THE PRINTERVERSE – Print professionals around the world are being encouraged to participate in International Print Day 2015 (IPD15), a global 24-hour event being held Wednesday, October 14, 2015, in which social media will be used to highlight the creativity, importance and power of print and paper.
The theme for this year’s International Print Day is “#PrintNOW.” Along with #IPD15, that hashtag has been designated for all print professionals to use when they share examples of print on social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube and others. Commercial printers, print buyers, paper mills, graphic designers, book publishers, marketers and manufacturers are urged to participate in this global sharing event.
“Produced a cool project recently? Used new paper or substrates? Share and tag it! Have new equipment? Wrapped a vehicle? Share and tag it! Designed something spectacular? Saw some spectacular print out in the world? Been to a great print event or tradeshow? Show everyone through pictures, videos and posts and share away!” exclaimed Deborah Corn, Principal at Print Media Centr, and founder of International Print Day.
Using the hashtags #IPD15 and #PrintNOW, print professionals and anyone associated with the printing industry are encouraged to flood social media channels with education, facts, and fun stuff related to print and paper. International Print Day 2014 resulted in 8,683 Tweets delivered to 23,023,968 timelines with 1,271 contributors. IPD 2015 organizers expect those numbers to be crushed this year.
“#PrintNOW encapsulates the state of the industry and all of the amazing advances in print, paper and marketing technology we are creating and implementing to help customers. #PrintNOW also serves as a call to action for marketing professionals – and even consumers – to include printed materials in their communications mix,” Corn added.
Companies are also encouraged to share information about their related products and services, though a strategic approach is always suggested. International Print Day 2015 is an amazing opportunity for everyone in the print, paper, design and marketing industry to tell the world how they bring value to their customers by sharing their print success stories.
Allied Printing (http://www.alliedprinting.com) created a #PrintNOW logo that can be downloaded from the International Print Day 2015 website. For that, the IPD15 logo and more information about International Print Day 2015, please visit http://www.internationalprintday.org
Source: WhatTheyThink?
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Crowds are following Marvin Ellison around these days.
When the J.C. Penney CEO spoke to a gathering of Dallas retail executives on a Wednesday night in September, the turnout was a couple hundred people, more than the local industry group usually gets.
The same thing happened earlier last month at the Goldman Sachs Annual Global Retailing Conference. The half-empty room filled up when it was Ellison’s turn at the podium.
He’ll be talking to the retail industry again Thursday afternoon at the Texas A&M Retailing Summit at the Westin Galleria in Dallas.
Ellison is spreading the word about what’s next for J.C. Penney after his predecessor, Mike Ullman, stabilized a company that had been on the brink of disaster.
“We have not arrived, but we have left,” is the way he phrases where Penney stands in its turnaround efforts.
Perhaps Penney has been too broad in defining who its customer really is, he said. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
His point is that retailers can dilute their focus, and Penney may have done that as it tried to be “the favorite department store for middle America.”
His strategy: focus on fostering customer loyalty.
Some 87 million customers that Penney had before former CEO Ron Johnson’s attempt to reinvent the department store have returned. But other shopping habits they acquired during 2012-13 when Penney lost $6 billion in sales are hurting the chain now.
‘In the wilderness’
Ellison calls that period “18 months in the wilderness” and said he was shocked to find that local store data about product assortments had been wiped out and systems had been unplugged.
And while every other retailer was fixated on its “omnichannel” — creating a seamless shopping experience across stores and online — Penney’s online business was ignored.
The company has a massive network of distribution centers, a legacy from its catalog days, but Ellison said he found systems that don’t talk to each other and other technical issues. That’s hurting the company’s plans to make shopping more seamless for the customer, both online and in stores.
Penney is behind, he said, on online shopping conveniences like same-day, in-store pickup for online purchases.
Ellison’s first big moves when he took over as CEO in August were to bring in new people to head up the supply chain and the omnichannel.
Penney’s customers are shopping less frequently, and when they do come into the store, they buy less, Ellison said.
These days, everyone has a loyalty program that rewards customers for spending.
Ellison plans to change Penney’s program, which he says is “very confusing, costs us a lot of money and the customer hates it.”
A new one will be launched next year, he said.
“We have great data; we just aren’t using it,” Ellison said.
The company is trying to convert more of its marketing from print to digital. It’s a tough sell inside the company, which was also the case when he was at Home Depot, he said.
“Our marketing has to be more specialized,” he said. “Part of the effort to get more customers to spend more with us will require more focused messages.”
Building brands
In the stores, the company is rebranding its salons with In Style magazine and adding more beauty brands and products. It recently created a private brand to compete with fast-fashion retailers.
Penney has always been a destination for special sizes, including children’s, petites and plus sizes for women. To capitalize on that, Penney is adding more fashion to its women’s plus-size business, upgrading styles and adding brands such as Levi and Bisou Bisou.
