The SmartVideo Blog

Each year thousands of digital marketing mavens from the top 500 internet retailers in the world to entrepreneurs with startup fever in their blood, flock to the annual Shop.org summit to listen and learn to the latest and greatest the industry has to offer. This year was no different as over 4,500 professionals from the online retail industry gathered in Denver last week.

I just returned from two days at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum where leading industry speakers shared thought-provoking ideas and powerful content. Simply put, this event helped solidify my view of the future where the customer is at the center of competitive strategy for the leaders in every industry. In fact, Harley Manning of Forrester shared a graph that compared 5-year total return of customer experience leaders (up 22%) to customer experience laggards (down 46%) to the S&P 500 (down 1%). Clearly, companies adopting a customer-centric strategy are already proving that we are in the “Age of the Customer.”

You know the story. China is on the move and they’re coming for your job. They can do it cheaper, faster and better than the rest of the world and while the economies of the West struggle to keep a nostril above water, China expands with the vigor of a 90’s baseball slugger.

Yesterday I shared the top five themes I took away from this week’s Videonuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit. Now I want to take a deeper dive into a brand that is at the top of its game not only in online video advertising, but also in front of the “connected consumer” on all fronts: Macy’s.

According to Cisco, data traffic will grow 10x by 2016 while online revenue will only double. Retailers are absolutely overwhelmed right now with technology options to help them acquire, convert, retain and expand customer relationships within the online realm. Yet, learning how to leverage data to communicate with customers appears to be at the crux of defining winners and losers in the market. Without proper information flow and visual information experiences, both users and business managers bog down with "information overload" and become frustrated with shopping.

We recently attended the 2012 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) in Chicago to check the online industry pulse on emerging trends, best practices, and innovations in retail. The discussions, sessions and networking provided a great platform for defining and understanding the way the world shops today and in the future.