I’ve had some interesting conversations with retailers in the past few months and have seen an interesting theme. We are typically talking to folks on the internet marketing and e-commerce team. We’re talking to these folks about cross-channel marketing opportunities whereby we could help them track the impact of online pre-shoppers on in-store purchases. We’ve heard from several folks that the e-commerce team doesn’t work with the retail marketing folks. They are different divisions and are often geographically separate. This is a common problem when we are trying to pitch a solution that involves both parties. Some retailers claim that they are fully-integrated, meaning that their retail and online divisions are working in harmony to grow the aggregate corporate enterprise. Most retailers, however, do not collaborate. The online and offline divisions are separated, both legally and geographically. Most of what we’re hearing is that these retailers want to collaborate between divisions but aren’t quite there yet. In order for third party solutions providers to help these companies grow, they first need to embrace the integrated model and have to restructure the organization to begin collaborating more regularly between the online and offline divisions.
