Pacific Sunwear: Tracking Business Trends with BI

With more than 900 PacSun stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, Pacific Sunwear is a leading lifestyle specialty retailer rooted in the youth culture and fashion vibe of Southern California, offering private-label and national brands, including Hurley, Billabong, Fox, Volvom, Vurt, Roxy and Quiksilver. In 2006, Pacific Sunwear was looking for effective ways to evaluate and improve business performance in order to achieve long-term growth. The goal was for executives to be able to access strategic information each day and then perform timely analysis of business trends and key metrics without significantly increasing IT staff or replacing legacy systems. In addition, the company wanted to reduce paper consumption by 50 percent through a significant reduction in the use of printed reports. Pacific Sunwear searched for an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution while at the same time consolidating its corporate data into a cohesive structure. Ultimately, the company selected Micro- Strategy as its BI standard and Quantisense for its retail-specific BI capabilities. Netezza was chosen as the high-performance BI hardware platform. The result, according to Pacific Sunwear's vice president of information technology Steve Rosenberg, is that the solution has enabled the company to deliver time-sensitive business performance metrics to a broad audience, while also enabling it to analyze performance and take action to drive results. "With the ability to access sales information by style, color, size, store, date/time of transaction along with other key product and location attributes, our associates no longer have to sift through volumes of reports to find information," he says. "We now rely on a core set of reports that provide flexible views of sales, inventory and sourcing data, and we have the ability to quickly create new reports to answer specific business performance questions as they arise." Improving the Monday-morning meetings PacSun's enterprise dashboard reporting application now provides a single channel of company-wide business reporting and analysis and a holistic view of all corporate data. Users can view information flexibly, by division, department, product attributes and location, at any time. For example, a buyer is able to look at all the hot-selling items and quickly get in touch with the vendor to speed up an order, resulting in fewer out of stocks and increased sales. "Once we went live with the application, we quickly saw that our Monday meetings were more effective, and that metrics and data were more standardized across the company," said John Fontana, senior vice president of supply chain and information technology. The QuantiSense application and Micro- Strategy's dynamic enterprise dashboards provide great scalability, performance and flexibility, he says, and enhance the company's view into the trends and the performance of the business. Pacific Sunwear's users are able to produce highly productive and detailed seasonal re-caps. With MicroStrategy, business users independently access detailed information to analyze business performance and make better decisions in merchandising, planning and allocation, store operations and store management. For example, buyers and allocators have been able to analyze size performance, with insight into which sizes to buy and reorder for each store. Additionally, merchandise planners and allocators are able to measure customer service levels across all of the styles and sizes in the stores and in the distribution center, and spot stock outs and imminent stock outs, and more effectively manage and fine-tune inventory levels across all of the company's basic denim lines. Additionally, QuantiSense built one of its signature Playbooks, "Top Stores," for Pacific Sunwear, to provide insight into the depth and breadth of the merchandise assortment between stores to optimize purchasing decisions. Gaining quick insight - without replacing core systems PacSun currently counts more than 150 users that run thousands of ad-hoc reports and hundreds of pre-built reports against a five-terabyte Netezza data warehouse. Pacific Sunwear supports its BI environment with a team of approximately five FTEs. Web-based training for the application is available, and users can seek this and other help topics within the application as well. "With MicroStrategy and Quantisense, we have an integrated, sustainable system quickly, with out-of-the-box retail metrics and dashboards that provide quick, actionable insight," said Fontana. "The software gives us access to very critical details of our business and helps us make faster, better, more informed decisions," he says. Additionally, the company was able to achieve these results quickly, without replacing core systems, which, Fontana is quick to note, would have been costly, painful and highly disruptive to Pacific Sunwear's business. Use of pre-built models significantly reduced the typical data warehouse implementation timeframe. Within six months of implementation, Pacific Sunwear's data warehouse was populated with three years of history, and provided more than 1,000 different retail metrics and 300 standard reports. PacSun is in the process of rolling out region, district and store sales dashboards and KPIs to field management throughout the remainder of this second quarter. In the future, the company will investigate the use of enhanced PDF reports to allow field users to drill down into details of their area of responsibility without a network connection or a local database. Pacific Sunwear will also look at opportunities to deliver information to mobile devices, hopes to leverage transactional-level data to perform market basket analysis to better understand consumer purchasing behaviors, and has plans to expand the contents of the data warehouse to include payroll data.