This week, Penney opened a new in-store concept, branding its plus-size department the Boutique. Twelve stores are testing the Boutiques, which range from 3,000 to 5,000 square feet. The chain plans to add it to more stores next spring, and the Boutique is also online.
Penney’s store at Town East Mall in Mesquite was the first to get the expanded selection locally. Penney is also adding plus sizes to juniors, said Siiri Dougherty, senior vice president over women’s and salons.
“It’s an underserved market, and we’re good at it, but we can be even better,” Dougherty said.
At the center
Ellison also wants to work on the middle of the stores. The Sephora shops can feel like an oasis into the desert, he said. Penney wants to position neighboring departments in a way that makes sense to that shopper.
He’s also on board with an initiative Ullman started while he was CEO to separate men’s and women’s shoe departments.
“You don’t have to be a great merchant to know men don’t like to try on shoes next to women,” he said.
Penney needs to give customers more reasons to shop there, Ellison said.
“We know who we are, and we’re not ashamed of us. The customer loves us, and we need to love them back,” he said.
Source: Dallas News
Article by Maria Halkias, Staff Writer
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MasterCard is trying out a new technology that lets online shoppers authorize a transaction with a snapshot of their face instead of a password.
“As the world gets increasingly digital, this will be the next wave of technology that will change the consumer experience of shopping digitally," says Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise security solutions for MasterCard. “It’s all part of our role in making commerce available anywhere, any time, on any digital device."
More than 200 employees of First Tech Federal Credit Union in the U.S. are taking part in a two-month pilot, through October, in which they verify who they are with either the scan of a fingerprint or a smartphone selfie. A similar trial is taking place in the Netherlands.
This latest innovation comes at a time of dramatic change in the electronic payments sector. Apple Pay lets consumers sign off on a purchase, paid for with a stored credit card, with a fingerprint. And the U.S. is catching up with Europe and other parts of the world by switching users to chip-embedded credit and debit cards, considered more secure than those with just a magnetic stripe. On Oct. 1, that shift hit a milestone with retailers becoming liable for fraudulent transactions made with a chip card that they are not equipped to process.
To use MasterCard’s selfie payment option, a customer would need to download its Identity Check app. Then, if they are buying a product from a merchant that requires their identity to be verified before purchase, they will get a push notification to their mobile device, which opens the app. They then hold up their phone, like taking a selfie, blink, "and you’re done," Bhalla says. “It’s ... a seamless, smooth experience."
The blink prevents a criminal from just holding up another person's picture, Bhalla explained. A facial recognition scan converts your features into a string of ones and zeros, and that, not your actual picture, is processed. The security boost MasterCard anticipates from the use of facial verification is necessary, he says. According to Aite, a consulting firm, 45% of payment card losses are from online transactions.
Another perk? Authorizing a purchase with a photo cuts out the need for remembering yet another password.
“Within most parts of the world, when you do a digital transaction, you use a password, and that’s a big problem because people can’t remember them," Bhalla says. “That means they’ll struggle when completing the transaction." A global survey of about 10,000 consumers, commissioned by MasterCard and conducted in August, found that one-third of of consumers have bailed on an online purchase because they couldn’t recall their password.
If the pilot programs are deemed successful, MasterCard plans to introduce the face and fingerprint technology to more banks, with the ultimate goal that “it eventually will be rolled out to everybody," Bhalla says.
Such innovations are probably going to become more common, and should go a long way toward better safeguarding consumers’ financial information, says Matt Schulz, senior industry analyst for CreditCards.com.
“Biometrics are likely the future of credit card security," Schulz says. “They're a major step in the right direction, because when your face is your password, you can't forget it, and it's much harder to steal than a PIN."
Selfie pay should prove particularly popular with Millennials, according to James DeBello, CEO and president of Mitek, a mobile imaging technology company.“They love the convenience of taking a picture for data capture and they want to be doing more of it,'' he said in an email.
A Mitek poll of 1,004 Millennials found that 86% make purchases and perform other transactions via their smartphones. “When you also look at the fact that 28% want to enroll for everything from a new credit card to a gym membership by taking a picture of their driver’s license, you start to see the appetite for adding the snap of the camera to mobile transactions.''
MasterCard isn't the only credit card company working on new ways to check out. Visa has developed a technical blueprint that can eventually be used industrywide to enable the use of fingerprints, a face, palm and other biometrics, as verification of a person's identity during on-site transactions. And, along with the facial recognition and fingerprint trials currently underway, MasterCard is also looking at the possibility of voice recognition or even a person’s heartbeat being able to confirm who they are.
Read entire article at USA TODAY
Source: MasterCard
Graphic: Janet Loehrke, USA TODAY
Article by Charisse Jones, USA Today
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