Yet brands’ approach to acknowledging and celebrating the holiday vary, according to a piece in PRNEWS. Some companies have chosen to make it a paid day off for employees—a trend that’s gaining traction—while others have taken a more educational approach.

Target, for instance, paid workers time-and-a-half to work on Juneteenth. And last year, not long after May 25, the day of George Floyd’s killing, Amazon donated $10 million to justice organizations and urged employees to take time to reflect and learn on June 19—a suggestion poorly received by some in light of the retail giant’s reputation for not providing sufficient work breaks for employees. Victoria’s Secret, a brand accused of lacking relevance and failing to align with women’s evolving beauty standards, sent customers a dedicated email pointing to the brand’s long list of commitments to Juneteenth.

But though conversations about Juneteenth have increased, not all companies are observing the holiday yet—or even communicating about it. PR pro Jenny Wang, a vice president at Clyde Group, suggests that companies emphasize education internally and concentrate on communicating within about the additional work that’s needed around diversity and inclusion. Conversations that take place during smaller staff meetings or employee resource groups may prove more effective. Further, if a company mentions the holiday externally without doing to the work internally, those words “will ring hollow.”

For more on how brands can approach messaging—and actions—surrounding Juneteenth, read on in PRNEWS.

The post How Brands Are Showing Support for Juneteenth Holiday appeared first on Chief Marketer.

What’s more, in its five-year history, Prime Day has gone from being about only Amazon’s brand to seeing 250 other retailers trying to partake in the sales event. Indeed, Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, eBay and other brands seemed to have FOMO (fear of missing out) on consumers’ escalating Prime Day fever.

At the same time, too many industry analysts will focus on the discounts as being key to such success. While deals attract customers, retailers that want to win the holiday season should take note—Amazon during Prime Day showed it is advancing the space in three key areas.

Embracing a channel-agnostic mindset 

At this juncture in retail history, it cannot be underemphasized the way consumers think about their location at any given moment as part of the customer experience. In the last two years, Google mobile searches for “near me” that also contain the copy “can I buy” and “to buy” have jumped 500 percent. Constantly shopping on smartphones—in stores, on the way to work, in the office, at home—has made customers channel-agnostic. Brands need to be, too, particularly because customers expect order delivery and returns to be convenient for them. It’s a crucial aspect of acquiring new patrons and creating loyal ones.

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Prime Day made evident that Amazon embraces the channel-agnostic mindset. For instance, it leveraged the physical presence of Whole Foods in almost every conceivable way. Through various online and offline channels, Amazon pitched Whole Foods specials for Prime Day several days before the big event while also offering $10 Prime Day credits for anyone who spent $10 or more in one of the grocery stores.

Amazon may want to consider expanding Whole Foods’ role by offering all locations as a drop-off point for Amazon orders. This idea was reportedly in the works back in 2017 but hasn’t happened. At the same time, Amazon has partnered with Kohl’s and Rite Aid to provide convenient offline returns. With Amazon’s strategy to seamlessly mesh ecommerce and offline retail, one can almost bet that Amazon’s online returns will soon include Whole Foods stores.

Combining CX with the big TV spot

Amazon is transforming how “the big sales event” or “Christmas in July sale” is marketed, pushing the sales-event concept forward from the simplistic, blanketed TV advertising of years past to data-driven customer experience. It achieved this accomplishment by layering its Prime ads such as the buzzy Taylor Swift spot with personalized offers via email and its mobile app.

Indeed, Prime Day was the latest signal that personalization rules the day. If you had searched on Amazon for a wallet before the sales event, Amazon sent you a deal on an RFID-powered billfold. If you had searched for beauty products on the platform, Amazon sent you special offers for cosmetic kits. If you had searched Amazon for golf irons, your Prime Day deal included discounted Callaways or Pings. Like numerous retailers, Amazon email recipients were probably subject to a bit of FOMO due to the targeted offers.

Creating loyalty with first-party data and permission
In a span of 48 hours this week, Amazon gained millions of new Prime customers who will not only give permission for Amazon to use their purchase data but also their Amazon search data, as they use the ecommerce platform over time. The company’s machine learning will take such intelligence, crunch the numbers and make offers that are increasingly timely and relevant. Because of this data, Amazon Prime Day will only strengthen the ecommerce behemoth’s ability to improve personalization and drive loyalty among its newest customers.

Also, Amazon recognizes that it’s imperative to keep customers up-to-date about where their order is in the fulfillment system. The company uses order tracking pages that are easily accessible via mobile and the web. Such useful features make customers feel like the data they give retailers permission to use is a worthy value exchange.

Amazon’s Prime Day success shows the ecommerce player is increasingly channel-agnostic, focuses on the customer experience and leverages first-party data. These tactics help form a strategy that underscores why so many large competitors had FOMO and were scurrying to compete.

It’s all about creating loyalty by taking care of customers during their path to purchase and after their order is placed. Consider that it costs six times more to attract new customers than it does to maintain them. Instead of focusing only on the best deals to keep up with Amazon, retailers should take note of what the retail giant does beyond the sale. No matter what time of year, it’s important for brands to always think about the customer experience first.

Amit Sharma is CEO of Narvar.

The post Amazon Prime Day: 3 Takeaways Every Retailer Should Know appeared first on Chief Marketer.

In coordination with Prime Day, Amazon launched a $10 store credit incentive for customers who install Amazon Assistant, a browser extension for comparison shopping across the web. Though Amazon Assistant has been around for years, the adoption push from the company last week is timely and even predictable, considering how much harder it just became to collect user data from third parties without an opt-in.

