Marketing

Staying true to its 115-year-old brand heritage while evolving to remain relevant to today's consumers is the challenge facing cross-channel retailer Filson. The company's Vice President of Direct Sales Harold Egler outlined those challenges as well as how the company embraces its history in a keynote presentation yesterday at NEMOA's directXchange conference in Groton, Conn.

Listen in as Brad Wolansky, the newly named president of direct and chief marketing officer at Yankee Candle, discusses his new role, his company's integrated cross-channel approach to marketing and holiday marketing plans at Shop.org's Annual Summit in Denver.

There's every indication that during the 2012 holiday season tablets will be as important a shopping accessory as low-interest credit cards. According to the 2012 Shop.org/Forrester Research State of Retailing Online survey, 49 percent of retailers say their average order value from tablet shoppers is now higher than traditional web sales. And nearly three in 10 retailers say they're seeing about the same average order value from tablets as their website.

Sometimes living in New York City can be rough. Crowded subways, smoggy air and expensive everything can put a damper on the general morale of the city. However, nothing brightens up the day like a hug, and this is especially true if it's coming from a beautiful model. This Friday, online shopping retailer Shoptiques.com will deploy five friendly models on a cross-city tour of hug-giving.

Although students aren't yet thinking about back to school, marketers are.  Performance marketing budgets are being set for the peak back-to-school months of July, August and September. To give retailers an idea of this year's opportunity, we looked back at 2011 back-to-school paid search data for our aggregate group of retailer clients. We also considered some key differences between the 2011 and 2012 back-to-school shopper to devise some fresh 2012 engagement strategies.

Time flies when you're looking at a Victoria's Secret catalog. Being exposed to sexually arousing images like those in a Victoria’s Secret catalog may slow down the way people perceive time and make them more impatient when it comes to getting delayed rewards, according to a study from Professor Gal Zauberman of the Wharton School and Professor Kyu Kim of USC Marshall School of Business.

Target is engaging Facebook to help determine how half of a $5 million back-to-school donation is allocated. The retailer plans to donate $5 million to schools as part of its “Give With Target” initiative this fall. The two-part giving campaign provides $2.5 million in grants to in-need schools, as well as up to $2.5 million in Target GiftCards to local schools through votes on Target’s Facebook page. The Give With Target campaign will include $25,000 grants to 100 in-need schools just in time for the start of the school year.

This week I conclude this series of columns about big data and what it means for marketers with a seven-minute video. I promised at the end of "E-Commerce Moneyball" that I'd show you the tools that Amazon.com developed internally and leveraged to become the dominant e-commerce market leader. In the video, I deconstruct Amazon's category (landing page) and product pages to identify the features that online retailers can duplicate with some of the big data tools that have come to the market recently.

PriceGrabber just released additional results from its Back-to-School Shopping Forecast, revealing that while consumers are planning to spend more money on back-to-school items this year, they continue to look for ways to stretch their dollar and take advantage of retailer incentives to save. According to the survey, 74 percent of consumers chose free shipping as the top retailer tactic that would entice them to make a back-to-school purchase this year. Conducted from May 22 to June 5, 2012, the survey includes responses from 4,450 U.S. online consumers, with 1,509 of the respondents planning to shop this back-to-school season.

Mark Zuckerberg and his senior management team will spend two days at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas home office this week, meeting with executives of the world's largest retailer and discussing ways to "deepen" their relationship. The Facebook team will meet with Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke and his lieutenants on Friday, in the first such meeting between the two corporations’ senior management teams. Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg will then speak to hundreds of Wal-Mart employees on Saturday at the retailer's monthly meeting.