises in the creation of tailor-made olfactory signatures. We have interviewed its creator, Arthur Dupuy, to understand his actions and to examine customer expectations in this unique field of sensory marketing. The Arthur Dupuy Company. The only French company in the sector to be affiliated with a university, notably the University of Montpellier. The company is...
Nudie Jeans builds a community around upcycling and quality
On my recent tour of the Berlin retail scene (see for instance my other posts on New Era and Soho House) I discovered Nudie Jeans, a Swedish brand whose store is located on Münzstrasse, next to the Levis store. Today’s article is short and will quickly walk you through the positioning of this brand and my analysis of the customer experience. Eventually I’ll also touch customer satisfaction and loyalty in this context....
2/3 of value lost in 18 months: future of Snapchat doesn’t look good
What is Snapchat’ future? Will Snapchat still be alive in 5 years from now? In the light of the latest financial results investors can be doubtful. We predicted this downturn 3 years ago when most people were seeing Snapchat as the next Facebook, the best social media to capture the attention of the younger generations. Snap Inc. has lost 2/3 of its value in 18 months Snap Inc., the company that owns Snapchat, was introduced on...
What’s the marketing secret behind Frank Woolworth’s fortune?
The Woolworth building is one of New-York’s most iconic buildings. Not only was it the tallest building of the world from 1913 until 1930, but it also conveys the history of a brand that has revolutionized retail before going bankrupt. How did retail look like at the time of Frank Woolworth ? Frank Woolworth was a legendary businessman but also a legendary inept salesman. His inability as a salesman is told to have led him draft...
Do you know your customers ? On the importance of data sovereignty
On the occasion of my keynote at RTBF, I introduced the term of “data sovereignty” to justify the use of a single-sign-on system. In today’s blog post I’d like to come back on my concept of “data sovereignty” and what it means for your business. 75% of internet trafic goes through facebook and google In his famous article “The web began dying in 2014, here’s how” André Staltz shows...
Ghost kitchens : the next disruption in the restaurant industry?
I recently reflected on Deliveroo’s and Uber’s ghost kitchens which have appeared in various cities (read here and there) of the US and in London (read this article in the Guardian). Those ghost kitchen make perfect economic sense : margins are thin in the restaurant industry, driven by high employees-related costs, rent, expensive equipment and variability in demand. Setting up a restaurant is a bet with a 5 to 20-year...
Market research : authentication on media website, a growing trend
As announced in an earlier article of this blog, I organized a 2-day conference on Single-Sign-On at RTBF (read more here). From a market research perspective this conference allowed participants to clearly understand that SSO was a growing trend among public service broadcasters. We had the please to listen to 9 amazing speakers from very different organizations and horizons : Tim Rowell (Piano.io), Ben Sekhon (Gigya, leader on the...
How Delhaize Urban Farm fits into their marketing strategy
Supermarkets Delhaize are known for a marketing strategy based on differentiation : premium products and a broader assortiment are part of Delhaize DNA. Delhaize has also invested for several years in its branding and has started positioning itself as a respectful brand. The opening of its urban farm on top of Delhaize Boondael (Brussels) roof is a cornerstone of this strategy. I had the pleasure to be invited by Delhaize to visit the...
My blog is worth 221000€ and this is how I got there
Next to the guest blogging offers I receive every single day, I also receive offers from agencies which want me to pay them for writing on my behalf. Such a company (called Ridigio) got in touch with me a few months ago to propose its services. I had an interesting discussion with their salesrep and realized how much my blog was worth : some 221,000€. How I got to this total is simple : their most basic offer starts at 85€ per...
Digital innovation: does your market segment care ?
Tech-savvy entrepreneurs love to imagine solutions to digitalize our world and change consumers’ usages. Adoption is usually the problem that occurs. It’s therefore essential to ask you this question beforehand: “do your target customers care enough to change their habits” ? To illustrate the problem, let me tell you a story. The story of my 80-year old mother-in-law. My mother-in-law writes phone numbers on the back of her cell phone...
Mobile Me : your car has no secrets for Mercedes
Nowadays cars can be connected with your smartphone ; not only to make calls but also to control your car at distance. The Mercedes Me application enables the owner to monitor basic and more advanced functionalities of the vehicle through his smartphone. The presence of a SIM card transmitting the information to the smartphone is the enabler of this enhanced connectivity ; but it may also enable Mercedes to become a data provider....
Service quality : the next retail challenge after Big Data
Algorithms have become instrumental in retailers’ strategies to increase loyalty among customers. We don’t know of any major retailer not having a Big Data team working on a.o. predicting churn, couponning, increasing loyalty, new segmentation, … Yet, what we also notice is that all retailers more or less all use the same tools, the same techniques for the same goals. It’s all about Spark, Hadoop, real-time...
