Nordstrom Lets Shoppers Reserve Online And Try In-Store

8/31/2017

Nordstrom Lets Shoppers Reserve Online And Try In-Store

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Nordstrom Lets Shoppers Reserve Online And Try In-Store

Nordstrom Lets Shoppers Reserve Online And Try In-Store

Offers customers a convenient and personalized experience

Leading fashion specialty retailer Nordstrom is expanding its ‘Reserve Online & Try In Store’ service to almost 40 stores across the USA, following a pilot in six stores. Customers will be able to pick items online and then go to their nearest Nordstrom store to try them on in person. This new service aims to combine the convenience of shopping online with an efficient and personalized in-store experience.

Customers can use ‘Reserve Online & Try In Store’ through the Nordstrom mobile app. They will receive a text notification when their items are ready, and another one when they arrive in the store to let them know where they can find their dedicated dressing room.

The pilot of ‘Reserve Online & Try In Store’ took place in six Washington state stores in the fall of 2016. 80% of customers who tried the service continued to use it multiple times. Nordstrom plans to keep expanding the service to more stores over the next year.

Shea Jensen, senior vice president of customer experience at Nordstrom, said in a press release:

“We’re thrilled to expand our Reserve Online & Try In Store service to provide a better experience for customers shopping with Nordstrom – whether that’s online, in-store or a combination of both. Many of our customers like to feel and try on clothes and shoes before they purchase them and we’re excited to offer them a more convenient way to do so.”

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August 31, 2017 at 06:33AM

74% of Consumers Overwhelmed By Email Overload Says Survey

8/31/2017

74% of Consumers Overwhelmed By Email Overload, Says Survey

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Three-quarters of Americans admit to feeling overwhelmed by the number and frequency of emails they receive, according to a study released Wednesday by Edison Software.

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August 31, 2017 at 06:30AM

[Insight] Male Spas Go Mainstream

8/31/2017

[Insight] Male Spas Go Mainstream

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A Man Cave, but for Manicures | GQ

The number of male spa-goers has exploded in the past 12 years, creating a niche but thriving industry.

The space is dark. The lights are dark, the wood flooring is dark, and the leather chairs are dark. Keep walking and you’ll find a bar serving complimentary wine. Jazz is playing. Scattered around are succulents and candles, neutral in both scent and appearance. In the next room is a desk where a man with headphones is receiving a manicure, and a row of plush chairs with sinks at the foot of each. Because this isn’t your garden-variety man cave. It’s a spa—for men.

Living Fresh Men’s Spa in New York, specifically. It is just one of the several men’s-specific spas that have popped up across the country, mostly in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, but also in Columbus, Ohio, and Minneapolis. This is not a contained phenomenon. The spa industry is growing—it’s worth $16.8 billion today, compared to only $4.2 billion just over a decade ago—which means the spas-for-men industry is growing, and everyone wants to dip their pedicured toes into the business.

The International SPA Association, or ISPA, has been tracking the industry in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers for over a decade. In 2005, it found that only 29 percent of spa-goers were male. Today that figure has rocketed to 49 percent, thanks in large part to changing attitudes men have toward grooming.

This is a new phenomenon. A 2013 ISPA survey listed the following reasons men didn’t go to spas: 11 percent said it’s “too indulgent,” 14 percent said because “none of my friends go,” 17 percent said they were embarrassed to go, and 19 percent said “spas are for women.” “[Guys] have that masculinity hangup, and that's something that helps us exist,” says Jose Girona, Living Fresh’s general manager. The male spa business is built on these concerns, worries, and anxieties.

Apparently, men need safe spaces in the year of our lord 2017—at least when it comes to spas. The idea for Hammer & Nails came to its founder, Michael Elliot, when he walked into a salon and felt everyone staring at him. He was struck, he says, by “this notion that if I open the door to a nail salon, I gotta be gay because I’m getting a manicure or a pedicure.”

It gets back to that stat: 19 percent of men believe spas are for women. Imagine converting that group: the guys who are too embarrassed to show up, plus the ones who are still on the buddy system, plus the ones who just need a little extra attention, or maybe a Groupon. Suddenly you have a pretty sizable audience. The owners of traditional spas I spoke to noticed more and more guys coming in. Giving them their own spot was a natural next step. So these joints do the obvious: slap the word “men” on the name, serve complimentary Macallan, and swap out the magazines in the waiting room.

The coddling starts before men even make an appointment—except it’s very proudly non-coddly. The Shays Lounge Men’s Spa in Los Angeles has torched “any girlie sh*t.” “We’ve built a man cave,” reads the site for Hammer & Nails. And those efforts are ramped up when a dude actually makes it into the spa.

