Macy’s Focuses On Service To Compete With Online Retailers

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Macy’s saw a 5.5 percent sales bump during the holiday quarter. This is a payoff for the company’s multiyear investment in physical renovations, integrating mobile technologies, and its “Magic Selling” program involving coaching its employees to be friendlier and to help tailor merchandise to local preferences.

This is impressive, given difficultly with Hurricane Sandy, the fiscal cliff and unseasonably warm winter weather during late 2012. J. C. Penney and Best Buy have tried to emulate this, though for Macy’s, the transformation has engaged and been guided by its employees.

Macy offers turn-by-turn GPS guidance helping customers with mobile phones to self-navigate the massive Herald Square store in New York and an integrated inventory system that lets associates find in-stock products and ship direct to customers. Macy’s investments have improved the customer experience by empowering the salesperson, where they are able to differentiate the in-store experience through their personalities and service while delivering on price, assortment, and convenience that customers get through online shopping.

Service is a key component, as the 2012 Kellogg Shopper Index reported 59 percent of shoppers said they received poor or average service that pushed them to go to competitors. There were 40 percent that reported that they never intended to buy online, but a frustrating in-store experience drove them there.

“If we keep the experience worthwhile, consumers will come back,” said Cheryl Berinato, director of consumer insights and strategy at Macy’s during the National Retail Federation’s annual show in January. “Our associates are our most powerful tool.”

Personalizing the customer experience while forging loyalty is built on having talented, trained, and motivated frontline people actively contributing ideas for how to improve operations.

Source: BusinessWeek.com

G4 Becoming Esquire Network On April 22

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NBCUniversal has announced that the G4 Network will become the Esquire Network on April 22.   It will be completely owned by NBC and is described as “an upscale Bravo for men” designed to move away from the game-playing demographic.

“Realistically, guys who are into gaming are not necessarily watching television,” said NBC executive Bonnie Hammer. “If this was going to come under my portfolio, I’m a little brand crazy, so I said, let’s create a real brand, define a space, understand who we are programming for.”

“Much of today’s programming targets men in a one-dimensional way,” said Esquire Network general manager Adam Stotsky, describing the channel focusing on “the modern man.”

Source: New York Times

Ouya CEO Talks About Making New Hardware Every Year

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Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman has confirmed that the company plans to release new versions of the Android console based around new and cheaper hardware every year, with each version backwards compatible with what has come before. With the use of standard components and an open philosophy, she thinks this will help the company against its larger, more well funded competition.

“From a hardware perspective, there’s nothing defendable,” Uhrman said. “We didn’t build a custom chip, we took off the shelf components and just combined them in a different way. What’s unique about Ouya is the business model, the fact that every single game is free to try, that it’s open for every single creator, the fact that we’re bringing games back to the television. But most importantly, we will win if we’re able to develop a great relationship with developers and gamers where the best, newest, and most creative games are on Ouya.”

She also talked about the mandatory “free-to-try” option on all Ouya games, saying, “It cleans up the app store. It removes the confusion between a paid app store and a free app store. We also think it cuts down on the copycat games, where you have games that look like each other and one is paid but the other is free and you don’t know what to do. So we thought the easiest way to remove that and create a great experience for gamers and developers that was rewarding in their own right was to adopt this free-to-try model.”

Source: GamesIndustry International

Xbox 360 Install Base At 76 Million

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Yusuf Mehdi head of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, says that the Xbox 360 install base is at 76 million. This is an increase from 70 million at the end of September 2012.

Mehdi also revealed that 38 percent of Xbox users are women, and more than 51 percent have children. 24 million Kinects have been sold, up from 20 million last year, and there are 46 million Xbox Live accounts, up from 40 million.

As far as usage, U.S. Xbox 360 users are on the device for 87 hours per month. Non-gaming applications are becoming more popular, as there is a 57 percent year-over-year growth in entertainment usage.

Source: AllThingsD

Are You Living Under The Dome?

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During the Superbowl, CBS started to whet the appetite of its audience by airing a teaser for its upcoming series “Under the Dome” based on the book by Stephen King.

The simple teaser mostly promoted a new website, underthedome.com which prompts the user to type in an address and watch their home or office be swallowed up by a mysterious dome.

That’s what happens to a small New England town in the series, which will debut on CBS in June. Read more about the series here.

The website also allows you to sign up to receive more information about the show from the network.

Gree SVP Says Revenue For Top Mobile Games Has Quadrupled

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Anil Dharni, Gree’s SVP of studio operations, indicates that the iPad has led to huge growth in the mobile gaming sector over the past two years. Dharni also thinks that Android is going to continue to grow during 2013.

“It’s 4X and beyond in terms of revenue [compared to a year ago],” said Dharni of the top grossing mobile games.

He also says that while the company is expanding into North America and Europe, the company’s base in Japan has been a great test bed and incubator of game ideas. “While we had been running live games, we weren’t running them at the depth at Gree was,” he added. “What that means is creating new fun and engaging content on a daily or weekly basis. You want your players coming back every week to check what’s new. We conceptually understood this, but didn’t see the extent to which it improves our metrics.”

Source: TechCrunch

World Of Warcraft At 9.6 Million Subscribers

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Activision Blizzard is reporting that World of Warcraft has approximately 9.6 million subscribers. This is a decline of 400,000 subscribers since the game reached 10 million subscribers soon after Mists of Pandaria released.

The publisher noted that World of Warcraft is the “number-one subscription-based MMORPG”. They also said that the expansion was one of two Blizzard titles to place in the top-10 PC games sales in North America and Europe in the calendar year 2012, with Mists of Pandaria taking the number three spot.