Chewing gum market in crisis
The chewing gum market is in crisis. Revenues generated from chewing gum sales have been decreasing steadily since 2008. The slowdown even reached 3% in 2015. As a consequence Mars-Wrigley (Freedent, Skittles, …) and Mondelez (Stimorol, Malabar, Hollywood) have started a market share war. Why is the chewing gum market in crisis ? The reason is simple : demand is plunging. What is less obvious to understand is why the...
Customers are the last hurdle to remove for a smoother supply-chain
The Nespresso Prodigio case shows that companies are trying to remove the last uncertainty factor to maximize loyalty. This factor is the customer himself. It’s not a bad idea indeed. Rather than building complex algorithms to predict customers’ behaviors, why not just remove the human factor from the equation ? If the proposed added value is sufficient it may well work. Prodigio’s value proposition : enough to automate customer’s...
Nespresso : the secret behind the new Prodigio connected machine
Nespresso just launched a new connected machine called “Prodigio”. This machine allegedly allows you to prepare a coffee with your smartphone and make sure you never run out of Nespresso capsules. This machine will however allow much more than that … but the customer will probably never get to know it. Let’s have a look behind the scene and discover the secrets of the Prodigio strategy. Churn : the one metric Nespresso is concerned...
Are smart boxes the future of car insurance?
Telematic units, also called black or smart boxes, are devices installed in a car to monitor a driver’s behavior (speed, acceleration, deceleration, …). They are increasingly used by insurance companies to develop a pay-as-you-drive pricing. Such pricing may be especially interesting for young drivers who are hit by high insurance premiums. Young drivers are victims of their youth One metric sums it up all: 25% of accidents are caused...
Add a human touch to your marketing strategy
Marketing strategies are increasingly ruled by algorithms, IT-based decision systems which leave less and less space for human qualities to make the difference. We just wrote an article about recommendation algorithms and artificial intelligence in the business sphere that you may want to read to understand how it affects the customer experience. If you are in an industry which uses those technologies, you might well consider the...
Longer tweets : the effect on twitter users’ behavior
Twitter announced working on a new feature allowing to post tweets exceeding 140 words. Social media specialists were quite puzzled by this announcement. Much of twitter’s success is based on the shortness of the messages and we can wonder whether twitter is not losing its DNA. In this blog post we are trying to predict what may happen and how consumers will react. Twitter users’ behavior today Twitter users today tend to follow a lot...
Creative business cards : we are almost there
Last year I felt the need to have new business cards. From the very beginning I wanted to create creative business cards that people would remember. After searching the internet and in particular pinterest, I drafted a few concepts that combined all my objectives. I also spotted this one example that I found absolutely stunning. Creative business cards : 3 tips for a wow effect I listed 3 elements that in my opinion...
Highlights of one more year of blogging
It’s now been 6 years I’ve regularly posted articles on this blog (some 2100 articles in 3 languages). The design and technical changes we made in 2014 and 2015 were fruitful. The audience increases regularly and since we fixed a cache problem this summer, the French version of the blog is hitting almost systematically the 100k unique users mark on annual basis. The Dutch version of the blog is not doing so good ; despite all my...
Not sure SnapChat will become a profitable business
71% of snapchat users are under 25. In a world where businesses try to attract and touch youngsters, this is a very unique selling proposition. Despite a market capitalization of 16 to 19b$ doubts still exist about the business model of snapchat and how it will monetize its users’ database. Will Snapchat be able to really leverage the value of its users’ database ? This is what will deal with in this blog post. Snapchat’s concept For...
How to drive Generations Y and Z back to traditional media
Traditional medias have a huge problem to get in touch with the Y and Z generations, which both have their own media consumption habits. A recent initiative launched by Egmont, a UK-based press house focusing on children, brings a possible solution to this difficult problem. A new magazine format for Generations Y and Z Egmont just launched a new magazine entitled Oh My Vlog ! which is dedicated to famous YouTubers, those guys like...
TUZZit : 8 great online tools for your startup
Many would-be entrepreneurs we meet strive to either look for or even make up the visual and creative collaborative tools that will ease their team thinking process. This difficulty further increases when those teams are decentralized. Business model canvas, 5 forces of Porter, Important / Urgent matrix … TUZZit offers a collection of visual models to work with creativity online. Initiated by a Belgian startup, TUZZit...
Fedex wants to take TNT over: will it happen or not?
