Marketing

Making the most of peak selling seasons today requires technologies that not only simplify store shopping, but also tightly interweave it with omnichannel retailing's digital touchpoints. Major retailers including Sears, DSW, Cabela's and Pier 1 Imports have made significant IT investments that are designed to provide a big return on investment during the 2013 holiday season. 

Pinterest and online shopping — it's a match made in retail heaven. But Nordstrom is trying to bridge the gap between online shopping and the in-store experience by bringing Pinterest to life. According to GigaOM, Nordstrom has begun labeling its "Top Pinned Items" in stores with a Pinterest logo, alerting shoppers which items are the most popular online. The program, currently in place at 13 Nordstrom locations, is a good idea on the most basic level.

For many retailers, Christmas begins in July with preparations for major site traffic events like Cyber Monday. Will your company's site be ready? The time to find out is now, not when your web servers are overloaded, incoming orders have stopped, and frustrated visitors are abandoning their filled shopping carts and rushing to a competitor's site to buy their gifts.

Saks Fifth Avenue is debuting a new marketing campaign, which it hopes will sell shoppers on its reputation as a place for fashion discovery. Themed "Look," it starts this week with the release of its new "The Making of a Look" catalog, a spokesperson tells Marketing Daily. "Our ads, which will reflect 'Look,' won't run until August, and will be featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and local ads," she says. New shopping bags, direct mail, press initiatives, in-store events, digital marketing, social media and visual displays are also scheduled to begin in August. 

As other retailers struggle with slipping sales, branding problems and public relations controversies — or, in some cases, all three — an opportunity emerges for the once-venerable company. Brand strategist David Brier of DBD International shows how J.C. Penney can seize it.

Webrooming is the practice of researching products online before going to a brick-and-mortar store for a final evaluation and purchase. For retailers, webrooming presents opportunities to provide shoppers with information they expect to receive online (e.g., product information, pricing, peer reviews, etc.), while maintaining control over the customer journey by showcasing the physical store experience as the consumer's final destination.

There's nothing see-through about how lululemon will overcome its recent image nightmare. Just sell more of the pants once they are no longer so sheer that nothing is left to the imagination, a Wall Street expert told TODAY on Thursday. There's no reason that the clothing maker, forced to withdraw the line because they failed the bend-over test, cannot survive that public relations disaster and also the loss of its charismatic CEO and a resulting stock plunge, Dana Telsey said.

In an effort to clean up its image following CEO Mike Jeffries' controversial comments regarding the type of people he would prefer to see donning his clothing, Abercrombie & Fitch

Niraj Shah, CEO of Wayfair (formerly CSN Stores), the Boston-based online seller of home furnishings, with 1,250 employees, a global presence, 2012 revenue of $600 million and a 40 percent growth rate, offered his four drivers of long-term retail success during a session at the 2013 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago last week. They include the following:

A Fathead mistake turned into an opportunity for the brand. And for Reddit. Last week, a Reddit user posted an image of a Tim Tebow Fathead poster he'd purchased online. The thing is, the user ordered a Tom Brady Fathead. Naturally, he went to Reddit to complain. The post had 2,624 upvotes (the Reddit equivalent of a Facebook like) and 675 comments. It's the kind of attention a brand doesn't want to see when it screws up.