How to create an effective brand?

There are several things that are important when it comes to building a brand. Number one, you look at the models for good branding.

One of the good models, for example is the whole series of book "for Dummies." You have Computers for Dummies, this for dummies, that for dummies, and they all have the same character logo used on the covers and on their Web site. it maintains a consistent color theme, which is black and yellow. Everything has the same graphic design, and so what that means is whether you're looking at the Web site or whether you're looking at the book, you know the company, you know the look.

If you think of Starbucks, what colors do you think of? Starbucks is associated with that green color they have, and so this is subconscious association. Psychologists call it contiguous association, and that's really what you're trying to build in branding. Hey, maybe your company won't get to that level, but if you work toward brand recognition in your neighborhood or area, city or state, that might be all you need to be successful.

Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars

What is the number 1 reason why businesses fail?

Many people have often said that the number one cause of business failure is that people run out of money. I'm going to say that the reason that they run out of money is because they are doing marketing that doesn't work. They end u spending all of their money in advertising and their kind of advertising doesn't generate a response rate. Therefore, they run out of money because of the way they approach their marketing Online I can do all kinds of things, without having to spend a lot of money, so if you are tight on your budget, online is really the way to go.

The other reason that online is different, dramatically different than the real world, is that in the real world you're trying to get a person to say "yes" or "no." And because you don't have the luxury of hanging around, you rent a mailing list, you prepare your direct mail piece and you send it in the mail and you've got to get that to pay. If it doesn't pay, you're dead.

But online, I don't want a "yes" or "no, " I want a "maybe." I want a person to raise their hand and say "Yes, I like your information and I think I will sign up for your e-zine. I will receive those free reports you said you were going to send. yes, I want to test it out, I want to just stick my toe in the water, I don't want to make a decision, I don't want to say yes or no, I want you to just lavish me with free stuff."

And frankly most of your free stuff is digital: digital special reports, digital streaming audio, streaming video. These are things that don't cost you any money to deliver except the cost of setting up the repository.

Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars

Did you know...

Guess what? Depending on the source, 50-70% of the people out there think that the companies listed at the top of the search engine rankings are the top companies in their field. That's right - as high as 70%.

Does your site address these customer concerns?

When we look at the most important factors that keep people from engaging in more online shopping, people say*:

• Sites carts are too complicated 14%
• Return/Exchange Policy 41%
• Fraud Identity Theft 49%
• Sharing Personal Information 53%

*Marketsherpas Econerce benchmark guide 2006

How will having your site listed on the first few pages help increase traffic and sales?

B to B Magazine said, "Studies have shown that second or third page rankings can increate Web site traffic by up to nine times. Top 10 rankings, or first page listings, can mean an additinal sixfold increase in traffic. The correlating impact in sales is also astronomical: 42% more sales within the first month of Top 10 listings and nearly 100% more the second month."

Numbes of Pages Looked at Before a Search is Concluded*:

First Page: 39%

first 2 Pages: 19%

First 3 Pages: 9%

More than 3 Pages: 10%

Search Marketing Fact Pack 2006 - Ad Age

5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Search Rankings

5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Search Rankings

Guest_Blogger from Elance May 8, 2009

Search engine optimization continues to be one of the most crucial methods of generating direct traffic and increasing your websites monetization. However, SEO isn't something you can just pick up and master overnight — it's probably best to leave it up to the search engine pros. However, there are quick and easy ways to improve your search ranking from dead last to back in the pack. Alex McArthur, Vice President of Search Strategies at OrangeSoda, outlines five tried and true ways of pulling in more Web traffic.