In the experience of the several men’s spa owners I spoke with, getting men comfortable enough to just come in is the biggest hurdle, so there’s a lot of thought that goes into making spas men-friendly without making them corny—you can easily imagine neon beer signs on the wall and posters borrowed from a high school boy’s room. The magazines, products and scents, and relaxing beverages are manly but understated. A partition, like the curtain at Living Fresh, is critical, closing off the space where men get their backs waxed, hands manicured, and feet pampered. Places like The Shays Lounge are designed with discretion in mind. “There's lots of little dark nooks,” says The Shays Lounge founder Jodi Shays, ”where they can sit and pour themselves a bourbon or read a magazine.” Your body is a temple, the male spa says, but also here’s a glass of liquid poison.

Hammer & Nails’ Elliot insists on breathing room between chairs so guys don’t have to expose their feet within eyeshot of another man. A customer on Yelp refers to this as ”the unwritten rule of ‘man-space.’” Jim Price, who runs Well Groomed Male Spa in Columbus, Ohio, goes one step further: He’ll greet a customer and then give him his massage, hair cut, manicure, wax, facial, whatever. He does every treatment one-on-one. While this may limit the amount of customers Price gets to see, he’s worried doing it any other way would stall out his customer base. “I don’t want to get to that point where men are still uncomfortable to come through the door,” he says.

A lot of these spas recognized that men probably wouldn’t just waltz into a room of—gasp—women. Shays says part of the appeal of her spa is that “[men] have this area where they're not going into this gaggle of giggling women, who are going to make fun of me,” she says. Before her men’s room, Shays says guys most frequently requested the very first or the very last appointment of the day.

Beyond the decor elements, there are also subtle shifts in treatment. The most popular regimens, besides waxing, are Thai and sports massage--like a friggin’ ripped athlete might get—and businesses like Hammer & Nails position their messaging around “health and wellness” rather than the more effeminate “pampering.” For men it’s “not as much the pampering or the time out,” says Lynne McNees, the president of ISPA. “It's more about, I want to be better, I want to make something better, I want results, I want to improve something, and really being able to see a difference.”

Paul Johnson, a 47-year-old senior specialist acquisitions analyst with AT&T and a retired U.S. Air Force member, has gone to Hammer & Nails for almost a year. The health message clicks for him. Johnson first started getting pedicures to take care of his feet while working in Afghanistan. After moving back to Los Angeles, Johnson says finding Hammer & Nails was a revelation after trying traditional salons. “I felt awkward and really weird about going, ’cause there wasn't that many guys,” he says, adding that he sometimes felt labeled as a “metrosexual.” Johnson felt like he was an afterthought at these other spas, but not at Hammer & Nails. “The comfortable chairs, the decor, everything about it really says this is our thing.” Men’s spas are required to put together the whole experience; a fantasy almost. “It feels like a speakeasy,” Johnson says.

At this point, the only guys who are resistant to spas are the guys who haven’t been to just-for-men spas yet. Elliot says 35 percent of his business still comes from women buying men treatments or gift cards, but he finds that most are converted instantly to repeat customers. He also says he gets a lot of first-timers who have never gotten a manicure or pedicure before. “When I first started doing my market research, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know there were far more men that had never had a pedicure than men that had,” says Elliot. Shays estimates The Shays Lounge sees eight new male customers daily. Price says his business is so popular he’s fully booked two weeks out. Meanwhile, Hammer & Nails is pedicuring its way to global domination. Revenues have grown 20 percent year-over-year at the Los Angeles location (which made $350,000 doing only $23-and-up manis and $33-and-up pedis last year). Elliot expects to have six locations open by the end of this year, and over 200 by 2022. Lots of guys are going to spas now.

I cannot count myself among those men, because I got a pedicure, just once, a couple years ago. But that was at a spa-spa; what I needed was something charged with 100 volts of testosterone. So I went to Living Fresh in New York City.

I settled into the plush leather seat with a heavy pour of red wine. Netflix’s new moody-man drama Ozark played on silent while Solange, Bon Iver, and jazz played over the speakers. My technician, who told me she also works at a traditional nail salon near Grand Central Station, says she much prefers the men’s spa. For both practical reasons— “No polish!” she said—but also because the environment is much more relaxed. That part surprised me. After all this talk about how men don’t want or need to be pampered, here I was, getting a pedicure for two or three times as long as it takes for my technician to do a woman’s nails. No part of the experience made me feel like a man, necessarily, but I was overwhelmed by guilt that someone should be forced to flay off my calluses, even if it is for money. ($70 including tip, for mine.)

