Marketing

Retail marketing experts will cover which shopper behaviors signal buying intent and how AI turns those signals into decisions.

In episode 518 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-In-Chief Joe Keenan Interviews Bear Mayer, founder and CEO of BRUCE BOLT, a family-owned sports equipment brand based in Austin, Texas. Mayer looks back on his entrepreneurial beginnings, touching on the valuable business lessons his father imparted on him (00:55). He discusses the rapid growth of BRUCE BOLT…

Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) still commands enormous attention from retailers and shoppers. But increasingly, it's less the start of the holiday shopping season and more the moment when months of earlier marketing are put to the test. The 2026 Holiday & Seasonal Shopping Trends Report from tvScientific by Pinterest surveyed 400-plus marketers and found…

Your marketing team worked for months creating a campaign for a new service offering. The slogan was polished, the copy precise and brand supportive. The call to action clear. They launched the campaign and waited. And waited. Clickthrough rates came in flat. Webinar attendance was below forecast. The sales team reported that prospects didn’t recognize…

It happens multiple times an hour: A shopper scans her loyalty card at checkout and a screen shows her a discount for something she bought last week, not what she's holding now. The data was personalized, but the relevance was not. That gap is the one retailers have been battling for decades because personalization in…

Brands like BYLT Basics that grew up entirely on paid social and site conversion are reaching a new stage of growth. In this interview, recorded at Total Retail Tech last month in Dallas, BYLT Chief Marketing Officer Davide Mattucci shares why brick-and-mortar is such an important part of the premium menswear brand's future. He discusses…

Every retailer is hearing the same message right now: use artificial intelligence to create more personalized experiences. Produce more content. Launch more campaigns. Tailor every interaction. For years, personalization was viewed as the pinnacle of customer experience. If brands understood individual customers, the more relevant and effective their marketing became. Then generative AI changed the…

In this episode of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Chris Hurt, president and CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop, a beloved multigenerational brand focused on its mission to "add a little more heart to life," known for its stuffed animals. Hurt discusses his career start at Polo Ralph Lauren and American Eagle Outfitters, and the…

Marketing is one of the largest and most variable investments on a brand’s P&L. Yet finance often has less confidence in the numbers behind it than almost any other major area of spend. That gap is getting harder to defend. Retail CFOs are under pressure to improve forecast accuracy, protect margins and allocate capital with…

Each year, marketers have the same question: Did the holiday shopping season start earlier? Seasonal merchandise begins to appear in the summer, promotions creep further into the fall, and by September, it can feel like the holiday marketing train is already packed. However, for marketers that aren’t advertising Halloween in July or Christmas in August,…