Getting your website listed in Google, Yahoo and MSN isn’t a mystical process that should be left to the geeks, techies or the pimple-faced kid down the street. For most small business owners, getting ranked simply comes down to ensuring you’ve done the basics. While this isn’t intended to be the end all, be all of Search Engine Optimization, we find that you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck with the following 5 things:

1. Make sure your ‘Title’ tags are related to the content of the site. Huh, title tag? What’s that? Well in a nutshell, your title tag is a line of HTML code that specifies the title of an individual webpage. If you look in the upper left hand corner of your browser and in the first line of an individual search result, you’ll see the product of a title tag. Specifically, a title tag in HTML looks like this:

<title> San Jose Plumbing Clean Plumbers, Inc </title>

Most search experts agree that having correct title tags is one of the top three factors that determine where a search engine will rank you. Where many people fail with their title tags is they use the same text for every page on their and they fail to properly describe the page with their title tags. Imagine going to a book store and picking a book up off the shelf with the title “True Spy Stories of the Cold War”. However, to your surprise, inside the book is a steamy romance. You, the reader, would want your money back. So spend a minute and look at the title tags of every page on your site and see if you have accurately described the page with your title tags. A good title tag will include the keyword you are trying to rank that page for, and don’t forget to add your company’s name as I’ve done in the example above. Be aware — brevity is a virtue; Google and the rest will truncate your title tags after 65 characters including spaces.

2. Your Meta Description Tags Count Too! If your title tags are the cover of your book, your meta description tags are the back cover telling your reader what’s inside. If you were to look at the search results of any query, the text underneath the link but above the URL of a search result comes from what is in your meta description. (If you don’t have anything in the meta description, the search engines will typically pull a couple lines of text from the page and place it in the results.) To find your meta description tag pop open your site’s code and search for the following:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Describe your site with Keyword Rich Text Here.">

As I indicated in the example above, you should write a couple sentences that describe your site and/or your page. In your meta description, you get a bit more room to talk but you should use no more than 200 characters. Just like with your title tags, every page should have a unique meta description.

3. URL and File Names Matter. Now what looks better?

a) http://www.yourwebsite.com/catalog/index.ognc?CategoryID=7497

OR

b) http://www.yourwebsite.com/myproduct

You might have noticed I keep talking about keywords. Your URLs and page names matter for the purposes of generating a click to your site as well as improved search rankings. Several studies, such as a MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, clearly demonstrate that short, descriptive URLs like example B increase the propensity of a searcher to click on your search result. Google search engineer Matt Cutts also says that having short, descriptive URLs is a factor in better rankings. Specifically, this means having a URL that has no more than 5 words after the .com/url extension. One of the best places to look for an example besides what I’ve put above is at Amazon.com. Do a search from their homepage for anything and you will see a solidly formed URL.

4. Let People Know About Your Site. Many business owners miss the opportunity to brag about their online home, especially after they’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars to have a site created. Google is the ultimate democracy and works by looking at the number of people who link to you. While there are some caveats to this, you can prime the pump a bit. If I were a business owner, I’d take a couple minutes to create profiles on social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Merchant Circle, InLocal, and Google Maps. These will give you a handful of strong links to your site and let the search engines know you exist and start the process of getting your site listed.

5. Check the Text of Your Site. One of the things OrangeSoda runs into frequently is websites with relatively little text, content that says nothing about the business and/or fails to use keywords related to the business. When the search engines visit your site, they download a page and look at the text trying to make a determination of what the website as a whole is about and where it belongs. If you are trying to get ranked for “San Jose Plumber”, you should have at least a page with that keyword in it a couple times. It’s also important that the copy appear natural and be understandable because after all, a website that captures the interest of the search engines but fails to capture the interest of your customers can hardly be justifiable.

