Monthly Archives: December 2017

In terms of reach, TripAdvisor is the leading digital travel platform in most countries covered by eMarketer. Though predominantly a travel review site, TripAdvisor also offers metasearch services, making it an important tool for trip research and planning. Meanwhile, interest in the sharing economy for accommodation services like Airbnb is growing, though most travelers worldwide have yet to use them. Sharing transportation services like Uber and other ride-hailing apps have made greater headway, partly due to their lower barrier to entry.

Le gouvernement vient de rafraichir le site France.fr. Avec l’aide de cette vitrine de l’art de vivre à la française, le ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères et Atout France, agence en charge de la promotion du tourisme vers la France, espèrent accueillir 100 millions de touristes en France d’ici 2020. 2 millions ont été investis pour promouvoir les atouts touristiques de l’Hexagone. Le site a été créé en 2015 par Laurent Fabius, alors ministre des Affaires étrangères chargé du dossier du Tourisme, afin de remplacer la plateforme rendezvousenfrance.com. Au cours du premier trimestre 2018, les contenus du site seront traduits en 14 langues, dont le chinois, le russe, le suédois ou encore le coréen.

La cryptomonnaie est passée en dessous des 11.000 dollars ce vendredi sur certaines plateformes, alors qu'elle valait encore 18.000 dollars en début de semaine. C'est un véritable krach. Le cours du bitcoin s'effondre ce vendredi partout dans le monde et vient de passer en dessous des 11.000 dollars sur certaines plateformes, notamment en Asie. Le 19 décembre, la monnaie virtuelle valait 18.000 dollars et les analystes la voyaient encore grimper à 20.000 dollars, avant qu'une première chute ne survienne. Depuis ce matin, bitcoin a perdu plus de 5.000 dollars, soit une chute de 45 %, selon des données compilées par l'agence Bloomberg. A ce niveau, le bitcoin, qui a déjà connu quatre krachs depuis son lancement en 2009, retrouve sa valorisation du début du mois de décembre.

La banque d'affaires américaine est en train de mettre sur pied une équipe dédiée aux cryptomonnaies. Elle devrait être opérationnelle d'ici à juin 2018, selon Bloomberg. Ce n'est plus qu'une question de mois. La banque américaine Goldman Sachs, réputée pour son ingéniosité financière, est en train de mettre en place une équipe dédiée à l'achat et à la vente de cryptomonnaies, notamment le bitcoin, selon une information de Bloomberg. La banque dirigée par Lloyd Blankfein se donne six mois pour rendre l'équipe de traders officiellement opérationnelle - soit d'ici à juin 2018 -, même si son lancement pourrait intervenir un peu avant. « Nous explorons la meilleure façon de servir nos clients », a déclaré jeudi Michael DuVally, un porte-parole de la banque new-yorkaise.

Who’s feeling lucky enough to replace him? Eric Schmidt is leaving his role as executive chairman for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, though he’ll remain on the board and serve as a technical adviser. Alphabet also owns YouTube, Nest and Waymo. Google was founded in 1998 and Schmidt joined as CEO in 2001, moving to head of Alphabet when the company was restructured in 2015. Aside from Schmidt saying “the time is right,” little’s been said about the reason for the change. Alphabet’s expected to replace him with a non-executive chair.

Brands choose to interrupt and buy attention vs. create content that’s good enough to earn attention. Brands have used middlemen in the process of connecting the brand and its content—say a banner ad—to the consumer. The industry has become bloated with more and more middlemen that take a large slice in between and perform some function. The advertising industry looks at the blockchain’s ability to create an immutable audit trail and says, “This is what we need now so we can have more transparency in the industry and understand where our money goes and what happens between us and the user.” Organizations like Mad Network are exploring this area. One version of the future is that the advertising industry will try to use the blockchain to remove fraud and end up with a solution to a problem that no longer exists—the traditional advertising architecture will simply become irrelevant, because it will all be blocked by a browser like Brave in the end.

