30
Mar 07

Target Stores & The Migros School of Retailing

Link to Target : About Target : Our Focus on Design

I must credit my wife for first mentioning this to me: the new Target Stores, and their focus on customer experience, take direct inspiration from the Swiss chain Migros, particularly in the area of store design and product merchandising.

 The telling clue was the recent announcement that Target is carrying Migros’ house- brand chocolate, Frey (in stores only). Once I picked up a large shipment of Frey chocolate, I felt right at home in the newly remodeled Redmond Target store, and starting humming Migros’ jingle. That’s when the revelation hit: Target is collaborating with Migros, and not just in the chocolate aisle.

The most obvious parallel is the color scheme, and it’s relentless application throughout the store: for Target it’s red/white, and for Migros orange/white. But there’s also a very Swiss sense of order and organization, and a consistency in visual merchandising that US stores rarely adopt on that scale (just visit your local department store). The brand selection is another giveaway: Target is carefully mixing mid-scale brand names with upscale house brands.

Next time I’m in Switzerland, I’ll check whether Migros is learning anything from Target. In the meantime, Migros could use some of Target’s advice on Web design…


21
Nov 06

Deeper, Juicer Analytics

The good folks at Juice Analytics maintain a blog rich with analytical hints and tips.

See for instance the “Top Resources for Analysts: Excel, Data Analysis and Business Intelligence, and Charting, Visualization and Presentation


16
Nov 06

Cool Swiss Design II: Swatch Irony Nabab “Black Scepter”

My second Swiss Design purchase this summer was the Swatch Irony Nabab “Black Scepter”. Even though this one was probably designed by Swatch in Italy, let’s count it toward Swiss Design coolness: the Nababs are the heaviest Swatches around, and a great fashion value. This one is available in the US, although it is a previous year model.


16
Nov 06

Cool Swiss Design I: Caran d’Ache Frosty Pen and Pencils


I purchased 10 of these in Switzerland this summer. Caran d’Ache high-end instruments can be found in the US, but their “office product” line seems limited to Switzerland. This are the nicest cheap pens ever – shaped like classical fountain pens, built to survive a Swiss army bootcamp, showing just enough of the traditional Caran d’Ache hexagonal profile.
Update: I found one US vendor who sells these in packs of 10. Christmas stocking stuffers?


25
Oct 06

Pivot Tables

Any analyst who doesn’t know about Pivot Tables in Excel is either wasting time or charging their customer for useless time. Pivot tables are essential to quickly summarize data in Excel. They are the reporting equivalent of “back-of-the-envelope” calculations, but can also be used for long-term reports. Microsoft offers various tutorials on Pivot Tables, I recommend this one.


24
Oct 06

Live from User Experience 2006 – Don Norman

Don Norman’s address yesterday redeemed a slow day. He delivered an entertaining list of challenges along the lines of his pre-released chapter on “Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens”. In typical college professor style, he offered more questions than answers, but he won the crowd over.


23
Oct 06

Live from: User Experience 2006, Seattle – John Boyd

(this is a review of just one of many sessions of User Experience 2006 in Seattle)

As Smorgasbord-design noted, “with NN/g you have to pay for the privilege of dealing with the (experts)”. After almost a day with John Boyd of Yahoo!, there’s no doubt he is an expert, but he seems constrained by how he interpreted his topic. Boyd followed his outline faithfully, even contributed a last-minute “application” addendum to the handout, but nevertheless failed to practically tie social pyschology experiments with Web experiments. There was a glimpse of hope from 11.45 to noon when he really had the audience engaged, but the momentum was lost after lunch and never regained. The handout itself was a dissapointment, never reflecting the richness of the talk. It lacked sentences and verbs and made few lasting points beyond the referenced outline.

powered by performancing firefox


09
Oct 06

Looking forward to Unbox International

Amazon’s Unbox offering is a step in the right direction: offering border-free tv show / movie rental, world-wide. I can’t wait to watch (and pay for) downloads of the orginal “Vidocq” and “Les Brigades du Tigre


09
Oct 06

50% attainment on Google Prediction

In December of last year, I predicted a unified approach to RSS subscriptions for Google. Although that hasn’t happened yet, the underlying issue of a lack of focus has been acknowledged by Google.


09
Oct 06

Analyzing folder contents using Firefox and Excel

When a quick analysis of the contents of a Windows folder is necessary, navigate to that folder using Firefox. Firefox will show an html page with a directory index.

Copy the page content into Excel, and the data can then be manipulated, for instance sorted by date or included in a Pivot Table.

The same can be done from a list of e-mails in Outlook to Excel.