Clear Digital Digest: bagel cities, online grocery, Instagram is 10 and a chocolate orange hotel

Today’s Clear Digital Digest is full of tasty morsels, as we look at:

• “Bagel cities” – and how customer footfall continues to cluster at the edges.
• The latest online grocery news, particularly from Ocado.
• Notable digital dates: happy birthday Instagram and here comes Amazon Prime Day.
• A different type of Hotel Chocolat.

LONDON: A BAGEL CITY, NOT JUST FOR BRICK LANE

​Javelin Group have recently published some insightful research regarding the impact of Covid19 on footfall within 5 key global cities: New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin and London. 

• The graph below looks at footfall within a variety of different London shopping destinations: e.g. central, suburban, transport etc. 
• This shows how the suburban Wood Green shopping centre has nearly recovered in terms of customers visting since Covid struck but it is a very different story for the office workers starved Cheapside as well as the prestige shopping destination of Regent Street.  

Source: Javelin Group

• This shift has seen London sometimes described as a “bagel city”, with a lot of the activity moving away from the centre to the edges. 
• This has been fairly well documented anecdotally but this data from Javelin helps to really demonstrate the scale of these changes.  I was also slightly surprised that Heathrow Airport has recovered to 75% of its pre-Covid average.

ONLINE GROCERY NEWS

• Ocado hit the news last week as its share price rose to see the company valued at £21bn, significant in that this briefly took Ocado above grocery market leader Tesco’s £20.9bn valuation.
• And whereas Tesco accounts for 27% of UK food and drink sales, Ocado’s share is less than 2%.  Instead, it is Ocado’s ability to sell its hi-tech grocery delivery operations overseas that has seen its share price rocket, as investors increasingly view Ocado as a tech stock rather than an online retailer.  Since its first deal with France’s Groupe Casino in November 2017, Ocado has sealed eight more such agreements ranging from Kroger in the US to Aeon in Japan.
• Ocado has of course also benefitted from the shift towards online grocery shopping in the UK, which now accounts for 12.5% of all sales, up from 7% before the pandemic hit.  This has also helped Ocado to be named as the fastest growing UK brand in research published by Kantar Brandz last week, and rising to number 18 overall (Vodafone, HSBC and Shell occupy the top 3 slots).

Source: Marketing Week/Kantar Brandz

• However, in a busy week news wise for Ocado, it emerged over the weekend that Ocado is being sued for alleged patent infringement on its automated picking systems by Norwegian company AutoStore, which if proven would seriously jeopardise Ocado's plans to sell such technology as outlined above.
• Some further context on Ocado’s valuation is also provided by Wal-Mart’s sale of Asda this week to the Blackburn based Issa brother and TDR Capital for £6.8bn (so approximately a third of Ocado’s value), a very similar sum to the £6.7bn Wal-Mart originally paid back in 1999.

A COUPLE OF NOTABLE DIGITAL DATES

• Instagram turns 10 today (6th October); to mark its birthday, the Huffington Post have rounded up 10 key trends on the ubiquitous platform from selfies to avocados...

• Amazon have announced that this year’s Prime Day will now be taking place next week, starting on Tuesday 13th October, having been put back from its usual summer slot when Amazon was prioritising essential deliveries.

AND FINALLY…

After coming across this tweet, it appears that yes you can book a chocolate orange themed room in a ski hotel in the Alps.  The Christmas tree in the picture really is something.