Ugly Mr Covid has hit few business areas within our publishing company, dfv Media Group, harder than our Conference Group division. Another prominent victim of the pandemic was the annual Insights Congress of our market research & marketing magazine, planung&analyse, this autumn.But never underestimate the resilience of the female species. Sabine Hedewig-Mohr, managing editor of planung&analyse, and Diana Goldbeck, MD of dfv Conference Group, have created a virtual platform for international exhibitions that will appeal to marketers from all trades. The first such cyber venue, under the name Data Analytics & Insights Salon (DAIS), will be held on March 24 & 25 next year. Want to know more?

German Retail Blog Podcasts

DAIS wants you to resist on March 24 & 25

At the end of this tedious coronavirus year, let's have a look around the global village and see how the world's retailers are celebrating Christmas. All you need to do is click the link embedded in each company name and watch the commercial they have designed to promote sales during the festive season. If the birth of Christ was re-enacted today, one wonders how biblical figures would manage to celebrate a Covid Christmas. Perhaps the shepherds would only be allowed to view the babe in the crib if they took a fever test and wore protective masks. Or, would Joseph and Mary hold virtual tours of the stable on Zoom?Not a Christian and don't celebrate Christmas? Don't worry, no one's perfect. Hopefully, we also have many Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and agnostics among our international subscribers. These readers can still enjoy the creativity and humour that retail marketing departments and advertising agencies have employed in a relentless assault on customer pockets...

Retailers want us to have a happy Christmas

For better or for worse, everyone knows Amazon. But Alibaba? China's leading e-commerce player is still relatively unknown in the West. For many consumers the name probably still conjures up 40 thieves rather than an online retailer with global ambitions.Our readers, of course, know that Alibaba is a digital giant and a bit like Amazon, PayPal and Twitter all rolled into one. The Hangzhou-based company founded by legendary entrepreneur Jack Ma in 1999 is also growing like a supernova. According to Edge Retail Analysis, it still ranks only number 22 among Europe's top retailers by sales, but these jumped 24.5 per cent last year, outpacing even Amazon.The corporate boilerplate is certainly ambitious: "Our mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. We aim to build the future infrastructure of commerce. We envision that our customers will meet, work and live at Alibaba, and that it will be a company that lasts at least 102 years."Why, though, 102 years and not 91 or 203 years? Perhaps Alibaba president Mike Evans will enlighten us...

Talk with Alibaba president on Singles' Day

If you hang our latest Top 50 ranking table of European retailers on your office wall, it will doubtless impress all trade visitors. But what are sales and market share prognoses for 2020 without interpretation?Even the most cursory glance at this fascinating snapshot, compiled by Edge Retail Insight, demands an answer to a number of questions.Why, for instance, does the largest retailer on the continent still make hardly more than one per cent of its annual sales online when Amazon is already snapping at its heels? Or why are there still no retailers from Central & Eastern Europe in the Top 10 – thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc?

Europe's Top 50 retailers face online challenge

Since February retailers and fmcg manufacturers have been challenged as never before in peacetime. They have risen to the coronavirus threat with feats of organisation and radical changes to their logistics.On the front line, store employees tread warily. Admin staff are now familiar with working from home. Some ask why they once commuted to the office every day. Even top managers question the vast carbon footprint they make by jetting around the globe when a videoconference would often do just as well.Lockdown, home office and furlough have accelerated structural change in the trade. As customers order more online, home delivery is becoming mainstream. Fear of infection has taken what little joy there ever was in shopping at mass retailers. A wave of small business closures has already begun to stoke unemployment and recessionary concerns. At all events, the feel-good factor is totally lacking among consumers.Anyone can draw a doomsday scenario, but ways out of the crisis are what really matters. So we asked a panel of international trade experts to find them...

Beating Mr Covid

Price has always been an essential marketing mechanism in retailing. It is obviously now of paramount importance when consumers are worried about losing their jobs in a post-Covid recession.On a recent shopping trip to Italy, it was therefore not surprising to find grocers like Interspar or Coop Italia proclaiming how they have frozen their prices. They do this everywhere on store banners, shelf stoppers, and price tags. They don't even spare their organic food departments. This is great for customers, but is it really good for retailer margins? After all, only one player can be the cheapest in the same way that only one gunslinger could ever be the fastest in the Wild West. Or are we really in some Italo-Western where all that matters is to be the last man standing?In the pursuit of an answer there is little point in talking with a discounter whose whole raison d'être is price. But what about a full-assortment grocer like Spar Österreich, Austria's leading retailer by sales, with more than 570 hypermarkets and supermarkets in northern Italy?This is a grocer, who has always been about quality, and therefore with a reputation to lose. So we asked country manager Paul Klotz how dangerous he thinks it is for Spar Österreich to play the price game in bella Italia...

Is it only price, price, price now in Italy?

A good doctor regularly takes the pulse of his or her patients. The same applies to publishing. One can bore the pants off of one's readers simply by not covering the issues that concern them.This is a fatal mistake in a world where it takes just one click to unsubscribe from an online newsletter. But there is a simple journalistic remedy: Ask your own readers.As you belong to the elite group of individualists who subscribe to German Retail Blog, we are keen to discover more about your motivation as a reader.We should therefore really appreciate your answer to the following questions:

Opinion wanted: Yours!

Martial comparisons are generally best avoided. But, as in wartime, the coronavirus has brought out the best and the worst in people. We have had to endure black marketers selling protective masks and even basic foodstuffs at exorbitant prices, unprovoked attacks on vulnerable shop staff, and disinformation from the White House.Yet the crisis has also brought forth many unsung heroes. Selfless hospital staff serve their fellowman to the point of exhaustion. Others have volunteered to be human guinea-pigs in the search for a vaccine. Simple, hard-working people with their own families to care for have still found the time to shop for the old. Meanwhile the young are generally as feckless as they have ever been since time immemorial. They persist in 'hanging out' unmasked at super-spreader events. Marketers and sociologists have long tried to define them with such terms as Generation Y, Generation Z or The Millennials. Perhaps we should simply call them the Covid-19 Generation.The young would not perhaps be so bright and gay if they inhabited a world of rationing with long queues for such basic commodities as pasta, water, milk or toilet paper. The fact that they don't is due to the tremendous speed and flexibility with which suppliers have met unprecedented spikes in demand...

Production almost back to pre-Covid levels

May we draw your attention to the English version of one of our most influential and authoritative sister publications? FOOD SERVICE International provides global news for the HoReCa sector, which is intimately linked with retailing and the fmcg industry.For decades shopping centres, hypermarkets and department stores have profited from the customer frequency created by such famous names as McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut or Taco Bell. Attempts by retailers to go it alone have come to one conclusion: Gastronomy has to be done extraordinarily well with the flair of an Eataly if it is to create enough pull. Executed poorly or even only half-heartedly, the whole thing backfires.Top brands have also not been able to resist the sheer marketing power of food service concepts. Examples range from PepsiCo's former massive flirtation with fast food to Dr. Oetker, who intends to launch a first 'Pudu-Pudu' pudding shop in Venice Beach/California.Interested in this vibrant business segment which has been challenged as never before in the time of corona? Then check out FOOD SERVICE International, it's just a click away...

New in English: FOOD SERVICE International

Dear Retailers,If you want to survive a savage post-Covid-19 recession, you will have to change your shabby old customer marketing ways. True, the era of mass retailing has always been an excuse for poor and surly service, but the times they are a-changin'.Just look around. Before, you couldn't pack enough customers into your stores, and you kept them in for as long as possible. Now, in the time of coronavirus and the Great Lockdown, you drastically limit their entry and push 'em out as quickly as you can...

Retailers, up your customer marketing or fail!

Rohlik.cz is already the leading home delivery company for food in its native Czech Republic. The online start-up now intends to honk its horn in Germany within the next three to five years. "It's my primary objective," says CEO and co-founder Tomáš Čupr.Rohlik has just kick-started international expansion in neighbouring Hungary and will press the ignition button in both Vienna and Bucharest later this year. Čupr sees both range selection and delivery speed as the company's USP, especially when competing with bricks & mortar retailers who try to run online shops.Rohlik is currently active in nine Czech cities where it can deliver within a timeframe of just two hours. Even in distant Budapest, where international retail giants like Tesco, Auchan or Spar deliver the next day, the pure player says it can get the job done in three hours.It's one thing to be quick, but it's a completely different thing to be both fast and profitable. So how do these Czechs make their dough?

