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Log In / Register | May 25, 2013

Expert Advice

Au Contraire, Mon Ami

Expert | Bob O'Brien | May 15 | trends
Is there anything the U.S. press likes more than a piece of news that makes the French look less French and more, well, American? All my newsreaders are full of re-reporting of a study that shows that half of French foodservice sales are going to quick service restaurants (QSR) these days. Zoot alors!  How could this be? The reason it’s so surprising is that it’s not true. The NPD Group’s foodservice market research, CREST has for the past 6 years tracked consumer foodservice purchases in France.  We do it every day of every year, rain or shine.  And here’s what that research has told us, month after month, year after year. It has told us that QSRs in France get about a third of all the spending to restaurants while full service places get a little...
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Go with the Flow

Expert | Robert Mandelbaum | Apr 17 | hotel, trends
Figure one The U.S. lodging industry recovery made great progress in 2011 with over 70 percent of the hotels in the nation showing increases in both revenue and profits during the year. Many industry prognosticators, including PKF Hospitality Research, LLC (PKF-HR), are expecting this trend to continue in the future. Based on the PKF-HR's December 2012 Hotel Horizons® forecast, U.S. hotels will enjoy compound annual growth (CAGR) in rooms revenue (RevPAR) of 6.5 percent through 2016. In turn, this should result in a CAGR of 6.1 percent in total hotel revenue during the same period. Given these strong projections of revenue growth, how much profit can hoteliers expect to earn in the coming years? To understand how these increased revenues will flow to the bottom line, PKF-...
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Walmart Blames Q1 Sales Slump on New Consumer Technology

Expert | Nikki Baird | Apr 9 | retail, trends
Walmart’s woes continue as more leaked emails reveal a growing concern among company executives over a new consumer technology that promises to completely disrupt the mass merchant’s business model. While retailers like Best Buy struggle to combat showrooming and retailers like JCPenney appear to be failing miserably at redefining the future of the store, Walmart’s greatest threat appears to be the next generation of 3D printers known as “replicators.” 3D printers have begun making a splash on the retail scene, as RetailWire noted in March. At the time, industry pundits believed the technology in its infancy, but a recent breakthrough has changed the game.Since 2005, MIT scientist and certified physics genius Neil Gershenfield, director of the...
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Hotel Owners, Select Your Profits

Expert | Robert Mandelbaum | Mar 19 | hotel, trends
The definition of "select-service" within the lodging industry may vary from person to person, but there is no doubt that properties in this segment are the most popular among developers. Using the broadest definition of select-service, this category comprised an estimated 85 percent of the total projects in the development pipeline according to the October 2012 U.S. Hotel Pipeline Outlook report from Smith Travel Research. While developers may be influenced by emotional and other non-economic factors, financial return is typically the main criteria considered when choosing to develop one type of hotel versus another. To gain a better understanding of the financial performance of select-service hotels, we compared and contrasted the operating performance of select-service...
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"I Did Not See That Coming," Be Nimble

Expert | Paula Rosenblum | Mar 6 | retail, trends
On February 27, I had the opportunity to participate in an internet radio show on Voice America with two other strong and successful women, Vicki Cantrell, SVP, Communities and Executive Director, Shop.org, and Lori Mitchell-Keller, head of the Global Retail Industry Business Unit for SAP. We’re three women who don’t agree on everything, but it turned out in this show that we agree on quite a lot when it comes to the future of store-based retail. The name of the show is “Coffee Break with Game-Changers (with your host Bonnie D. Graham)”. While the show is sponsored by SAP, the company has no influence over the content. In other words, it’s a free-wheeling hour, and Bonnie Graham is quite something as a host. To listen to a replay of the episode, called...
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When Shopper Convenience Is Second, Retailers and Manufacturers Lose

Expert | Nikki Baird | Feb 14 | retail, trends
Last week, RetailWire ran a post on a new study by a professor at the University of Illinois. The gist of the study is that, in cases where “fit” is not a competitive factor in consumer decision-making, retailers should optimize retail floor space according to how much manufacturers will pay for it, even if that results in increased inconvenience for shoppers.Even typing that phrase – “increased inconvenience for shoppers” – is like nails on a chalkboard to me. And I wasn’t the only one. Most of the BrainTrust on RetailWire took the study to task. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that something more needed to be said. What I gathered from the University’s summary of the research is that the professor, Yunchuan “Frank...
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The Days of High Upfront International License Fees Are Over

Expert | Ed Teixeira | Feb 8 | franchising, trends
A number of years ago certain franchisors that franchised internationally had a practice of trying to get the highest licensing fee as possible upfront. The justification for this practice was based upon several factors: The initial licensing fee was seen by the franchisor as primarily a profit generator rather than as reimbursement for related present and future franchisor expenses, costs of training, franchise system value and development costs. Franchisors were fearful of not receiving future royalty payments and felt that a higher upfront license fee could serve as a form of insurance if this happened. Fear of costly litigation in a foreign country was a related issue.  Some franchisors preferred receiving a higher licensing fee in lieu of...
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Where Brands Strike Gold and Make Money, Emotional Engagement

Expert | Passikoff and Shea | Feb 8 | manage, trends
Brand Keys announced the results of our 17th annual Customer Loyalty Engagement Index (CLEI) this week. We ended up with 54 categories and nearly 400 brands. And if you’re interested in seeing how brands ranked in your product or service category, just click here. We say “ended up with” because a number of categories no longer appear in the CLEI. This was due to neither lack of interest nor hubris, but the fact that it would be more accurate to characterize those categories as no longer being “brand-based.” By that we mean they include products that consumers used to view as ‘brands,’ and still know the names of, but are now being regarded as so completely comparable in all key attributes that drive purchase, as to be the same. So not...
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Food Culture: Price Still Doesn't Trump Assortment

Expert | Paula Rosenblum | Feb 6 | food, retail, trends
NRF’s Big Show is not the only conference that falls in January. And so less than a week after my time in New York City, I found myself winging off to Phoenix Arizona for FMI’s Midwinter Executive Conference. While there, I had the opportunity to address members of their Independent Operator Program. I also got an early look at a consumer benchmark commissioned by FMI, Daymon Worldwide and the Hartman Group. The report title is “Reframing Retail through the Lens of Changing Food Culture”. The benchmark is interesting and well worth a read, not just because it highlights how differently Americans are buying, preparing and eating their food, but because consumers were asked about their attitude about price. It also comes to us at a fortuitous time, while RSR...
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Being Context-Aware Is New Bar for Customer Service

Expert | Nikki Baird | Feb 6 | retail, trends
I have to start this article with a couple of caveats. I’m about to share with you a customer service fail that happened to me in the week following the NRF Big Show. I don’t usually like to air my complaints and issues with consumer-facing industries in this column because one, I know I’m not a ‘typical’ customer. I’m probably one of the worst customers in the world because my expectations are set by what I know about the industry, and about particular retailers, and it makes me a lot more demanding – and impatient – than almost any of my friends who are not in the industry. Two, it can be ridiculously easy to find customer service fails of one kind or another, so in that sense the fact that something went horribly wrong is not “...
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