News and Analysis
BUST: A Timeless Ice Cream Brand Melts
Oberweis Ice Cream and Dairy was founded in 1927 and is an iconic Midwest retail brand. It recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is in the process of reorganizing. The company operates 43 locations in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Missouri. While other ice cream brands thrive, Oberweis owes about $4 million to 20 creditors […]
Hidden Nuggets in Local Address Data for Retail Decisions
It’s no secret that the past few years have been extremely challenging for inventory managers. In 2021 and early 2022, brands faced widespread inventory shortages, while the latter half of 2022 and 2023 saw massive excess inventory levels (as much as $740 billion in unsold goods) as brands worked to counteract the previous year’s shortages […]
Commentary
The Growth of Visual Search
Claire Carlile, in a recent post on visual search that contains useful tips for local businesses, shows us that Google is now making it possible to conduct a search that starts and ends with images. Her example search is conducted using Google Lens, where an image of a Sony headphones package is the “query” that produces a local pack result replete with its own images. This may or may not be the future of search, but it’s highly representative of the visual-first orientation that Google is embracing to a growing degree.
How Brands Can Better Serve Increasingly Elastic Customers
One of the many things the pandemic has demonstrated is the elasticity of consumers – they’ll continue to consume and ‘snap back’ to their preferred methods, albeit with some new expectations. This is what businesses need to know about the elastic consumer and how they can shift practices to best serve their customers in 2022.
Latest Posts
What Every Marketing Team Needs to Thrive in 2022
The economic headwinds businesses face today make it even more important for marketing teams to work smarter in order to drive growth. Businesses should be stepping up their local marketing efforts and running more hyperlocal campaigns if they want to continue to grow through the second half of the year and the first half of 2023.
Retailers Build Internal Infrastructure to Optimize In-Store Advertising
Target, Kroger, Walmart, AT&T, and even the coffee giant Starbucks are all investing in audio out-of-home advertising as a way to direct traffic to existing kiosks inside brick-and-mortar stores. For Starbucks, which is ramping up to allow for mobile ordering at kiosks in more than 1,300 Target stores across the country, the investment in AOOH is especially pronounced.
Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels