LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 109 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

LPRC Team had a Great Time Connecting with Members at NRF Protect! FusionNet is ready to go in case of any new protests! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss an LPRC mapping project in South Florida, the world’s top 5 most valuable retail and technology brands, the impact of inflation on consumers, and the new return procedures that Retailers are testing out. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 109 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP-related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science Podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series. The team is back to their various home bases after an interesting, fun, and informative week in Cleveland for the National Retail Federation, or NRF, Protect Conference. And I know our team at LPRC, Dr. Corey Lowe. We had our COO, Chad McIntosh, and also Diego Rodriguez, our producer today, also of Crime Science Podcast episodes, today also of crime science podcast episodes were there in attendance and we got to meet and greet a lot of current LPRC members, prospective members, partners, work on certain issues for

our upcoming LPRC impact conference and a couple of our summits. Product protection was discussed pretty heavily. The finalists, their booths, if they were there at the NRF Protect show in the expo hall, of course, had signage on there. And so it was a good week. We talked a lot about integrations. to work with Esri, the world leaders in sort of very specialized mapping programs and software like ArcPro, ArcGIS platforms. We got to present on a use case that is for real. One of our auto parts retailer members experienced a series of nine arm robberies. We've discussed this prior, but James Martin on our team, working with John on the Esri team and myself were able to go through

and run various analytics, pull in different layers into the mapping software, analyze the proximity of rob locations to police stations, to high energy or access roadway systems, intersections. We did a deeper dive on a couple of locations that were robbed. And the interesting thing, again, about this case was the fact that the nine out of 22 Dade and Broward County, Florida stores from this particular chain

were hit. And so, as we've talked about before, it's always why, why not, why here, not there, why this crew, a three-man crew, were only hitting this particular brand and not other brands. And there are at least three other brands, many with stores within a mile of the Rob's store. So it really started to look like an insider job, possibly. Somebody had some knowledge. job possibly. Somebody had some knowledge. Video clip analysis seemed to reveal the same, that one and the same one, or a member of this crew, three-man crew, seemed to be the one that pulled the drawers out, requiring a special tactic to get the drawers out, the cash drawers. They also seemed to know about the ninth robbery event. That location had just deployed an armed guard, seemed to know about the presence and had a plan to disarm, disable, neutralize that guard as a protective force against them, and successfully

robbed that store. So, we talked about that with the group. What does mapping mean? How do we use that to better understand upcoming issues or why some locations are more prone or experiencing higher losses and things like that compared to others. What are things about what's co-located with that location, the roadways, entry-exit, particularly the exit to get a high-speed getaway for thefts and so on. So a great opportunity there to work with ESRI. You'll see a lot more on this case study and others as we work to build a mapping center of excellence at the LPRC. We had a lot of good visits, as I mentioned before, with a lot of members. And so what I want to do is we're going to be having our impact conference again, October 3rd through 5th. You're not going to believe the content. We'd love to see each and every one

of you. I want to make sure that you all feel invited to come into Gainesville, Florida, October 3rd through 5th for 2022 LPRC Impact Conference, some really cool social events, and so on. So let me go ahead. I'm joined, as always, by my co-producer, Diego Rodriguez, as well as our co-speakers, Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan. And let me go ahead and turn it over to Tony. Tony, take it away. Thank you, Reid, for those great updates. Let me start this week with a summary of an article that I just published on the world's top five most valuable retail brands for 2022. For quite some time I've been predicting that the future of retail will be driven by stronger branding and increasing digitally influenced immersive consumer experiences.

COVID-19 became a major accelerator of digital transformation trends, with technology often becoming the differentiator to changes in consumer loyalty. As McKinsey said, the pandemic ushered in an unprecedented level of channel switching and brand loyalty disruption. A whopping 75% of consumers try new shopping behaviors, where many of them cite inconvenience and value. Fully 39% of them, merely Gen Zs and millennials, left trusted brands for new ones. That restlessness is reflected in the fact that many younger consumers said they are still searching for brands that reflect their values.

return to shield holders of an investment in a Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index over the last 20 years ending 2019. In the same article, I also pointed out some really interesting statistics about the value of branding, and it takes five to seven impressions for people to remember a brand. 73% of consumers love a brand because of helpful customer service. Presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenues by up to 23%. Brands with poor company branding pay 10% higher salary. 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands higher salary, 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands that share their value. And finally, my favorite, 73% prefer brands that personalize shopping experiences.