These five methods are a great start for getting your website on the search engine map, but people, this is just the beginning. Since the SEO game is constantly evolving (some go so far as to call it an arms race), it can be difficult to stay on top. Hire a Search Engine Optimization expert, and you'll be pulling in new traffic while smoking the competition now and in the future.

February Search Market Share!

Google bounces back from a market share slowdown, but in a down month

With only 28 days, February is typically a low-query month for the leading search engines. This year proved no exception, with query volumes dipping across the board, despite searcher interest in the Oscars and Valentine’s Day.

One interesting result of this dip in query volume was that it actually improved Google’s market share. So while Google’s query volume fell by 1%, its market share actually rose 2.2pts. That move effectively reversed a long term trend we’ve seen with Google’s market share over the past 6 months. Since August 2008, Google’s market share has hovered at 70%. Last month, it hit 72.4%.

While Google benefitted from a down month in its industry, others did not fare so well. Yahoo! lost 1.5pts market share on 11.6% decline in query volume. It hit a new market share low of 17.8% last month. MSN/Live also declined 0.4pts and hit a market share low of 6.3% of search queries. Factoring in Club Live, MSN fared somewhat better but still lost share. Ask also lost both query volume and market share. For the past 6 months, Ask’s share has hovered around 2.5%.

In February, Ask managed to increase Sponsored Referrals, or the rate of referrals that drive advertising revenue, by 46% to 6.2% of all referrals. That brought Ask in line with Google and Yahoo!, which have maintained Sponsored Referrals at 6 – 9% over the past year.

The key points for February, 2009 (excluding Club Live from the market)…

Google query volume dipped 1% but market share actually rose to 72.4% on a down market, reversing a share slowdown.

Yahoo! fell to 17.8% market share, a new low. Query volume also declined due to the shortened month.

MSN/Live also fell to a new low of 6.3% market share, with a similar query decline.

Ask maintained 2.3% share, but Sponsored Referrals rose to a healthy 6.2%.

AOL held on with 0.8% share. We’ll see if new CEO Tim Armstrong can bring some of that Google magic.

Creating Market-Right Collections in a Challenged Fashion Economy

Complimentary Web Seminar Next Week:
Creating Market-Right Collections in a Challenged Fashion Economy
Register Now

Every brand and retailer has always been challenged to create the right design that will sell, but in today’s challenged fashion economy, the pressures have become even greater. To achieve higher sell through, it is often imperative that collections are delivered to the customer with increasing frequency and that the collections be both cohesive and “market right.”

This insightful webinar will feature a panel of leading apparel executives whose firms are utilizing design technology to create, validate, modify and communicate their products electronically — allowing for better collaboration and decision making early in the process, and ultimately resulting in streamlined operations to produce more saleable designs.

Go to HERE to sign up

Promotional products are all around us. Every day you’re bombarded with advertising: the magnet with your favorite milk brand’s logo on your refrigerator; the notepad courtesy of your insurance firm on your office desk; or the Parker pen in your pocket from your bank.

You may think this type of marketing costs a fortune, but it IS possible to launch such a campaign without spending so much. In fact, promotional products are much cheaper than, say, a 60-second spot on TV.

Marketing your brand does not have to do horrors to your checkbook. Consider these:

Never discount the magic of the word “sale.” If you’ve been sourcing promotional products for some time now, you probably know that there’s a sale for every season. Sign up for e-mail alerts with your favorite promotional products supplier so you don’t miss out on big discounts. Some advertising merchandise companies throw in special discounts when you sign up or make your first purchase.

Ordering wholesale allows you to save more. At Promostadium.com, you probably notice how prices of promotional products vary depending on order quantity. You also get to save on shipping and other incidental costs when you buy in bulk.

Find ways to cut corners. There are promotional products that ship for free, while others have waived deco charges. Always be on the lookout for special promos.

Expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better. This is so true. Sometimes what it takes to impress is not an expensive gift. Recipients are more likely to remember you if you give promotional products that are useful to them.