It’s no surprise that Amazon would go for those opt-ins during deal days. Unlike Google, Apple and Microsoft, Amazon doesn’t have its own browser to leverage as a portal into what’s happening off its own site—data it could use to improve its marketing, products, and services.

But the promotion is still rubbing some the wrong way. By agreeing to the terms of Amazon Assistant’s free service, customers are, knowingly or not, agreeing to be followed around online, to share some of their behavioral patterns and interaction data with Amazon. The hope, of course, is that they’ll do so knowingly. Somehow, though, the open commoditization of this tacit agreement—complete with a $10 price tag—felt kind of icky to some. (The Prime Day timing might not have helped…you half expected to see Your Privacy advertised on those Deals Under $10 lists). It’s sparking criticism around the move’s inherent self-interest, fueling speculation of intentional misdirection and trickery.

But is that really fair?

In this new era of consumer behavior, our access to products, goods, and services is increasingly limited to a handful of merchants, and by extension, our purchases are, too. Shoppers are increasingly ok with this whole thing—we’re getting more ok with it all the time, in fact, if the steady dominance of Mary Meeker’s top five is any indicator. Despite cautionary headlines, it turns out most consumers would rather get to the best purchase outcome easier and faster, even if it means giving up control, choice and even privacy in the process.

Of course, paying for convenience—whether through brand loyalty or outsourcing the effort of decision-making to an assistant (human or bot)—is absolutely nothing new. It just wasn’t really middle-class behavior, and it was a luxury paid for with money, not data. What has changed about convenience today is its currency, and with that, its democratization.

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As Amazon’s willingness to pay users to install Amazon Assistant indicates, consumers can now choose the more convenient shopping path at every price point because data as currency evens the playing field. Shoppers’ data—precious, unique, ever-evolving and, best of all, effortless—is their inexhaustibly deep pocket, available and within their power to monetize. In the best case, the willing and secure exchange of personal data can be the ticket to a more bespoke, luxurious shopping experience than many would otherwise be able to afford.

Of course…there’s also the worst case. But if anything, Amazon’s promotion should be seen as a sign of progress.

In this mid-2019 post-storm tentative calm, scandals around the misuse and abuse of consumer privacy are becoming fewer and regulation is coming to bear, putting more power in the hands of consumers. That power will continue to change shape from the simple option to say No to being tracked to the ability to say Yes, but.

The notion of consumers selling their own data, at different price points for different gains, is just kicking off, and, once the stigma wears off, it’s likely to normalize. And maybe, in an eerie parallel to other lessons we’ve been forced to confront in the last couple of years, the next chapter of the data story is about the mutual benefits of a value exchange based on honest communication and responsibly-obtained, knowingly expressed consent. Amazon is just turning the first page.

Margo Kahnrose is SVP of marketing for Kenshoo.

The post Amazon Assistant and the Value of Ecommerce Data appeared first on Chief Marketer.

There’s The Glenlivet Dram Room experiential pop-up where digitized samples and smart delivery channels encouraged visitors to try its spirits. Jameson Irish Whiskey dropped $14 million to transform its Dublin distillery into a fully immersive experiential marketing platform. And in a campaign to try and dethrone Grey Goose, Pernod Ricard held a VIP experience in the CEO’s expansive private loft space and only those that knew how to open a secret bookcase door had a way in.

SpiritsBusiness.com came up with its own list of the top spirits marketing campaigns in December 2017, the hottest—and most critical—month for selling spirits to holiday partiers and New Year’s revelers. And the brand they chose didn’t disappoint.

Several focused on responsible drinking like Diageo’s Join the Pact campaign that drew 7 million pledges to never drink and drive. Jim Beam launched the first smart decanter, which can answer questions all the while serving bourbon from a sleek spout. Pernod Ricard developed voice-activate cocktail-making skills with the Amazon Show device.

In all, SpiritsBusiness.com showcases the 10 different innovative spirits campaigns in an easy-on-the-eyes slide show with large graphics.

With 2018 now underway, these brands will only ramp up innovation and creativity to surpass the bar already in place. We’ll be watching!

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The post The Best Spirits Marketing Campaigns of 2017 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Bloomberg News reports that Amazon.com and PayPal are in discussions to allow Amazon shoppers to pay for purchases using their PayPal accounts.

“We’re closing in on 200 million users on our platform right now,” said PayPal CEO Dan Schulman in an interview with Bloomberg.” At that scale, it’s hard for any retailer to think about not accepting PayPal.”

PayPal split from Amazon rival eBay Inc. in 2015 to concentrate on expanding its electronic transactions business. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2016, PayPal had 197 million active customer accounts, up from 179 million at the end of 2015. On average, users made 31 payments on their accounts, and transactions totaled $1.8 billion for the quarter.

The possible PayPal deal isn’t the only news on the Amazon online payment front. Earlier this month, the ecommerce titan announced a new credit card for Amazon Prime members.

As Forbes.com notes, the move is clearly a move to help increase the already sizable Amazon Prime membership base. Last year, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimated that about 46% of U.S. households have at least one Prime membership.

Other retailers aren’t rolling over in the wake of the Amazon juggernaut however. Chief Marketer’s sister site Multichannel Merchant reports that Walmart has lowered its free two-day shipping threshold to $35 from $50 on two million items.

Of course, as MCM’s Mike O’Brien points out, free two-day shipping alone isn’t enough. “While it will certainly generate more traffic, interest and buzz around the site, Walmart.com has to go quite a bit further to create the ‘have to have’ compelling nature and cache of Amazon Prime, with membership perks like unlimited photo storage, streaming video and music.”

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The post Amazon and PayPal in Online Payment Talks appeared first on Chief Marketer.