An article in USA Today reports that as of March 10th, Target will allow customers to take advantage of special mobile-coupon offers on their handsets. In the article, Target.com President Steve Eastman states that Target is one of the first nationwide retailers to start this type of promotion. alqemyiQ is predicting that category managers will need to integrate mobile data analytics into their reporting process and CIOs and their IT departments will need to plan for this huge influx of data that mobile couponing will bring. Read more…

In a rapidly evolving CPG world, the arena of marketing can be a difficult place. Marketing departments and their CMOs are consistently asked to justify the effectiveness of all money spent, and that is a very difficult thing in an industry in which the technological potential and ideas for connecting with customers are always being chased by the actual development of tangible technology infrastructure. In a recent interview in CGT, staff writer Albert Guffanti discussed the dilemma with Kevin Tigges, Microsoft’s Consumer Goods Industry Solutions Director. Read more…

Consumer Goods Technology recently posted an article on their website that truly shows the rate at which mobile technology is starting to dominate the retail world. According to their figures, mobile online shopping rose in the United States from $396 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2009. Read more…

            When a technology platform moves from fledgling to becoming a dominant medium in a market, it often brings a whole new type of economy. In the most recent issue of Information Management, editorial director Jim Ericson explored what a web data service economy implies for businesses. In the article, Ericson again touched on the in-between state of the data management enterprise. “There is reason to hope and believe,” he writes, “that the last few years have given rise to a new era of maturity in data and information management. The early limitations of hardware and networks, and ensuing challenges of application and data integration, are largely conquered (or at least understood) for now. CPU and storage costs are less and less a barrier to any project, and analytic tools have matured.” This seems an overall optimistic view of the state of the data management industry. Read more…

Just before the shopping craze of the recent holiday season, an article was published in the Money section of USA Today discussing the pros and cons of the extremely fast-growing phenomenon of mobile shopping, that is, on your smartphone. Clearly the potential of mobile retail is still fairly latent, but some of the article’s contributors would have their readers forewarned: it is the future.

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In a recent article from Information Management magazine, the complex, changing world that is data management today was discussed by Robin Bloor, a Hurwitz Group analyst. Bloor’s topic, aptly title “The Semantics of Information Management,” was focused on the way data is labeled in the process of capturing. “Since we started collecting data in files, then in hierarchical databases, relational databases and object databases, we did not store the meaning of the data in any comprehensive way. We were labeling things, and that was all we could say about them. There was no formal statement for what it is.” This lack of a comprehensive, cohesive way of labeling data is a problem for CPG companies both great and small. Often one company’s analysts will work with numerous data feeds and file formats, which can each be very semantically different, whether that refers to the way a product is tagged, the way data feeds refer to a major manufacturer, etc. Bloor put it well when comparing this labeling problem to “a sentence [that] contains all the semantics that provide the context of the sentence, but nothing to explicitly tell you what the sentence means. The interpretation is up to you.” Read more…

Time: January 28, 2010 at 2:00-3:00 PM EST
Registration: http://www.alqemyiqcorp.com/resources/webinars

Overview
Learn how to create insightful presentations from multiple sources of data and data file formats. In 3 easy steps, you can transform complex database files containing valuable product, promotion and pricing information into colorful charts and graphs of segmented data. This transformation will unlock insights from the massive amount of raw data that category managers receive on a regular basis. In this webinar, you will see how to use DataAlchemy to import data, create segments and build presentation templates that can be automatically updated when new data becomes available. Read more…

After interviewing several category managers, the alqemyiQ marketing team identified a few unique and common problems in the world of the category manager. First there is the fact that the job is done differently by the many different people who fill it. There is no set way to manage a category. On top of that, or more precisely lending to it, is the fact that the job of a category manager involves serving two masters. The manager is usually working for a manufacturer to grow the manufacturer’s category, but also working with the retailer trying to optimize sales and gain the trust needed to become an advisor to the retailer.

In order to serve these two masters best, the category manager uses a number of tools to help managers optimize pricing and promotions tailored to a specific retailer and even specific stores. They will use an inordinate amount of data from consumers, retailers, syndicated data providers, private parties, manufacturers, online advertising results, etc. The list could go on forever as to the various data sources that will help a category manager to accomplish the main task of the job: to grow the category.

On the front lines of growing the category, the category manager will have a hand in developing planograms (the diagram of what an item or items will look like on the shelf) for the retailer. The manager will also work closely with the category captain (usually the leading supplier in a certain category) to continue to grow the category. Through sound methodology used for data analysis to optimize pricing and promotions and through trustworthy relationships with both the manufacturer and the retailer, the category will grow. The best category managers will then take what works and duplicate it.

A recent article in CGT touches base on the top tech trends of 2009 for the consumer goods industry. The article notes that IT spending is being closely monitored and an emphasis on business investments for enterprise solutions is taking priority. As 2010 quickly approaches us, be sure to keep a watchful eye on these issues and look for solutions that can assist in tracking your return on investment. Information related to what applications are being used, by who and how often will be important for measuring ROI and will bring value to your department and company as a whole. The complete article and webinar can be found on the CGT website, at the following link …

           A quick glance around your office or local coffee shop will provide sufficient evidence that mobile technology has become prevalent in present day life and that its popularity is ever on the rise. A report from Morgan Stanley’s October 2009 Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco claims that mobile technology is the incremental driver of Internet user growth. Read more…