For many brands, whether direct-to-consumer online or brick-and-mortar retailers, Amazon is the Grinch that stole Christmas. That’s because Amazon keeps eating chunks of whatever business it’s in. And this year, it has been using big shopping events such as American Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, when it sold record amounts of its own-brand Alexa, Kindle and Fire brands—and they’re just the biggest of Amazon’s expanding family of private brands that it has produced and sells on its own channels. Indeed, this entire holiday season is being used to boost its private label brands, stoking fears as it diverts consumers away from other brands much as Walmart, Target and other retailers are doing in their websites and stores. Ever-savvier in self-promotion, Amazon is highlighting its fashion portal and exclusive apparel labels with a limited edition collaboration with Calvin Klein in a co-branded pop-up store in that’s running through the holiday season in New York until December 31st. The growth of Amazon’s private labels may feel like a lump of coal in some brands’ stockings. Amazon has sold $300 million in private label goods so far this year, a 12% increase over 2016, according to a report by One Click Retail. Its value-conscious AmazonBasics brand, which offers more than 1,500 products, accounted for nearly 85% of its private label sales so far in 2017, while its apparel and baby care brands are up 90% year-over-year vs. 2016. While that’s a mere sliver of Amazon global sales, now closing in on $300 billion a year, with 20% annual growth—the company’s private label forays into all manner of new categories are keeping retailers and brands up at night. AmazonBasics launched in 2009 primarily as an electronics category, selling phone-charging cables and the like, but it has since expanded to include many other types of “basics” for the home, ranging from bedding to knife sets. Amazon quietly operates several dozen private label brands, including a women’s clothing line called Lark & Ro, which—despite being quietly introduced early last year—has generated about $5 million in sales this year, according to One Click. Oprah Winfrey even included a Lark & Ro cashmere sweater as her debut Amazon private-label fashion pick on her 2017 holiday “Favorite Things” shopping list on the site. Other popular Amazon-owned brands: The Lovely Tote Co. (purses), The Fix (shoes and accessories), Amazon Elements (baby wipes, vitamins and supplements), and the Rivet line of home furnishings. Amazon’s private label initiatives are extending abroad, as well, including to Europe this year, which now offers Mama Bear baby wipes and Presto! paper towels, and India, where its private label smartphones are competing with home-grown rival Flipkart. None of that is to mention how Amazon is beginning to harness its acquisition of Whole Foods Markets this year and is gearing up sales of about 2,000 of the chain’s private-label 365 brand products. The threat to brands from Amazon is so much bigger than from conventional competitors in part because Amazon has control over massive amounts of customer data and also an ability to eat profit losses for an extended period of time, according to Digiday.com. “Right now, Amazon is throwing a lot at the wall to see what sticks,” Cooper Smith, the Amazon research lead at L2, told Digiday. “They haven’t taken a targeted approach to apparel yet, instead opting to test different things to see where they can compete and where they want to compete. If they put their mind to it, not only can they offer items at a huge discount to bigger player brands, but they can get things to market super quickly.” Among fashion brands, one of the biggest concerns is that Amazon is tapping for its private labels some of the same suppliers used by the pricier marques whose goods Amazon also sells. “The hot-button issue for fashion brands is private-label encroachment from Amazon brands,” Smith said. “Amazon is investing heavily in its private-label brands, and they’re working with a lot of the same suppliers who work with the fashion brands they sell.”

La Cour de justice de l'Union européenne a tranché : Uber devra se soumettre aux règles normales imposées à toute société de taxi. Une revanche du législateur sur l'emprise croissante des plates-formes numériques. Mais attention de ne pas livrer un combat d'arrière-garde sous prétexte de contenir les GAFA. C'est la fin du Far West pour...

Le gouvernement entend imposer aux mineurs de moins de seize ans d'obtenir l'autorisation de leurs parents pour s'inscrire sur un réseau social. Mais la loi semble difficile à mettre en application. Surtout ne changez rien ! Le Règlement européen sur la protection des données personnelles ayant fixé des règles communes pour toute l'Union européenne, les...

Delivering world-class customer experience continues to rise up the agenda for marketers. But despite UK brands ploughing billions of pounds into improving their relationship with consumers, they are failing to keep up with increasingly high expectations. Indeed, KPMG Nunwood’s annual Customer Experience Excellence study shows that rather than improving, the overall performance score for British...