As I gathered my things to leave, the place was practically bustling. Nearby (but not too nearby), there was a man much older than me in a red button-up short-sleeve shirt and khakis downing complimentary candies. There was a man much cooler than me in Nike shorts and shoes and an Adidas sleeveless hoodie. There was a man presumably much wealthier than me carrying a fine leather bag. My chair was promptly filled by the next appointment while others waited in the lobby, behind the partition. Maybe these guys had hangups about going to a traditional spa. Maybe this place was just close to their office. Either way, here they were in a space where every single product, chair, song, treatment, candle, plant, and neon blue shower light was hand-selected with them in mind. These were men, in their man spa. They seemed happy.

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August 31, 2017 at 06:05AM

CMO Council Report: Brands & Telcos Must Partner to Deliver Omni-Channel Experience

8/31/2017

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CMO Council Report: Brands & Telcos Must Partner to Deliver Omni-Channel Experience

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New research from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council reveals that brands and communications service providers will need to become tightly coupled in order to truly fulfill their shared vision of delivering a more gratifying, valued and relevant omni-channel experience for customers.

“The milestone study, dubbed ‘Getting Serious About the Omni-Channel Experience,’ uncovers a healthy interest among brands for tapping the upgraded digital infrastructures, subscriber access and enormously valuable data repositories of mobile network operators and telco carriers as they seek to deliver a more consistent, unified and enriched experience across all digital and physical channels,” an emailed statement reads.

More than 80 percent of brand marketers surveyed by the CMO Council in the first half of 2017 say their brands are extremely, very or increasingly reliant on global customer connectivity, secure digital communications, real-time customer interaction and multi-channel content delivery.

According to a provided statement, almost half of non-telco marketers surveyed by the CMO Council see a potential leadership role for communications service providers to provide brands with an optimized framework for omni-channel engagement. Only 11 percent do not, and 40 percent are uncertain.

In contrast, 56 percent of telco industry marketers believe that non-telco companies are out-performing telco operators and communications service providers in delivering a true omni-channel experience. This compares to one quarter who do not.

Surprisingly, just 4 percent of subscriber-reliant telco companies believe they are giving their customers a consistent, personalized and contextually relevant experience across all traditional and digital channels by leveraging persistence of information, respecting the privacy of customers, and aligning the business needs with IT. On the non-telco side, the picture is just as dismal. A nominal 1 percent of brand marketers say they have a complete omni-channel management (OCM) model in place.

“Less than 10 percent of telco marketers believe they are highly advanced and rapidly evolving when it comes to being more data-driven, customer-responsive and digitally adaptive,” notes Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “More than 25 percent list functional integration; cultural, technical and operational hurdles; and resistance to change as obstacles to evolving to a true OCM model.”

To learn more, check out the full report here.

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August 31, 2017 at 05:56AM

Technology Brings Healthcare to Hurricane Harvey Victims

8/31/2017

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Technology Brings Healthcare to Hurricane Harvey Victims

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Our sister site MHW has learned that Doctor On Demand will be extending support to all those affected by Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana.

Through September 8th, Doctor On Demand will make its medical services available to anyone in the affected regions at no cost.

Doctor On Demand physicians will treat infections, skin and eye issues, sprains and bruises, back pain, vomiting and diarrhea, colds, coughs, and congestion, and 90% of the most common medical issues seen in the ER and urgent care. The company’s physicians are trained to treat stress, anxiety, grief, and depression.

During significant weather events, patients are often unable to access healthcare due to road closures, flooding, or office closures. The services from Doctor On Demand will allow patients to access medical care without traveling into severe weather situations.

Generally, Doctor On Demand’s board-certified physicians are available on-demand and by appointment. The typical average wait time to connect with a doctor is under 3 minutes.

To download the Doctor On Demand app, click here. To contact Doctor On Demand’s member support team, call 1 (800) 997-6196.

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August 31, 2017 at 05:40AM

California Distillery Creates Vodka From Food Waste

8/31/2017

California Distillery Creates Vodka From Food Waste

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California Distillery Creates Vodka From Food Waste

California Distillery Creates Vodka From Food Waste

A bartender and agricultural economist team up to create a niche in an evergreen category

As Misadventure & Co. states on its website, 40% of food grown in the United States ends up in a landfill. It’s an issue that continues to gain awareness and a distillery in San Diego is taking action on it – for the good of the nation, for their business and for vodka lovers.

