Marketing

eBay is debuting new "shoppable window" virtual stores over the course of this month and next to help retailer Fifth & Pacific Companies sell its new line of Kate Spade Saturday clothing on window display screens measuring 9 feet by 2 feet, which cover the windows of closed stores and allow passersby to browse and order a catalog of 30 items for same-day delivery.

Although tens of millions of children haven't finished the school year, Madison Avenue is already feverishly getting ready for the next one. Such front-running of seasonal milestones should no longer be surprising, given how marketers, retailers and media companies have been time-shifting the calendar to stimulate business related to holidays both official (Christmas) and unofficial (Super Bowl Sunday). Still, it may startle students when they see advertising asking them to buy clothing, school supplies and other merchandise for 2013-14 while they await final grades for 2012-13.

In a sweeping move to right the ship after former CEO Ron Johnson's failed attempt to reinvent the J.C. Penney brand and inject new life into the business, the company has adopted a bold new marketing strategy — hire its retired former CEO, whom Johnson replaced just about two years earlier, and quickly return to the deep discounts and doorbuster deals that originally got the brand into this mess. Wait. What?

Wal-Mart is turning up the pressure to keep its shelves adequately stocked by proposing to tie executive compensation to the issue — and has asked an outside auditor to alert workers which items to focus on by plastering U.S. stores with neon green dots. Earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported that Wal-Mart had trouble keeping its stores stocked as it cut back on workers per store. That has cost sales and driven away frustrated shoppers.

One of the universal truths I see is a lack of understanding by many marketers, from newbie to experienced, of what their website is really for. I know, I know, marketers always say the right thing: It's about conversion. When I look at their website and ask them what their site conversion rate is, I hear them proudly state, "I convert 2 percent, look how good I'm doing!" (And of course some marketers don't even know what their site conversion rate is.)

A.T. Kearney released the 2013 Achieving Excellence in Retail Operations (AERO) Study, a research project that looks at how companies approach store operations and provides retail executives with tools to better adapt to the fast-changing, technology-driven market. The study revealed that there are many underutilized sources of customer data. While leading retailers were gaining from the use of customer data sources, less than half of the retailers in the study collected social network data from third party domains, and just 8 percent thought it made an important contribution to generating insights.

Despite being far more tech-savvy than previous generations, Generation Y, the 80 million strong cohort of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35, hasn't forsaken shopping in stores for online purchasing — as long as retailers keep their offerings "fresh" and interesting, says a new report from the Urban Land Institute (ULI).

After days of silence during which long-held resentment toward Abercrombie & Fitch began to boil over, Chief Executive Michael S. Jeffries tried to stem a backlash against the teen-focused retailer. Jeffries, in a statement Thursday, discussed criticism that the company lacks women's XL and XXL sizes in favor of catering toward young, good-looking customers.

Etsy has resumed testing personalized marketing emails designed to entice shoppers back to the marketplace after a bug had caused a breach in some sellers' privacy last month.

This is the second installment of a two-part series about the integrated use of consumer package goods (CPG), transactional and retail store competitive, growth, multichannel and customer segmentation strategies. This post will focus on multichannel and customer segmentation strategies.