Sweat the small stuff

Shortly after arriving at DTDigital, I was asked to prepare a presentation for the WPP Global Retail Forum taking place here in Sydney. Generally speaking I'm more accustomed to giving presentations to people in jeans than suits, and never before in Australia, so I was a bit nervous to say the least - but they were a lovely crowd and gave warm feedback. Phew!

Anyway, I was pretty impressed with the breadth of presentations on the day. A few takeaways:

• Retailers need to be much more transparent with their pricing then they are at present. Customers are in your shop armed with information which is accurate, portable, real-time and free.
• A free eBook from Google called Zero Moment of Truth came up a few times - haven't read it yet but apparently it's pretty good 
• The JCPenney case study (3 year experiment) is worth keeping an eye on - they've completely revamped their brand and have ditched the mark-downs previously littered throughout the year. Very interesting from a marketers point of view, although early signs are mixed.
• 75% of everything sold in America is sold at a 50% discount!

Some refreshingly useful social media stuff too, from Angela Morris at JWT - good to see this industry is finally growing up:

• 0.5% of people who 'like' a brand have created any content around it
• Only 6% of people want brand interaction in a social space (the rest want to be left alone, thank you)
• Only 8% of people who interacted with a brand in a social space (so that's 8% of 6% who bothered in the first place, for those keeping score) said that the experience was 'really good'

Seems to reinforce my point of view - the primary role of brands in the social space is as a service mechanism. If someone complains, offer to help and then follow through.

So...my talk was called 'Sweat the small stuff' - a diatribe about paying attention to detail across five key areas of your online offering. I only had 20 minutes and so kept it quite light. Here are the slides. Pictures of sweaty men were added by one of our Creative Directors - if you like them, let me know and I'll make sure the credit gets to him!