Rohlik wants to ring German doorbells

Nietzsche considered it an infallible sign of decadence when art makes art its subject. So this strange German philosopher would probably not approve of any blog talking about itself, albeit for the first time since its creation ten years ago.Although praise of one's employers always sounds hoaky, it is to their credit that this blog has never been subjected to rigorous cost analysis. Clearly, our publishers see it as one of many facets within the manufactory of LZnet, the online arm of our weekly B2B newspaper Lebensmittel Zeitung.The reverse side of this generosity of spirit is the non-existence of any budget (importunate SEO advisers please take note).But employees are not obliged to whinge and whine when corporate cost controllers do not choose to wine and dine. Instead even German journalists, who must keep their hands unsullied by filthy lucre as per strict local press law, may take up the search for a payment model as a challenge worthy of the online entrepreneur...

Christmas thoughts on German Retail Blog

In only days from now Aldi will be starting business in the People's Republic of China. The German discount giant's first store will open in Shanghai on June 7. According to information obtained by Lebensmittel Zeitung, a further nine outlets will follow there soon. The first two sites, one of which includes a tenancy in the Jingan Sports & Fitness Center, are in noticeably prosperous neighbourhoods.Although Aldi is said to want to proceed cautiously during the pilot phase, our newspaper expects the medium-term store count to reach 50 to 100 in order to obtain the necessary economies of scale. Persons who claim to be familiar with the concept describe it as "more modern than company stores in Europe".Under the slogan 'Everyday value – Handpicked for you', the global discount pioneer will be offering a considerably more up-market proposition than at any of its other foreign markets. The convenience-oriented assortment will apparently feature many import goods from Europe, including the dairy products and cosmetics much loved by Chinese consumers.This represents a major departure from long-established company practice.

Aldi gets physical in China

If this were football, Schwarz Group would be FC Barcelona, Real Madrid or ManUnited. The owner of German discounters Lidl and Kaufland has again won the European retail cup, as compiled by Frankfurt-based analyst platform LZ Retailytics, with whopping annual gross sales of €113bn in 2018.French giant Carrefour is still runner-up, but has continued to lose ground to Aldi. UK grocer Tesco, supercharged by the purchase of leading local wholesaler Booker, stays number four.German supermarket giants Edeka and Rewe thrive in fifth viz. sixth place. With the exception of Metro, whose sales were burdened by currency rates in Mother Russia, all eight German players in the Top 50 league have continued to grow, with five of them among the Top 10.In an industry that has become, for better or worse, a game of large numbers, this isn't particularly remarkable. Germany is, after all, the biggest market in western Europe. So were there no surprises in all this sexy trade data?

LZ Retailytics ranks Europe's Top 50 retail stars

It used to be fun being one of the boss men, but not if you work at Schwarz Group these days. Klaus Gehrig, the mighty figure of power running the German retail giant founded by secretive entrepreneur Dieter Schwarz, seems to revel in home-made creative disruption. In increasingly frequent purges the 70-year-old corporate veteran regularly gives his top brass the chop, regardless of their sales achievements. No one is sacrosanct and no one is spared, if they question the general partner's structural changes.In an unmistakable power shift from operations to the consultative committee headed by Gerd Chrzanowski (47) at HQ in Neckarsulm, top managers are often obliged to vacate their offices so abruptly that no immediate replacement can be found. Only three weeks ago, Patrick Kaudewitz, CEO of hypermarket subsidiary Kaufland, had to make his goodbyes; now it is the turn of Jesper Højer, CEO of discounter Lidl, to say his sad farewells.Ignazio Paternò, a former head of Lidl Italia and currently deputy director of purchasing at Lidl Foundation in Neckarsulm, will assume Højer's role on an interim basis. The new supervisory body Schwarz Treuhand (SUT) is expected to make this arrangement permanent as early as this spring. But, at the current rate of survival, Paternò will last only two or three years.We all love to moralise and journalists more than most people. It would be immensely satisfying to write how the arbitrary ruthlessness of Klaus Gehrig is ruining the company for good and all. But this would create a false causality. In fact, with sincere apologies to both idealists and the tender-hearted, the very opposite would seem to be the case...

Lidl culls its bigwigs, but can't stop growing

The audio version of German Retail Blog. Read by Mike Dawson, International Desk. Provided by Lebensmittel Zeitung, Germany's leading business newspaper specialising in retailing & the fmcg industry.