Street Fight Daily: Winners and Losers in Amazon/Whole Foods, Walmart Counters With Bonobos

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Who Wins and Who Loses in Amazon’s Blockbuster Deal to Buy Whole Foods (Quartz)
The deal will impact more than supermarkets, though. It will hit merchants across the broader retail industry, as well as food-delivery companies, stock investors, and maybe even the drone business. Here’s a quick rundown of winners and losers from the deal. Local Onliner: How Amazon will use Whole Foods as a local retail anchor and lifestyle platform. Geomarketing: The deal will quickly solve Amazon’s grocery ambitions as well as Whole Foods’ lagging tech.

Report: Delivery Apps Don’t Cannibalize Restaurant Visits (Street Fight)
Sense360’s analysis found no evidence that delivery apps lead to significant drops in restaurant visits. The analysis also found that consumers who download delivery apps tend to have higher incomes, and visit fine dining restaurants 2.5x more frequently, than those who haven’t downloaded these apps.

Will Buying Brands Like Bonobos Give Walmart the Upscale Cred It Covets? (Slate)
Jacob Brogan: The Bonobos deal suggests an important story about the ways Walmart is striving to reach out into new markets—some of Amazon’s markets, in fact—especially when seen in light of some of its other recent moves.

Making Sense of Posts in Google’s SMB Product Portfolio (Street Fight)
“In local, most businesses do not have a transaction so Google wants to control the action,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “If they can sell an ad, great, and if not then they take credit for a click or a call, driving directions or response to a CTA (and gather the data of those activities).”

Local Store Pages on Facebook Deliver for Brands (MediaPost)
From Facebook to Yelp, it’s still common for national retailers to support a single brand page. By doing so, however, they’re missing a huge opportunity to engage customers at the local level.

How Fashion Brands Are Trying to Connect with Gen-Z (Digiday)
Perhaps the most overarching theme of Gen Z is a focus on individuality that expands upon the non-conformity of millennials. YPulse data shows that 82 percent of consumers ages 13-17 don’t care about brand names, 75 percent enjoy testing new brands and 66 percent think brands that experiment with new ways to sell or deliver products are innovative.

Will Tronc Get Squeezed Out of a Sun-Times Acquisition?  (Newsonomics)
A successful Eisendrath effort would leave the company’s other known bidder — Tronc, the U.S.’s third largest daily newspaper company in much turmoil for the last year, as Gannett mangled its own takeover attempt of the company last year — on the sidelines. If that happens, the impact on Tronc’s own finances may not be minimal.

Comparing Responses to In-App and Mobile Web Ads (eMarketer)
A global study of smartphone usage found scant differences in consumer response to advertising on the mobile web vs. in-app ads.

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