Retail insights at the intersection of now and next. Unfiltered. Unbiased
Mara Sirhal is SVP Merchandising Home at Target and candidly describes the retail business as tough; consumer count is declining. leadership teams often aren’t aligned, and friction points develop complicating a very volatile industry.
Billions of dollars’ worth of refunds have been issued, and America’s retailers have used
Apparently, the marketing and promotion planning folks at Petco never studied their retail history about programs that went terribly wrong or they would have never created a loyalty program that resulted in a loss of millions of dollars of sales due to “customer point redemption volumes (that) far exceeded our initial projections.”
Join Shelley and Karen Leland, founder of Sterling Marketing Group and author of “The Brand Mapping Strategy,” as they unpack why reinvigorating a brand beats rebranding. They discuss how brand marking is findable, followable, or unforgettable and the risks associated with each.
Old Navy’s move into beauty isn’t reinvention — it’s dilution. A mature brand adding tangential categories without fixing its core may help it hold on a little longer, but ultimately it only accelerates the doom loop.
The famed mail-order catalog was a better TV plotline than a retailer, and it appears to have made its last curtain call. Its real-life hero, John Peterman, was as fictional a merchant as the stories in his catalog.
The ads that actually capture Gen Z’s attention aren’t on the social platforms you’d expect—and that can make all the difference for brands. YouTube is unlike social feeds, where it’s easy to swipe past sponsored posts in a split second, Viewers often have to watch at least part of an ad before getting to the content they clicked on.
The business world thinks Shein’s recent Hong Kong IPO —which valued the Chinese ecommerce fashion giant at only a quarter of its 2022 high—is a sign of the company’s downfall. While Shein probably should have listed in Hong Kong years earlier, observers are wrong to see Shein’s stock market debut as a failure; more likely it is a new beginning.
With the possible exception of Greg Abel following Warren Buffet, there’s probably been no tougher succession with more pressure than what Tim Cook faced when he took over Apple from Steve Jobs 15 years ago. Cook has done a magnificent job leading Apple and doing it in a totally different way than Jobs did.
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