Home Depot

Retail brand consultants Interbrand Design Forum today released the Most Valuable U.S. Retail Brands report, the second ranking of the top 50 retail brands. Walmart claimed top honors as the most valuable retail brand, followed by Target (No. 2), Best Buy (No. 3), The Home Depot (No. 4) and Walgreens (No. 5).

According to a survey conducted for Shop.org by BIGresearch, 96.5 million Americans plan to shop on Cyber Monday this year, up from 85 million in 2008.

Blair Corp., a budget-priced apparel marketer for mature consumers, has a lengthy history in traditional direct mail and catalog. At the eTail Conference in Baltimore this morning, this unit of conglomerate Orchard Brands rolled out its new president/CEO, Shelley Nandkeolyar, who discussed his take on Blair’s approach to the economic downturn.

B-to-B catalogers always have had several advantages over retailers. They can maintain and offer wider and deeper product offerings as they're not limited to retail space. They can provide expert telephone sales and support, warranty and repair services, installation advice, and other “knowledge-based” services much better than a retailer can. Furthermore, new Web site shopping functionalities make it easy for customers to find, shop, learn, compare prices, order return and access a host of other related services much better than they could if they were standing in a store.

I suspect many of you are now familiar with The Long Tail strategy first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004. Essentially, the notion suggests “selling less of more.” I view it as the 80/20 rule in reverse, and it’s often the topic of heated discussion between direct marketers and their accountants.
The strategy focuses on the inherent competitive advantage of a B-to-B (or B-to-C, for that matter) catalog company stocking as many items as it can in order to compete with retail stores or “net gnats,” who pick off your best-selling items and sell them online at a discount. A retail store’s space is

People who buy and hold domain names for the purpose of eventually reselling them for a profit are called “domainers.” It’s now big business, particularly given the Internet trend of “going local” and the rush to own local Internet real estate. Think “AtlantaDoctors.com” or “MidtownChineseFood.com” as two hypothetical possibilities. Minneapolis-based investment bank Piper Jaffray & Co. estimates Internet local ad spending will grow from $5 billion to $25 billion in the next decade.
Each B-to-B cataloger should be a domain-name acquirer in its own market niche for three reasons.
1. Make sure you own the domain-name real estate related to your brand, product

One of the great advantages of Internet marketing is the ability to personalize the user experience, provided you have the data, expertise and technology to do so. E-commerce executives from three multichannel merchants shared their assorted experiences, strategies and failures with personalization during a session at last week’s eTail conference in Palm Desert, Calif. 1. Personalization is just a fancy name for segmentation, according to Andrew Knight, manager of online user experience at big-box hardware retailer The Home Depot. “Personalization starts with customer registration; that’s where we get a lot of the segmentation data for personalization efforts,” he said. Personalization then can address anything

As evidenced by recent surveys, including one in this issue’s By the Stats column, multichannel integration and customer acquisition across channels are both issues of increasing importance to catalogers, online merchants and brick-and-mortar retailers. Executives from several multichannel merchants gave their strategies for achieving success across multiple channels, brands and market segments in a panel session at last week’s eTail conference in Palm Desert, Calif. 1. On getting Internet marketing funds from reluctant executives: “One of the ways we raised awareness for e-marketing was to break out the sales that were attributed to Internet marketing on the formal P&L,” said Maureen Daney, vice president and

Shakeups at Three Big Multichannel Retailers Executive departures have resulted in major changes at three large multichannel retailers. Below are the maneuverings. J.C. Penney: Chairman/CEO Myron “Mike” Ullman has added the responsibilities of COO for this multichannel giant following the December termination of EVP/COO Catherine West. The Home Depot: Robert Nardelli has resigned as chairman/CEO of this multichannel home improvement products merchant. He’s been replaced by Vice Chairman and EVP Frank Blake. Additionally, CFO Carol Tome has added the title of EVP, corporate services; EVP for Home Depot Supply Joe DeAngelo has been named COO; and Brian Robbins has replaced John Campi as SVP, global sourcing and

&000;&000; Over the years, I've made plenty of catalog purchases, but rarely simply because I was a catalog business editor. I only turned to catalogs when I needed something unusual or came across a killer sale. Otherwise, I bought my mainstream goods off the rack. Today, that's changed. And the two vehicles that have impacted me the most have been the coming of age of e-mail and the remarkable ease of search engines. I find e-mail's impact on me surprising, because less than five years ago, I'd delete any personal e-mail from just about any address I didn't recognize. But now, I