Bartender White Rigali and agricultural economist Samuel Chereskin knew that vodka can be made out of any ingredient that contains enough sugar or starch. Mixing that with the food waste problem, the team formed Misadventure & Co.—a distillery that concocts vodka by using old bread products that would otherwise go to waste. Whether it’s a Twinkie or baguette, food is collected weekly from a local food bank and then put back into the process to create the distillery’s end product. It’s a productive, tasteful way to go about solving a big problem.

Misadventure & Co.

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August 31, 2017 at 05:37AM

OPINION: 3 Ways Hollywood Studios Are Finally Embracing Mobile Marketing

8/31/2017

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OPINION: 3 Ways Hollywood Studios Are Finally Embracing Mobile Marketing

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The following is a guest contributed post from Robert Ferrari, CEO of Bare Tree Media

It’s not an easy time to be a Hollywood studio. Movie theater attendance is at two-decade lows and digital distribution continues to break the tried and true delivery model. In addition, to the difficulty the industry is facing with getting butts in movie seats, it’s also dealing with a perplexing question facing companies across many sectors today. How do we get the attention of millennials on mobile screens?

Digital natives seem content serendipitously discovering new content to watch with a flip of their thumb through Netflix libraries or Instagram stories. The pre-release film junket and red carpet walks of actors – supported by television advertising air cover – isn’t cutting it anymore. Afterall, millennials and Generation Y now spend more time in front of than their televisions.

So what are Hollywood studios to do? With one dollar often allocated to movie marketing for every two dollars spent on a film production, marketers’ budgets aren’t exactly vanishing. Increasingly, forward thinking studio marketers are embracing mobile marketing strategies to engage potential filmgoers and franchise fans. After all, if consumers are spending five hours a day on a mobile device you better figure out a way to get their attention there. Here’s a look at how Hollywood marketers are finally marketing to the vertical screen.

Extending Franchise Shelf Life with Mobile Games

With the lucrative businesses of movie franchises and sequels seemingly drying up, studios have been scratching their heads looking for ways to extend the life of films beyond one viewing. A new path they’re taking to both grow the appetite for these types of movie franchises and extend the shelf life of them is mobile games.

Lionsgate’s March release of the mobile game ‘Power Rangers: Legacy Wars,’ which launched in tandem with its Saban’s Power Rangers movie, is a great example. The mobile game was downloaded more than 6 million times in its first four days on the market.

Not only did this raise awareness of the movie, which was a smashing success at the box office, but it should increase shelf life for the franchise as it works to quickly bring fans a sequel. This could be especially true in mobile-game-crazy China where the movie was released in May.

China has become a growing marketing for Hollywood games that often incubate a fan base before a movie is even launched there. For instance, the mobile game Minion Rush did astonishing well in China without the Despicable Me being released in country. The game grossed more than $80M in China, built up a very engaged user base and ultimately led to Despicable Me 3’s record breaking film release in China this summer.

Character and Scene Extension Into Mobile Messaging

Messaging is an increasingly big use of consumer time on mobile. Flurry, an app analytics platform, estimates that 12% of all time spent on mobile is on mobile messaging platforms. Furthermore, A recent eMarketer report estimated by 2019 there will be 2.19 billion global consumers active on messaging apps.

Savvy studios have started to wade into engaging potential movie goers via mobile messaging platforms in a variety of ways. Disney and Pixar’s mobile marketing of the Good Dinosaur on Whisper resembled a Google Adwords campaign. When users on the platform typed in a keyword related to the movie, branded character content from the movie would appear.

Film-branded stickers and emojis are also becoming a growing native opportunity to engage mobile messengers while extending character lives and scene-specific content. Our own research indicates that consumers using branded stickers send 5.5. stickers per session on mobile messaging platforms.

This has led studios such as DreamWorks, Warner Brothers and Lionsgate to launch sticker packs and sticker-enabled apps to correspond with movie premieres for the aforementioned Saban’s Power Rangers, as well as, Wonder Woman, Batman Lego, Fantastic Beasts and Trolls. Once recent mobile sticker campaign that corresponded with a national movie premier drove 350,000 sticker pack downloads and 100M impressions in under 30 days.

Future sticker and emoji campaigns within mobile messaging could soon even include clickable links within mobile stickers that lead consumers to buy a movie ticket via an app like Fandango or see a trailer to an upcoming film on YouTube.

Looking even even further down the road studios will need to examine how to best use AI and messaging bots to circumvent moviegoers only relying on word of mouth and their friends’ text recommendations for movies. Whether studios sponsor robot-given recommendations through a messaging bot on Facebook like andchill or opt for building their own movie recommender bot for their entire studio’s portfolio of films — the future of automated movie recommendations via a text or an iMessage looks bright.

