Recently, the sales of paper books have been decreasing dramatically. More and more bookstores have been closed.
This is remarkably sad because I love the unique atmosphere of bookstores.
The smell of the books and the sound of pages being turned make me relaxed.
Although e-books are nice and beneficial, I definitely do not want bookstores to be closed.
Therefore, I will consider some ways to get attention to bookstores and increase sales.
I will use 3P(Price, Promotion, Place) of 4P to consider this.

<Product>
There are various ideas to improve books and bookstores.
For example, there was an interesting fair in a Japanese bookstore, which was called “lead-in fair.”
In this fair, you cannot read titles and contents when you choose a book. All you can see is the first sentence of the book. This fair intended readers to pay more attention to the first sentence.

This kind of fair certainly will increase sales.
Another idea is to make a unique bookstore. I am not sure this will lead to an increase of sales. However, you will be able to get hard-core customers and stable sales. Here are some examples of unique bookstores.

URL: http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/reasons-why-we-love-bookstores

URL: http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2013/08/the-20-most-interesting-and-beautiful-bookstores-of-the-world/

<Promotion>
Promotion is difficult. Books are countless, which can be a good point, but could be also a bad point. The consumer cannot choose the right book.
In order to solve this problem, I think that you should increase the number of prizes like the Booker prize.
If you do so, it will be easier for us to choose books.

<Place>
I often see bookstores collaborating with cafes like Starbucks.
Although this is a great idea, more variations are needed.
For example, some bookstores collaborate with shoes stores. They place shoes which relate to books next to them.
Another example is that some bookstores have local supermarkets in them.
They place local food next to cooking books.

As we have seen above, there are a lot of ways to increase sales.
I hope that these solutions lead to the increase of sales and keep the unique experience of bookstores for future generations.

There is a famous story, which is about beer and diapers.
One major retailer in the U.S. found that the beer and diaper sales  were correlated.
The reason was that husbands were asked to buy diapers on their way home from work by their wives and they also picked up beer. Therefore, they just relocated beer next to diaper, then it led to the increase of those sales.

These kinds of stories come from data mining. We can deal with greater amount of data today because of the technology development. The data is called Big Data. Without any doubt, you can gain a lot of benefit if you use it properly.

For example, online dating services developed a unique algorithm for matching men and women from the data such as personal characteristics, reactions and communications.
Another example is that retailers analyze sales, pricing, economic, demographic and weather data. Convenience stores in Japan have the system that umbrellas are automatically delivered to the store if big data says it will rain in the afternoon.

Big data is innovation for marketers and will be used in many kinds of industries.

In this post, I will consider the future of big data a little.
For example, I think people will depend on their smartphones more. They know almost everything about holders from big data and will be able to predict their next movement easily.
If it says, “Eat sushi for lunch!”, most people will follow that.
This is because when a TV program said that bananas were really good for health, most people went to buy it  the next day. Why would people not follow smartphone’s advice?
Of course, it’ll be convenient for us but be somewhat boring for me.