Doubling Mobile Wallet Adoption By Halving Its Scope

In Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments, we saw why consumers were more likely to try out mobile wallets for store loyalty cards than debit or credit cards. In this post, we’ll go beyond initial adoption and see where these two mobile wallet use cases – “mobile loyalty” and “mobile payment” … Read more

Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments

My leather wallet wore out recently. With so much buzz around mobile wallets, I was wondering if I should even bother with another leather wallet. Before switching to a mobile wallet, I inventoried the contents of my wallet and arranged them into two piles. LHS: This pile contained payment related items such as cash, two … Read more

Why People Overestimate Change In Two Years

Bill Gates had once famously remarked, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”. Having witnessed the first part of this statement coming true with so many technologies – biometrics, e-grocery and mobile payments to name a few – … Read more

McDonald’s Versus Subway – How Manufacturing Style Influences Perception Of Quality & Fairness

Comparing McDonald’s with Subway, the recent BusinessWeek article titled Why the McWrap Is So Important to McDonald’s explains how manufacturing style could influence consumer perception of quality. This article got me thinking about the related configure-price-quote process and its repercussions on a company’s margins and reputation as a fair player. For the uninitiated, CPQ is the … Read more

Even If Customers Don’t Bother About Costs, Regulators Do

My recent post The Tug-of-War Between Different Pricing Models sparked a lively debate and attracted several comments and 1-on-1 feedback about whether customers care about costs or not. Some people believe that buyers are only interested in the value they receive from a product and are least bothered about how much it costs a manufacturer to produce … Read more

QR Codes Are 110X More Effective Than Banner Ads – When Done Right

In our past articles (click here and here), we took QR codes for granted wherever we found them and focused on their underlying technology, shared tips on how to get them right and suggested a few goals for after they scanned correctly. For a quick recap, QR codes enable smartphone users to visit websites and landing pages, download … Read more

Stores Have Themselves To Blame For ‘Showrooming’

In How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming?, I’d written about “showrooming”, the new shopping behavior in which consumers use a physical store as a showroom to touch and feel a product but ultimately buy it from an online competitor – often at a lower price. Although showrooming hasn’t yet become mainstream, it’s bound to gain … Read more

How Long Can Malls Remain Open If Stores Inside Them Keep Closing Down?

How Long Can Malls Remain Open If Stores Inside Them Keep Closing Down? Short Answer: Forever. Now for the long version. As I highlighted in Retail Winners & Losers Amidst Skyrocketing Real Estate Costs, many stores are unable to survive on the face of skyrocketing real estate costs. Although this post focused largely on standalone … Read more