With over twenty years of executive experience, he has significantly improved the customer proposition of leading value and luxury brands. Retailers such as Albert Heijn, HEMA, Sligro, Rituals and Action, gained in relevance and market share, thanks to his role in the leadership team.
Fashion retail was already in a dire condition in 2019. 2020 was brutal. But what's happening now is beyond any comprehension. Non essential stores are going down. State of Art, a men's fashion retail brand in Netherlands and Belgium, was a very successful business until March 13, 2020. We will be again in 2022 and beyond.
Many flagship stores are just a regular store with an abundance of space. The same number of products are displayed more widely. Fancy gadgets and irrelevant visual merchandising, finished off with huge LCD screens often cover that it's really much ado about nothing. Some though are a delight, a bliss. Amsterdam based Rituals opened 'House of Rituals' in October to give momentum to its 20 years anniversary. The aim was quite ambitious: to transcend from a cosmetics brand into the art of soulful living.
Customer service is in trouble. When you really needed it, you probably got “a labyrinth of FAQ’s, message boxes and if you are lucky, a mail address. Sometimes you’d be entangled in a myriad of voice response sequences. Never a real-life person.” When companies could have proven they cared about their customers, they didn't.
Many years ago life was simple. You were running a business and making money, and the state was run by government and parliament. Pretty simple. You needed to adhere some rules, laws and show some ethics and fiduciary duties. All tucked away in what we would cleverly call 'the private sector'. Fast forward to 2020 and there's nothing private anymore. Businesses these days play in an arena where moral will decide its future. And it's about time.
Covid-19 hit like a bullet. Much is said already, but I've found some new insights like: cash is the new God. Maslow is back. Hope is not a strategy. Forget forecasting. Dividends versus subsidies. Shit rolls downhill. And most of all: you are a leader, not an funeral undertaker. Show some resilience. It's definitely business as not usual.
The Dutch don't have what other leading EU economies have: Amazon as the leading e-commerce platform. Amazon skipped the Netherlands, back some years ago, preferring the other countries. Now, in just over a couple of weeks they will kickstart with a full grown Dutch webshop. What are the consequences for existing Dutch webshops, especially for Amazon look-a-like and Dutch leading e-commerce operator BOL?
t's all about the experience. Just the product alone, its function, price or quality, won't do anymore. This golden marketing rule might be less relevant for some low value items, it is certainly vital for premium products and services. Customers tend to love the orientation, comparing alternatives, and presale interactions. Unboxing luxury items is not an online fad anymore, it's a powerful marketing instrument. But not for Tesla.
I have selected some of Christmas' best. As always most are made in Britain. These are great times to air some really lengthy ads in the age of 5 seconds pre-rolls, display ads and banners.
Citizens living in the already crowded big cities in Western economies have witnessed a change in the past few years. Delivery trucks parking on dangerous places. Way more traffic from DHL, UPS and others delivering e-commerce parcels, with more pollution from those trucks. Huge delivery hubs are being built near city centers on land where otherwise housing projects could have been developed.
Around the globe people become more aware of the trade off between buying fashion items, wearing them a few times, disposing and what it does do our planet. Many new (online and physical) retail platforms have started concentrating on second hand items and renting out. Some even say that the second hand fashion market will outgrow fast fashion by 2028.
Strong retail leaders focus on the customer proposition, specifically on innovation. To fuel innovation new ideas and perspectives are vital. That's often the reason behind (foreign) retail safaris: to understand what works well or not, see some hits and forecast misses. On a July 2019 visit to London I saw some new and interesting retail formats, worth a visit.
Quite frequently I happen to visit one of the many shared offices the city of Amsterdam offers. I usually go to Spaces on the Vijzelstraat. One of the reasons why I prefer Spaces is their friendly baristas serving great cappuccino, from a brand called Bocca. This is a story about Bocca Coffee and its founder, Menno Simons.
Direct-to-Consumer (DtC) platforms are omni present in today's online retail. They enable consumers to stand out in the crowd, with easy and transparant e-commerce. But what are the key elements of their marketing approach?
This article is about Chinese millennials, with some insights on how they live and shop. Highlighting some remarkable differences between Europe and China. It was first published in April 2019 in Dutch Marketing Journal Adformatie.
In almost every country around the world you'll find food markets. There are famous ones like the Boqueria in Barcelona or hip ones like the Torvehallerne Market in Copenhagen. I definitely liked the authenticity of Riga Central Market. This is a story about a food market you probably never heard of. Rungis, the largest and most exciting food market in the world.
Retailers trying to cross a frontier and doing some really exciting new things: we kind of miss it. If we see new brands, we experience mostly small, incremental changes. A new kind of display idea, new designs or styles or a different routing. Few physical formats take a more lateral (some call it crazy) route to market. Enter Gentle Monster.
Hasan Minhaj has a show on Netflix: the Patriot Act. I am a huge fan, he dissects Amazon.com and the business practices it has used to grow from an e-bookstore into a powerful, multi-faceted corporation that controls a huge chunk of the online cloud. watch the full 20 minutes.
Tesco is launching a new discount format with only a dozen stores. It might feel like dipping a toe in the water, but if you can't beat them join them.
Een FrankNews interview over marketing, purpose en veel andere relevante en irrelevante zaken.
Skip value retail or hard discount. Discard online food shopping. This is about the real deal: a food walhalla, Zurheide's new supermarket in Dusseldorf.
Retailers trekken doorgaans naar de Amerikaanse westkust om zich te laten inspireren. René Repko ging de andere kant op en bezocht nieuwe winkelformules in China. Sla Seattle de volgende keer maar eens over.
The meal delivery business is exploding, with numerous platforms and market places entering every day to get a share of a market estimated to be $1,000bn by 2030. This is a story about MarleenKookt. Not just another mass market meal delivery service, but actually the opposite.