Retail insights at the intersection of now and next. Unfiltered. Unbiased
Hey, we get that wherever Sydney Sweeney goes controversy follows. Companies who have used her in their marketing think they are getting good publicity when she dresses—or undresses—provocatively. But her new campaign for Novig, the sports predictive betting site, is bad publicity and bad for the brand.
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.
The luxury industry has traditionally positioned employees as brand ambassadors. But employees cannot convincingly represent a brand they can’t relate to or no longer believe in. When career stagnation, poor management, unfairness, or exhaustion erode that belief, the same employees who once enthusiastically and convincingly communicated the brand’s values can become its most credible critics.
You may already know this, you possibly don’t want to know this, but you definitely need to know this. Tokens are quietly becoming the basic unit of value in the digital economy. As AI factories turn compute into millions of discrete units of machine intelligence, the costs and consequences are already rippling through major enterprises—runaway budgets, productivity plateaus, and a widening divide between employees and departments with generous token access and those left rationed or shut out entirely.
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.
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