Can you see me in this? Mobiles in the changing room:

Shoppers sending pictures of prospective purchases by Smartphones are altering habits on the high street

Phone companies on the lookout for trends in the millions of texts, calls and internet searches made every hour have identified hotspots around store changing rooms as shoppers photograph themselves trying on new outfits then beam the images to friends for an instant verdict.

Young fashion shoppers "spend longer and longer in changing rooms . . . They go in and put on two or three outfits, take pictures, send them to friends and wait to get their opinions back"

However the real money quote: "We know they are doing it because we can see messages going out from a particular corner of a store." Vodafone............

Wild Boar selects the wrong butcher…

A small-town German butcher said on Monday he faces steep bills after a wild boar tore through his shop in an hour-long rampage but will at least recover some of his losses by selling slices of the slain beast. The boar wandered out of a nearby forest and into the shop and caused about 5,000 euros ($6,600) in damage before being shot by a local hunter, butcher Rainer Kraemer told Reuters.

The 130-kg (290 lbs) boar will only fetch about 400 euros in ham and wurst sales after Kraemer finishes carving it up.

Moral: He who tries to steal lunch, can sometimes end up as lunch…

Have a fair-share weekend, from the Namnews Team!

Extending the BOGTF into product innovation…?

Pic: Andrew Sullivan
With Buy-One-Get-Two-Free rapidly gaining traction on the sales side, it was only a matter of time before marketing found a way of catering for niche-appetites and reducing packaging via the "cherpumple", a three-layer cake (yellow, spice and white) with a pie baked inside each layer (cherry, apple, pumpkin)... Full details including slideshow & Recipe on Wall Street Journal site
Have a multilevel weekend-fest, from the Namnews Team!

Poundland plans to go online?

With a 29% increase in turnover to £509m via 320 stores, Poundland have moved into mainstream retailing.

Appealing to two groups of savvy consumers who seldom forget lessons learned in austerity, their regular shoppers are those who need to save money, and those who choose to do so…

Going online will simply remove some costs and broaden Poundland’s appeal.

No longer an outlet for ad hoc ‘special packs’, or ends-of-lines, the pound shops now sell regular lines and brands, albeit forecasting ‘overages’ on a transaction basis that has somehow become essential…

Their ability to grab headlines will increase the competitive threat they represent to the multiples and discounts, probably resulting in retaliatory pricing moves?

Perhaps it is time to scope out the options, run the numbers, reassess their competitive appeal and factor poundshops into your trading strategies, before the multiples do it for you?

Running the ‘happy’ numbers…?

Millionaire Prime Minister David Cameron has made no secret of his wish for a greater focus on well-being rather than wealth and has asked the statistics agency for help.
Over the coming months - just as a savage government austerity programme kicks in - the country's statisticians will devise a set of questions to measure Briton's subjective quality of life.
These responses will form the basis of a new guage that will be published at regular intervals, perhaps alongside figures like GDP.

Essentially, the Office for National Statistics will quantify happiness, thus allowing us to complete the negotiation-calculation jigsaw in Namcalc.

Rest assured that as soon as they produce a robust formula, we shall quickly adapt it to measure KAM post-negotiation spirits-level (cause & effect?), the ultimate KPI?

Have a truely high-spirited weekend, from the Namnews Team!

WH Smith getting organised for Christmas?

Pic at 1300, 13th November 2010, WH Smith Brighton....

Office filing system, portable/vulnerable?

Checked your laptop lately?
How many of us carry the equivalent of the entire office filing system in our travels, 24/7?

                                                                Pic: Xerox

Time to split the files (archive & working files) and reduce the risk?

Buy One Get Two Free, serious?

Running the numbers on a BOGTF suggests that if the initiative becomes as 'popular' as a BOGOF, the supplier will end up providing the two free units per deal...
...suppliers should possibly be grateful that they are not also invited to maintain retailer margins, given that the retailer will still lose approx 50% on each deal...!

Choccywoccydoodah: Making specialist retail really special…

Visitors to this Brighton cake shop and chocolatier need no reminding of the team’s design creativity in producing the cake of someone’s dreams.
However, the really creative leap has been to encourage The Good Food Channel to produce a TV series that will feature the personal stories behind some of their unique creations. Time for NAMs & KAMs to think really deeply about what makes their specialist channel special, and fuse it with a medium ravenous for interesting content?
Have an indulgent weekend, from the Namnews Team!

Incremental sales to cover VAT increase?

If you absorb January’s 2.5% VAT increase, you could require 24% in incremental sales to cover the cost..

Do you really think the consumer or the retailer will share the pain?
See our inhouse bespoke Namcalc workshop for 34 similar 'day-job' calculations, with incremental sales implications, applied to your categories, customers and competition.