When John Lewis, a leading U.K. retailer, faced challenges with running its new, geographically distributed at home shops, Cisco IBSG knew that the problems could be solved through the innovative use of video technology. Within the retail industry, video collaboration has historically been regarded as a head-office capability, with the notion that video and mobile technology at the shop level were both too expensive to implement and too complex to use. This was an opportunity to prove otherwise and create a retail industry first.
Maggie Porteous, head of at home for John Lewis, was challenged with helping the new teams get to know the new shop format and with bringing them together to share learnings and improve operations. And while she wanted the dispersed shop teams to be able to work together, frequent travel was time-consuming, costly, and, most important, meant time away from serving customers.
Working with John Lewis CIO Paul Coby, we chose two critical concepts to pilot for the core retail use cases:
Two days ago, DC Shoes, retailer of footwear & gear for Extreme Sports, released the latest of their GYMKHANA video series, titled “DC and Ken Block present Gymkhana FIVE: Ultimate Urban Playground; San Francisco.” This video broke all the records from their previous videos, currently achieving 14 million views in its first four days.
Gymkhana is a form of motorsport where drivers a preset course featuring obstacles such as tires, cones and barrels in timing/speed competition. DC shoes CEO, Ken Block is their president, chief brand ambassor and an accomplished rallycross racer.
Some interesting facts about the DC Ken Block Gymkhana Project’s marketing effectiveness
Have been thinking about the retail implications of an early May article in the Wall Street Journal.
“Renting Prosperity” (by Daniel Gross, May 5) spoke to the growing trend of rental – and not just in the traditional housing or automotive markets. Numerous other rental business have emerged in recent years, from the Zipcar car-sharing plan to the Chegg.com college textbook service to the one million customers who have used Rent the Runway’s frock-and-accessory services.
The obvious implication for retail is all about new business models. A number of traditional brick-and-mortar players are now testing the waters. We’re aware of initiatives in which purveyors of hard goods are renting clothes washing machines by the load and high-end consumers of electronics are leasing home theatre set-ups and even iPads – along with monthly subscriptions, say, to Netflix.
But the lessons of the rental trend go deeper than simply a new business model.
Welcome to my first blog as Cisco Senior Director, Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Retail Marketing. On Monday, June 11th I will join thousands of our customers from across the world as we gather in San Diego to work and learn together at Cisco Live!
Many of our customers come to Cisco Live to learn about the latest IT and network innovations. This year, you can not only see the latest IT innovations around networking, data center, collaboration, video, and cloud, but you can also learn about, discuss and experience solutions purpose-built for industry based on those platforms. See how they can help you transform your business processes in ways you never managed to deliver greater productivity, operational efficiency, and customer service. Here’s a list of must-see industry-focused topics that you may want to join. I hope to see you there.
Rob Soderbery -- Senior Vice President, Enterprise Networking Group, Cisco
Join Rob Soderbery, SVP for Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group, for a discussion about how Cisco is driving innovation across its core portfolio of Catalyst switching, access routing and wireless networking technologies that will help you navigate these transitions. Soderbery will demonstrate how Cisco solutions come together so you can deliver a secure and uncompromised user experience to your customers, partners and employees