Influencing Movie Choices on Social Media

In the five hours that the average U.S. consumer spends on their mobile device, more than one-third of that time is being spent on social media. Can consumers’ choices be influenced on social media? It appears so, as a past study by Twitter and Nielsen found that 87 percent of Twitter users over 13 said tweets influenced their movie choices.

This provides a big opportunity for movie marketers that are willing to create campaigns, which move beyond only using promoted tweets or sponsored posts. So how do you create engaging content on social media that isn’t just another ad?

Perhaps the best digital marketing campaign to date for a movie release was Deadpool’s in 2016. 20th Century Fox’s online efforts spared no shortage of social media marketing highlights.

From lead actor Ryan Reynolds staged Twitter fight with Hugh Jackman, to running their own click-bait columns across Facebook like “43 Secrets the Internet Will Never Tell You About Kittens,” to knocking out Mario Lopez in an E! TV video shared over 2 million times, the movie’s marketers left no stone unturned on social media. This led to the movie garnering the largest social media footprint of any film since 2013 according to comScore and a whopping $135M opening weekend.

While this breakthrough campaign highlighted the true potential of mobile marketing to influence theater attendance, there is still a lot of ground to cover for Hollywood marketers attempting to reach consumers on mobile devices.

As Mary Meeker of of Kleiner Perkins noted in her annual Internet Trends presentation earlier this year “people spend 28% of their time with mobile media while brands are only spending 21% of their budgets it.”

That represents a $16 billion opportunity that the movie industry must aggressively capitalize on if it hopes to revive Hollywood and movie-going in the minds of mobile millennials. If they continue to replicate some of the more creative mobile marketing campaigns highlighted above, they may have a movie-worthy comeback story on their hands.

The post OPINION: 3 Ways Hollywood Studios Are Finally Embracing Mobile Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

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August 31, 2017 at 05:09AM

Amazons Latest Feature Is An AI That Designs Clothes By Looking At Pictures

8/31/2017

Amazon’s Latest Feature Is An AI That Designs Clothes By Looking At Pictures

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Amazon’s Latest Feature Is An AI That Designs Clothes By Looking At Pictures

Amazon’s Latest Feature Is An AI That Designs Clothes By Looking At Pictures

The e-commerce giant is trying to take a new approach to fashion

What makes a collection sellable? Aspiring fashion retail giant Amazon is planning to answer that question with an AI designer. The company is building a neural network that will make clothing design an automated process, MIT Technology Review reports. For this AI designer, Amazon innovators from Lab 126 created a generative adversarial network or GAN. The GAN is an AI scheme developed by Google engineers that allows computers to understand complex human tasks, continually improve, and generate its eerily human output. In essence, GANs use two neural networks that compete against each other. Basically, one generates the output, the other verifies it. The generating-end improves itself to pass the verifier while the verifier works hard to be more discerning. Datasets, often vast, will help the technology tell the difference between what is stylish and the faux pas. The same system was recently used by Google which turned Street View data into convincing professional photography.

For data, the system has a lot to work with. In the era of self-chronicling, platforms like Instagram have become significant players in the fashion industry. By harvesting the images and using data such as likes and comments on certain looks, Amazon’s AI fashion designer can put a finger on what’s becoming on-trend and what’s ending up on sale bins.

In recent years, fashion retail has turned upon itself. From big designers getting exclusive power to create trends, the next big thing can be a user-generated movement. Edited, a big data analytics company is already helping fashion brands like Topshop and Desigual. The company processes millions of product images, providing their clients a clear idea of what styles are statistically more sellable.

While Amazon is still keeping the project under covers, it’s an interesting one to look out for. In 2016, the long process from the runway to stores have seen several attempts to shrink. The industry is slowly becoming a race of who can spot a trend first and who can respond to the demand. Amazon’s silicon fashion designer might just outrun everyone.

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August 31, 2017 at 05:00AM

Marketers May Look To Telecoms For Omnichannel Help

8/31/2017

Marketers May Look To Telecoms For Omnichannel Help

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New research from the Chief Marketing Officer Council finds that many brands are interested in partnering with telecoms to unlock consumer data to help their marketing programs.

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August 31, 2017 at 04:54AM

PepsiCo's Lagging AMP Energy Gets Organic Reboot

8/31/2017

PepsiCo's Lagging AMP Energy Gets Organic Reboot

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The brand has redesigned its 12-ounce cans (above), and is in the process of updating the look of its website and its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram assets.

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August 31, 2017 at 04:54AM