China’s social media landscape is renowned for its complexity. As each social media platform looks to monetise faster and further than its competitors, brands are dealing with a constantly moving environment, and nailing a strategy across this can be extremely complicated.

Within this nebulous environment, brands have to learn to navigate and make use of the market size in the most efficient manner – setting quality over quantity. To help cut through the noise and complex social media structure in China, we have selected some key channels that are an essential starting place. Read More »

Businesses often strive for customer loyalty, but little frustrations such as poor service, lack of integration between online and offline stores, and purchases requiring too much effort on the consumers part have caused them to take their business elsewhere.

Consumers are not just stuck to shopping at one store or using one service provider, meaning they can be choosy about where they buy their goods, and 58% of customers have terminated contracts or changed suppliers because of continued service failings, showed a survey by Redwood.  Read More »

Hello and welcome to this week’s Espresso of Innovation; the hottest news and strongest stories from the world of creativity and technology filtered into a quick shot of inspiration. This week we’re taking a little turn on the catwalk.

Following on from the launch of the intimacy dress 2.0 that we covered in our Valentine Espresso I wanted to find out a bit more about technology and fashion. Read More »

HMV’s wounds are a stark example of the beating high-street brands are taking from online competitors. It is one of a long list of retail brands that have been battered on the high street. Others that have either closed or face an uncertain future include Jessops, fashion chain Republic and Blockbusters.

All are seemingly casualties of the digital age as many high-street retailers struggle against the tide of convenience offered to consumers by online shopping models.

So what is the solution? We spoke to retail PR expert, Caireen Wackett, who is a partner at PR firm Portas — founded by Mary “Queen of Shops” Portas — about the role digital PR can play in savingBritain’s ailing high-street. Read More »

As Chinese New Year celebrations draw to a close, it is a great opportunity to reflect on what the Year of the Snake could mean for UK businesses looking to take advantage of the huge market potential in China.

Chinese wisdom states that the Snake brings good luck, and that the year ahead will be a period marked by ‘steady progress and attention to detail, where focus and discipline will be necessary for you to achieve what you set out to create’. Read More »

According to the Centre of Economics and Business Research (CEBR) online prices are falling at their highest rate for five years. With the festive price war already in full flow, competition in the run-up to Christmas is fierce. With discounts everywhere a customer looks, whether they browse online or in store, how do brands compete for those all-important sales? Read More »

With over half of all shoppers reported to be using smartphones as an aid to so-called Robo (Research offline, buy online) shopping, you would expect Britain’s major retail chains to be walking the walk when it comes to digital retail services. But how much of the alleged £222,222 of customer spending that takes place every minute during the UK’s Cyber Monday are the traditional retailers actually getting a share of?

There may be a spike in Christmas spending with department stores such as John Lewis, Debenhams, Marks & Spencer and Argos, but recent research into online spending, shows that 62% of UK consumers don’t rate the top high street brands when they’re shopping online.  Read More »

The devastation of Superstorm Sandy (also dubbed Frankenstorm) is still being felt across much of the east coast of America, it claimed more 66 lives in the Caribbean before making its way to the US, where the death toll is now over 70.  There are eight million homes in 17 states without power and there’s an estimated cost of $50bn.

Although the immediate danger of Sandy has passed, the relief efforts, clean up and re-building will be ongoing for many years to come.

Social media has historically played an important role during crisis and times of natural disaster, and Superstorm Sandy is no different.  The word Sandy has been mentioned in social channels more than 4.8 million times and there are many examples over the last few days of how social media has been used by Government, organisations, brands and individuals for support, information, fun, trolling and… marketing.  Let’s take a look at some of the good, the bad and ugly examples. Read More »

While social media is booming one area that is not is social commerce. It is struggling to take off and this study and infographic from media agency MPG Media Contacts and Lightspeed Research points to the lack of social media included on ecommerce sites.

Why that is the case is pretty simple. Consumers use social media as both recommendations and inspiration when shopping online, but are reluctant to use links from social sites to buy.

What they want the study says is for brands to make their own sites more social and invest more in developing ways for their consumers to share photos, videos and product reviews. Read More »

Retail giant Walmart may be making a lot of noise about its commitment to selling online, but the reality is that it seems to have comparatively little to show for the vast investment it has made in developing its own on-site search function.

Walmart has received a lot of coverage recently with the unveiling of its new search engine Polaris, which it has developed in-house through WalmartLabs.

While this move does demonstrate the retail giant’s commitment to e-commerce, a closer look at what has been done is likely to leave you questioning why the retailer doesn’t have more to show from its investment. Read More »