In 2010 we predicted already that the market of courier delivery services would consolidate. Our prediction quickly turned true as UPS tried to take over TNT. This takeover was later rejected by the European commission, arguing that this would have restricted competition (read the press release here for more information). In some member states, the Commission argued, the competition would have been reduced to two players, leaving DHL...
Marketing strategy: should banks charge customers more?
The boss of the National Bank of Belgium suggested that banks change their tariffs and charge customers for services like cash withdrawal, payments made by bank cards, yearly fees charged to have a bank account, … Is it a good marketing strategy ? Why were such proposals made when, at the same time, consumers keep losing purchase power each and every year ? If such proposals were to be implemented, what would be the consequences on...
Inbound marketing: is video blogging the best SEO strategy for the future?
I recently had a meeting with fellow blogger Patrick Hannedouche in Paris and we discussed the future of blogging together. Blogging and inbound marketing Patrick runs a blog on entrepreneurship and financing that is very successful. He has some 15000 visitors per month which is slightly above the score of IntoTheMinds. We have both a very narrow positioning that makes our respective blogs interesting for “long tail” searches. One is...
iDTGVMax: What is the hidden agenda of the French railways?
The French railways company (SNCF : Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer) made the news this week when it announced the launch for an unlimited offer with its iDTGV. For 59.99€ per month, travelers would be allowed to take online booked high-velocity trains (called iDTGV) as many times as they’d like. This offer is called IDTGVMax and can be discovered on the dedicated website at IDTGVMax.com This unlimited offer was however limited...
Data Mining : a concrete example for SME’s
In 2015 one of the topics we would like to discuss more often on this blog is data mining. You have all heard about Big Data, data mining, business intelligence ; but what those terms really cover remains mysterious for most of us. I guess there is also a desire to keep these terms opaque and fuzzy so that they actually seem complicated and reserved to specialists. But is it really the case? Everyone can do data mining What I do...
Competition forces traditional taxis to change : finally !
The traditional press is full of articles regarding the legal procedures against Uber in Europe. In this judiciary fight, traditional taxis and VTC (Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur) have joined forces to fight Uber’s aggressive strategy to enter the market despite legal requirements (for more information read our previous article on this topic). Brussels minister for mobility was proud to announce that he had seized vehicles...
Can a normal airline still compete with a low-cost pure player ?
After SN Brussels Airlines announcement to launch a low-cost alternative, Air France tried to do the same but the plan was stopped by 2 weeks of strike (which may have cost up to 300m€ according to newspapers). Yet what you observe on the market is that low-cost has become the dominant business model. Ryanair had been the undisputed leader for years (in terms of profit) and became the #1 airline in Europe. This year EasyJet took...
Zalando : e-commerce giant recruits clients offline
How can you push your organic growth in e-commerce? That’s basically the problem that Zalando is facing. The e-commerce giant is still not profitable and believes that profitability will come with economies of scale, which can only be achieved through recruitment of more customers. But customers are difficult to convince and Zalando must therefore go offline to find them. Two types of consumers with different behaviors This may seem...
Marketing strategy : Hello Bank launches a pop-up store in Brussels
Pop-up stores belongs to the marketing toolbox as a promotion instrument. Fact is that they have been usually used by brands in the fashion sector to promote a collection, raise awareness in conjunction with another event (for instance the Fashion week), or to touch customers in some particular areas. Pop-up stores are much less used by players from other sectors and that’s why the initiative of Hello Bank (a brand of BNP Paribas) is...
Quality improvement through reengineering of business processes
We are currently conducting a big assignment for a BEL20 company to improve financial provisions processes and increase operations quality. This assignment encompasses the description of AS-IS processes across several divisions, reengineering them into something “lean” and improving the quality of the output. A big challenge given the complexity of those financial processes and the variety of people involved. Most assignments of this...
Online gambling : how has the market evolved since the opening of the market to competition?
On May, 13th 2010 the law was passed to open the market of online gambling to competition. Two years after, how does the market look like? Prior to that date online gambling was forbidden in France and gamblers using Gilbratar- or other exotic countries-based websites were in complete illegality. After May 2010 numerous new actors popped up and everyone was expecting hard times for the old and venerable PMU, which had the monopoly of...
Pop-up stores: what do they reveal about the future of retail
I’ve received several interview requests during the summer to discuss the future of retail. In today’s article I want to share with you my thoughts about pop-up stores, a (relatively) new forms of retail that reflects changes in our world and changes in the way the consumers behave. 1999 : the start of the pop-up stores It seems that the first pop-up store opened in 1999 in Los Angeles. The word pop-up meant at that time a “time...
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