GPS
#<UNK>, that is a question we could probably spend the day talking about, so I thank you for asking it.
Surely you are aware, obviously, since we have spent a lot of time talking about the back-end work we're doing on supply chain.
And that is work that is, again, a journey not a destination.
I see significant scaling of that, as we go forward in the businesses, period over period.
But again, it is a journey that we're on at the end of the day.
If I look at it from the other areas, let's go to CRM for a second.
It's one I'm really passionate about.
I just announced a position in the Company of a Chief Customer Officer, where we are taking a wide variety of disparate connections that we have with our customer, and stitching them together organizationally, and beginning to really build the capability to have a much more consistent, deep, and holistic view of our customers as individuals.
The core of that, as you might imagine, is our credit card, which are our best customers.
It is a program that we only have in the United States, which is part of why I go to structural strength.
It's a very strong program here for us in the United States, and it represents a significant portion of our business.
And I'm not of a mind that an organizational change brings about meaningful change, but we have had bits and pieces of the customer again, in a number of places in the Company, and I have just broken those walls down and brought it together.
If I think about what our best practices are, broadly, we are well behind that.
I think we are actually in a pretty good space from where our best practices are in the apparel industry, and I am looking to accelerate that significantly there, also.
Again, credit card is the core, web browsing history, obviously all your tender history, loyalty program, multi-tender loyalty program all coming together in one place.
And that is one example.
Again, I'm not going to tell you that's a lights-on moment in Q3 or Q4, or something like that.
We live in a world today where we spent a great deal of money on marketing, which is something else that I have signaled to you before, and a lot of that money is spent in very traditional ways.
We are now increasingly enabling the capability to be much more one-on-one in our communication, targeted and personalized in our communication, and that is a pivot away from some of the traditional vehicles that we have seen to a much deeper form of communication through CRM.
I had my Board this week, and I explained to them that one of the places where this will manifest itself is, I think windows today are much less relevant than they have historically been, and you will see this going forward, that we are actually skinnying down our windows treatment in Gap, as an example, on the belief that if you haven't won at the digital interface on the front end, your windows in the mall store are probably not going to make a difference at the end of the day.
So this is work that is underway, and again, I am happy of course, as always, to talk to you separately, but it is work that we are enthusiastic about, where we believe we really truly have some structural advantages.
It's a really good question.
It's a place where we have had strength, and we continue to have strength, and we see it obviously as everybody does, I think.
A long-term progressive shift of the consumer moving in that direction.
Let me go straight to mobile for a second, but let do view what I call the leaky bucket.
If you think about a business moving from stores, to a desktop or laptop, to mobile, stores for the industry, conversion of traffic into stores, whether it's in the mid-20s to the high 30s or something like that.
If you go down to a desktop or laptop experience, where someone is buying, that traffic converts somewhere in the low single digits for most people out there.
And then if you go to a mobile experience, a lot of people out there today are seeing conversion off of mobile traffic as a fractional single-digit.
And so the work that we're doing is very much about addressing that migration of traffic, and making sure that the opportunity for us to monetize that traffic as it moves remains there at the end of the day.
If I go straight to mobile, a big part of mobile is making sure that people have an incredibly easy shopping experience and checkout experience on a mobile device, that the content is relevant, so that means a responsive website, which we are largely towards achieving right now.
And then obviously content and the digital experience that shows up on a screen that is 2.5 by 5 inches at the end of the day.
So that is something where we are very focused.
For us, overall, our traffic has grown, and it has grown with digital.
If I were a retailer out there who was looking at this and was seeing my traffic being directly substituted from my stores, to a desktop to a laptop, to a mobile device, I would really start to worry about that bucket leaking out of the business.
And so we're committed to making sure where our customer is, and our customer today, and increasingly is on a mobile device, which means a great mobile shopping brand and e-commerce experience.
I would like to thank everyone for joining us on the call today.
As a reminder, the press release, which is available on GapInc.com contains a full recap of our first-quarter results, as well as the forward-looking guidance included in our prepared remarks.
As always, the investor relations team will be available after the call for further questions.
Thank you.