As McKinsey again summarized, personalization is a force multiplier and business necessity, one that more than 70% of consumers now consider a basic expectation. So with that background on the importance of branding, here are the top five most valuable retail brands for 2022 in the world. Number one, Amazon. Number two, Walmart. Number three, Home Depot. Number four, Taobao from China. And number five, Tmall, also from China. European retail brands are leading the global retail sector in bouncing back better from the pandemic, with Amazon and Walmart leading the way. In a world of changing consumer demand and disruptive supply chains, these big retailers are applying their logistics expertise to adapt in innovative ways to the new normal increasingly these mega retail brands are bringing logistic operation in-house and using their vertical integration to deliver literally for customers also interesting that seven out of the top 10 highest value brands are from the united states the other three are from china note that the two uh chinese brands are listed in the top five were in the top five, but their actual increase in value in terms of brand value increase was lower than those in the

United States. The U.S. department store chain Burlington with a brand value of 2.6 billion was up 40 it was up actually 80 percent and is the world fastest growing retail brand chinese retailers jd.com and usa retailer target also broke into the top 10 in the 2020 to report also interesting in the brand finance analysis uh were the top five most valuable technology brands and here they are number one Apple number two Amazon number three Google number four macro Microsoft number five Facebook interesting this year is a crossover of Amazon as the number two most valuable technology brand. Remember what I said earlier, Amazon was the number one retail brand. I'm not surprising about the others, but really what this report says,

especially with the technology brands and what's happening to retail, is that retail and technology are forever linked. Continuous innovation coupled with strong branding is what's going to deliver a really bright and prosperous future of retail. Let me now switch to another story this week from CNN. The chaotic mix of record fuel prices

and unending supply chain prices have retail considering the unthinkable instead of returning your unwanted items just keep them in recent weeks some of the biggest chains uh store chains including target walmart gap american Eagle, and others have reported their latest earnings, and they have reported they have too much inventory ranging from clothes to jackets to hoodies to garden furniture to bulky gestoids, and it's costing a lot of money for them to store it. Now, add that to that, in another category of the product that they have to deal with which is return so instead of piling return uh merchandise onto the growing inventory heap store are considering just handing customers their money back and letting them hang on to to their stuff they don't want

according to a consultant cited by cnn for every dollar in sales, a retailer net profit is between one and two five cents, where returns for every dollar of return merchandise, it costs a retailer between 15 to 30 handle this return differently. It'll be interesting to see if this sticks, especially with all the packages that are showing up at our home these days. So this is an interesting consumer trend. And finally, let me end on some news in terms of what's happening with grocery and the impact of inflation, and this is from chain storage 72 percent of americans said that increased grocery prices were having an impact on their household budgets with 34 percent citing a very significant impact and 38 signing a somewhat significant impact to account for increased cost to their household budgets more americans are holding off on purchasing or cutting back on spending or consumptions in other areas the biggest cutbacks

are in driving large purchases travel entertainment and clothing or other goods so in my view um this issue with inflation is going to be with us for a while. I do think there's a high risk of a recession. So this is something you should stay tuned. We will be checking and tracking where the world is headed in terms of the economies and where retail is heading on this podcast. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Thank you, Reed. Thank you, Tony. It was great to see you both at NRF. For the listeners, hopefully you got to hear our live NRF session. NRF was a great show. Lots and lots of interaction. I don't know the total headcount, but what I can say is that I had meetings back to back and it was extremely busy and really, really good to see everybody. I think that was the sentiment for everything that everybody I talked to was that it was fantastic to just get caught up and actually

