Retail and Hospitality

Hello, and welcome to my inaugural blog! I am happy to be here sharing my thoughts and experiences with you, because I have to tell you: I have the coolest job in the world. I’ve spent my entire life in retail, starting as a part-time worker while in school and moving up through merchandising and op…

Recently at the  Forrester’s Forum for Customer Experience Professionals in New York on June 26,  Graham Atkinson, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Walgreens, spoke about his work to transform the company from one that traditionally differentiated based on location to one that diff…

In the fast-changing, thin-margin world of consumer products, new winners and losers are created every day. Speed of innovation, time-to-market, and employee productivity can mean the difference between the next hot trend and a warehouse full of excess inventory. Success in the highly competitive co…

Last week I was honored to co-present with Parvez Patel, senior director of e-strategy at Grainger, on a session at Internet Retailer Conference 2013, titled “Social Marketing for B2B:  It’s Not Just for B2C Anymore.”   In this session both of us discussed how we approached B2B social media fr…

Internet Retailer Conference and Expo 2013, being held this year in Chicago from June 4th to 7th at the McCormick Convention Center, is expected to draw more than 9,500 attendees. Cisco retail industry marketing has grown from the initial Twitter feed to now include a comprehensive portfolio of soci…

I have been participating in meetings with the Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) since 2006 when Cisco joined as a member organization.  ARTS, a division of the National Retail Federation, is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology throu…

Do you want to increase sales by providing shoppers with the information they need when and where they need it – in your store? Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences solution can help you do just that. Connected Mobile Experiences is a new solution that helps enables retail organizations to use Wi-Fi l…

Last week, we sat down with Bart McGlothin and Christian Janoff from Cisco’s security team to discuss PCI Security for Retail to better understand “What is PCI Compliance?” and “How does that affect Retailers?” As a quick re-cap: PCI Compliance is a 12-step process to secure credit cards. Any retail…

A common perception is that there is a difference between being secure and being compliant. A Verizon analysis on cybercrime reported that cyber-attacks on Retailers are increasing and becoming streamlined and automated.  According to the 2012 Verizon PCI compliance report, “97% of breaches were avo…