The rise of consumer ‘decision support services’ is transforming the way a huge variety of markets work, according to Ctrl-Shift. We’re inclined to believe them, since the Ctrl-Shift team includes some of the sharpest minds we know for identifying market trends, and their report on these ‘decision support services’ chimes exactly with the developments we’re seeing.
The travel industry has been centre stage this week at ITB Berlin – the world’s biggest travel trade show, and one of the best predictors of upcoming trends in the industry. Here are the best bets for what’ll be shaping the travel market in the next few months and years, based on what we heard from attendees and speakers at the event.
Consumers and businesses alike have never had access to so much information - or more trouble turning the raw data that surrounds us into something useful.
A new type of business has arisen to solve this problem, either for consumers or for businesses. We're well placed to see the massive potential in all this unstructured data, having helped major multi-channel retailers and manufacturers like Sony extract meaningful insights from the flood of information.
Brands are often nervous about hosting consumer conversations about their products or service on their own sites (or Facebook pages, or their other web real estate). They worry that the discussions will be hijacked by a few cranks and they'll end up with nothing but criticism, posioning their reputation and depressing sales.
We've analysed the data from our curated consumer Q&A tool, Reevoo Conversations, and the results indicate that brands have nothing to worry about.
Consumers love to take their Facebook friends shopping with them, but retailers must be careful not to intrude too far into shopper's social circles.
As hard as the SEO industry strives to please search engines, search engines strive even harder to please their users. So when the popularity of social commerce content soars with users, search engines sit up and take notice.
1 in 4 UK consumers use the internet on their phones every day, and an increasing number of them do so to shop.
In fact, mobile phones are so thoroughly integrated into the shopping process that they're nearly as popular as sales assistants among consumers looking for information in-store.
Cyber Monday is the nickname for the biggest online shopping day of the year, which usually falls on the first Monday in December. This year however, there were two competing dates being touted around: Monday 29th November and Monday 6th December.
We’ve looked at the data from the consumer electricals market – by no means the only thing people buy online, but one of the most popular categories – and our data suggests this year’s real Cyber Monday was, err, a Sunday.