see people. So I think we continue to see the kind of the post COVID or I guess the evolution of COVID and what trade shows look like. I think that this was a well-attended show. There was some bustle about it wasn't attended as well as in the past, but from my perspective, I was busy the whole entire time, both within the show and after the show. So it was fantastic to see everybody and it was really a great show. Now turning over to just some things going on, there have been just basically in every major metropolitan city some form of civil disturbance or protest related to some of the Supreme Court decisions. We talked about the Supreme Court making a host of different decisions in the last upcoming weeks

and that in the previous episodes that we would stand by and watch them. We did activate the FusionNet. The FusionNet is active right now related to civil disturbances and protests related both to Roe v. Wade and a couple of the other decisions that came across. The chatter is probably more than I've seen ever as far as on the social media channels. I think I was exchanging messages with some folks on the FusionNet, and you're seeing hundreds of thousands of messages that are driven more from anger than actual violence. So I think when I looked on the first day, there was 137,000 mentions of burning the Supreme Court down. When you dug deep, it was just people being very angry. Luckily, most of the

civil servants that we're monitoring has been relatively peaceful. There were a couple clashes in LA and Portland that required a more, what do you say, riot intervention, some tear gas and things of that nature. But overall, with the amount of activity we're seeing, we saw relatively peaceful and organized approaches. The other really interesting thing is because these are organized approaches, it's a lot of runway to know when they're happening. They're being scheduled. In some cases, their permits are being filed so that you can plan accordingly. So we'll continue to monitor that here at the LPRC, continue to have the FusionNet up and running.

It is up and running now. And if you aren't participating in the FusionNet, then please reach out to someone from the LPRC. You can also reach out to myself, Reid or Tony or Diego, and you'll get squared up on it. And for the new listeners that may not know what the FusionNet is, it's basically a platform to share information about events that are going on,

whether it be civil disturbance, weather events, any other major things that are going on throughout the United States, this is a method or a platform specifically for the LPRC community to help share and do our best to validate some of that information because, as we know, during these type of events, it's very difficult and challenging to identify what is actually going on versus what's reported.

Switching gears just a little bit, is actually going on versus what's reported. Switching gears just a little bit, there are a couple different things in the cybersecurity space that I wanted to just mention. I'm not going to spend as much time as normal on this, but the U.S. and Brazil sees 272 websites that are illegally downloading music. Yes, that still happens.

It's out there and the government is cracking down on it. It comes up often. This is a larger seizure. Generally, these are copyright infringement cases that are then pursued through the federal government in the United States and then through partnerships with other countries. Sometimes these websites are hosted outside of those. Sometimes they're outside of the country. Sometimes they're depositories or torrents. But it is something that still goes on and it's still heavily managed. So I thought it was interesting that it was that many.

272 is a lot of sites, which tells us that that was a hotbed and that it's come down. They also, during this investigation, had several fines of $250,000 to folks that were participating in the United States. So it feels like this has been going on since the Napster days of the late 90s, and it has. So we'll continue to just kind of give the group updates on that. There was a Seattle woman

who was convicted in the massive Capital One hack that occurred. Paige Thompson's 36 she was found guilty of wire fraud and unauthorized access to a protected computer, damaging protected computers. So one of the things that's interesting here is that this is an Amazon software engineer that obtained personal information for more than 100 million people. Capital One also got a fine of around 80 million dollars from the federal government and in addition to a hundred and ninety million dollar settlement. So big impact here

financially for the bank and obviously a huge customer impact when you talk about a hundred million customers. So just we continue to see these types of breaches and cyber incidents occurring and I think we'll continue to see them in the future. And with that just before I turn it over to Tony Reed, just remind everybody to participate in the FusionNet. FusionNet only works when we have participation. So again, if you have any questions, be sure to reach out to any one of us or anybody on the LPRC team. I'm going to turn it back over to Reed. All right. Thanks so much, Tony and Tom and Diego. And of course, thanks to you all for joining us. Please stay in touch, lpresearch.org or operations at lpresearch.org. Stay in touch.

Stay safe. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the loss prevention research council