Benjamin Lorr – The secret life of groceries
Narrated with bravado, the book conjures the nostalgic image of a 1950s store and skillfully contrasts it with the current state of the industry.
To make the fashion industry sustainable (from both environmental and social perspective) consumers need to care and get engaged
Maxine Bedat does for fashion what the Michael Pollen did for food, but with a much more solid program behind it.
The rise of hard discounters has made grocers and CPG companies adjust their strategies
Jan-Benedict Steenkamp and Laurens Sloot – Retail disruptors
Generally solid overview of retail business economics using hard discounter in grocery as case examples, but the authors could not risist the urge to make overly general assertions.
Digitization, network effects, and participation will continue to disrupt many markets
Machine, Platform, Crowd – Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Decent summary of developments with some nice examples, but not sufficiently new or surprising to classify as ‘essential reading’.
Graham Jones – Click.ology
Straight-forward sanity checks can make webshops a whole lot better.
A brave but flawed (e.g. on pricing) attempt to provide naive rules of thumb for how to influence highly context-dependent and ultra-personal customer decisions.
David Lewis – The Brainsell
More emphasis could have been put on online shopping where more direct measurement possible and implementation is easier.