Influx

UK department store retailer John Lewis was crowned marketer of the year, for the second year running, by The Marketing Society. It’s just reward for the brand’s commitment to re-engineer itself to be relevant to today’s shopper. The brand has been determined to re-position itself in a...

UK retailer Marks and Spencer is a strange hybrid; it sells both food, homewares and clothes which means it faces tough competition from a number of different players. Keeping the brand relevant and differentiated is critical and to do this the company recently announced a plan costing close to $1...

Starbucks is a strange brand; hated by many for its ubiquity, but loved for the simple indulgent pleasure it brings. When it went down in 2008- there were cheers from various quarters, the company had gotten too big too fast and those on the sidelines wanted to see if suffer. In the tough months...

Forbes covers some of the highlights of a recent WSJ article that explored the secrets behind the success of the Apple store. It basically comes down to a few simple thing- having a powerful brand has to be key, but control and attention to detail follow closely behind. “Apple’s control of...

The latest Wired has a great piece by Matt Schwartz on what he terms "retail hacking". He describes a confluence of forces that have given rise to the emergence of consumers who will devote hours to hacking the system to get deals and how this world has been made accessible to masses of consumers...

Online retailers and physical stores with an online presence have gotten to the point where the store experience has been optimized to death. Most online shopping experiences are bland and highly predictable, but I think all this might be about to change and the third revolution might be upon...

The likes of the Gilt Group seem to have shaken up the retail space and brought something different to the marketplace. There seems no shortage of funding and deals with one of the latest being Amazon's rumored $3 billion purchase of the French company, Vente- Privee.Flash sales sites seem to have...

The high-flying management consultants get where the world is heading and are already looking for new ways to drive revenue. Obviously, they are bored with cost-cutting advice and have moved onto new horizons. With Western economies feeling the pinch, the big consulting groups are turning their...

Exciting and euphoric are not two words I would use to describe for Microsoft. The fact that this clearly staged euphoria was manufactured for public consumption, note the presence of TV cameras, is a sign that Microsoft means business. I guess If you can't beat them you have no choice, but to join...

It might have been going on for months, but I have just heard about Best Buy releasing its entire product catalog as API- meaning "almost" anyone can take the electronics giant's entire database of products and use it any way they want. It might not sound like the most exciting thing ever, but it's...

It's possible that every single surface will soon be turned into a screen of some sort, flashing and blinking messages at us twenty four hours a day. These screens will be inescapable, appearing shortly on end of aisle displays and even on packaging. While the developers of this technology seems...

The Timberland Boot Company isn't a new story, it's been around for a few years, but it's a good example of a sub-brand launch aimed at bringing some coolness to the parent brand. The focus of TBC is on the craft and workmanship of the company that goes back to its roots in the 1950s. The brand is...

John Dodds over at Make Marketing History has a nice post about the differences between Nokia and Apple in their retail experience. He compares two stores in Oxford St, London and concludes;The Nokia store is a gallery.The Apple store is alive.The Nokia store staff are tech sellers. The Apple...

Department stores have been trying for years to turn their private label offerings into real brands. Most attempts have failed because they are just names with no deeper meanings making it impossible for them to compete with the genuine article. JC Penny clearly understood the weakness in this...

At the end of the last century, every brand was rushing to participate in a new form of commerce, e-commerce.With everyone shopping online is there now more of a value on the real shopping experience? Is the retail-shopping environment, one of the most popular pastimes of global consumers, the...